Intel's monster 32nm CPU codenamed Gulftown and now dubbed the Core i7 980X has been listed in €uroland.
Geizhals, the German-language price engine, has begun listing the extremely expensive Core i7 980X at an Austrian e-tailer for just €999. A small price to pay for the greatness of the new hexa-core monster.
The Core i7 980X has six cores running at 3.33GHz with a Turbo speed of 3.6GHz in single threaded apps, although being an EE edition processor you get unlocked cores for life. The core is architecturally a 32nm shrink of the Nehalem, only with two additional cores and two QPI 6.4Gbps paths instead of one. The processor also has the Nehalem-like 256KB of L2 cache per core, plus 12MB of shared L3 cache, which should add up to make this one extremely powerful number crunching machine. Power-wise it is a hog, drawing 130W, which many of you might consider excessive for a 32nm processor. Truth is, however, that's no more than most of its EE predecessors.
Set in the future, the story revolves around a man (Jude Law) who struggles to make the payments on a heart he purchased. He must go on the run before said ticker is repossessed by the company that owns it.Universal is bringing Repo Men to theaters everywhere starting on March 19th. Planning on seeing this?
As this article from the BBC points out, upcoming hard drives shipping early next year will utilize 4KB (versus 512-byte) sectors. The move will mean less wasted space, particularly on today's large capacity terabyte drives, allowing drives to get larger while consuming the same amount of power. The downside though is that older operating systems like Windows XP weren't designed with 4K sectors in mind. This is because Windows XP was released before the 4K format was decided upon.
To help Windows XP cope, advanced format drives will be able to pretend they still use sectors 512 bytes in size.
When reading data from a drive this emulation will go unnoticed. However, said Mr Burks, in some situations writing data could hit performance.
In some cases the drive will take two steps to write data rather than one and introduce a delay of about 5 milliseconds.
"All other things being equal you will have a noticeable hard drive reduction in performance," said Mr Burks, adding that, in some circumstances, it could make a drive 10% slower.
In a bid to limit the misalignment, hard drive makers are producing software that ensures 512 sectors line up with 4K ones.
Those most likely to see the performance problems are those building their own computers or swapping out an old drive for one that uses the new format.
Disney released a new trailer for Tron: Legacy and despite my pessimism, this movie looks like it'll be freakin' sweet. Disney is bringing Tron Legacy to theaters in 3D starting on December 17th, 2010.
The idea of an SSD boot drive like the Kingston 30GB V Series drive works well of a lot of users who just can't dump a load of money into a drive but would really like to get rid of the HDD bottleneck in their system. You can see that Windows reports a total capacity availability of 27.9GB out of the 30GB total physically on the drive which is not much of a chunk allocated for drive maintenance as compared to some other drives which have been as much as 10-20%.
If you are running Windows 7 x64, you will fill up about half of the drive just with the OS alone depending on the amount of RAM you have. If you turn off the page file or at least reduce it, it will free up space reserved on the drive commensurate with the amount of RAM you have since the OS allocates drive space for it. Unless you have 12GB of RAM or more, I wouldn't recommend turning this off completely – especially if you are using Photoshop or other apps that can use a very large amount of memory. Reducing the amount of drive space available should be OK and there are numerous articles around the web that debate the pros and cons of this. You can also move the page file to another drive. Turning off hibernation will also free up some space if needed.
Performance for this drive was right on with the expectations set by Kingston. The unfortunate part of that is the write speed, which at 50MB/s, falls below hard drive speed and frankly, is disappointing. There were some benchmarks that did show writes exceeding this but they still barely rival most platter drives. This boot was made for walking (ok, bad pun). While you'll still see a nice performance boost by upgrading from an HDD in Windows and application loading, there are going to be some aspects of your daily use that you may see no change or even a loss in performance due to the writes. Such is life when you are only paying $110 (or $80 for the launch special) for a low capacity SSD.
Tom Petersen Director of Technical Mkt at NVIDIA describes how the performance of GeForce GTX 480 compares to existing solution. Tom also offers a quick peak at how 3DVision Surround is pushing PC gaming forward:
Not only has the Energizer Duo USB charger been less than a monumental success for the battery giant, it turns out that the monitoring software distributed with the portable charger is infected with a Windows trojan. According to Computerworld, the monitoring software contains 'grogue code' that 'glistens for commands on TCP port 7777' and it can 'download and execute files, transmit files stolen from the PC, or tweak the Windows registry.' So, just unplug the thing and call it a day, right? Apparently not. Even if you unplug the Energizer Duo from your computer's USB port, the trojan continues to do its thing. It executes each time you turn on the PC and remains active until you turn off the PC. Energizer is aware of the issue and is currently working with both CERT and U.S. government officials to understand how the code was inserted in the software.
As I reported last week, Newegg shipped out counterfeit Intel i7 processors to customers, where customers received a clay mold of a heatsink, and even a piece of scrap metal as the processor. Intel will investigate why there was counterfeit processors shipped out to customers and exactly how many were shipped:
The fake processor, sold as a standalone or "boxed" chip, came with an instruction manual comprised of blank pages. In addition, sticker on the outside of the box misspelled the word 'socket' as 'sochet' and other words on the box were spelled incorrectly -- subtle but clear indications that the contents inside were not genuine.
It was not immediately clear how the counterfeit chip ended up for sale at Newegg. HardOCP reported that when notified of the problem, Newegg shipped a genuine processor to the affected customer. Newegg could not immediately be reached for comment.
In a brief statement, Intel acknowledged the existence of the fake chip and said it was investigating.
"Intel has been made aware of the potential for counterfeit i7-920 packages in the marketplace and is working to identify how many and/or where they are being sold," said Nick Jacobs, an Intel spokesman, in an e-mail. "The examples we have seen are not Intel products but are counterfeits."
"Buyers should contact their place of purchase for a replacement and/or should contact their local law enforcement agency if the place of purchase refuses to help," he wrote.
Iron Man 2 takes place only six months after Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) revealed his identity as Iron Man at the end of the first movie. Mickey Rourke stars as a powerful new Russian villain named Whiplash. Paramount will be bringing Iron Man 2 to theaters everywhere starting on May 7th, 2010 this summer.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of hacking into the email accounts of rivals and journalists.
The CEO of the world's most successful social networking website was accused of at least two breaches of privacy in a series of articles run by BusinessInsider.com.
In the first instance, it said that, when Zuckerberg discovered that Harvard's student newspaper The Crimson was planning on running an article on him in 2004, he used reporters' Facebook logins to hack into their accounts.
In the second instance, the magazine claimed Zuckerberg hacked into the accounts of rivals at Harvard who accused him of stealing their idea for a social network. He then allegedly tried to sabotage the rival network they had set up.
Here's a trailer you'll definitely want to see. Harry Brown is the new British film that's sort of like Taken but with Michael Caine (Alfred!) instead of Liam Neeson. The Samuel Goldwyn Company is bringing Harry Brown to limited US theaters starting on April 30th this spring. Looks pretty good, right?
The Courier looks like it will be set up in a direct battle with the Apple iPad. It has been designed to be a very portable and mobile device with a weight of just over a pound and a thickness of under an inch. When closed its footprint will be a little larger than a 5" by 7" photo. Unlike previously believed, the device isn't based on Windows 7 and instead will run a similar mobile operating system to that used on the Zune HD, Windows Mobile 7 Series and the recently confirmed "Project Pink" devices, why could suggest use of Microsoft's Metro UI. As with the Zune HD, the Courier is expected to use a Tegra 2 chip. The Courier will also include a built-in camera, headphone jack and stylus, the latter to support its pen-centric interface, which is also designed to include finger touch and gesture controls.
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