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Pentium architectural history	The Ars Guide to PCI Express
Parts I (Pentium to Pentium III) and II (Pentium 4, Pentium-M, and Prescott) of Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' look at the evolution of the Pentium architecture. Part I, Part II .	PCI Express has generated a lot of excitement in the PC enthusiast scene in a short amount of time. And with good reason, since it promises to rid the PC of its bandwidth woes and enable a new class of applications. More...

XM Radio takes its ball and goes home

Posted August 31, 2004 @ 3:01PM, by Eric Bangeman

Last week, we reported on a cool app (Time Trax) that had drawn the unwelcome scrutiny of both XM Radio and the RIAA. Time Trax enables owners of the XM PCR to record XM Radio programming on a PC, a very popular feature that has apparently led to XM's discontinuing the XM PCR. While XM will not confirm that the PCR has been pulled off the market, some XM Radio resellers are reporting that they have been informed that it has.

XM is still looking for a way to stop the distribution of Time Trax, displeased as they are that people would want to time shift a broadcast or save it to listen again later. A company spokesperson confirmed this, saying that "we continue to pursue appropriate options related to TimeTrax, including any legal or other options." In the meantime, XM's move is proving to be a windfall for current PCR owners, as the law of supply and demand has kicked in. The normally US$49.95 unit is now fetching upwards of US$350 on ebay.

For its part, the RIAA denies having any influence over XM's decision to pull the PCR off the market, although it shares the concerns XM has over the product.

"We are very concerned about a variety of technologies that essentially transform performances into music libraries," RIAA spokesman Steve Marks said. "We have communicated our concerns to XM and other broadcasters and Webcasters, (and told them) that we'd like to work together with them to address technologies that hijack these performances."

Transforming a performance into a music library? I was doing that back in the late 70s with the help of my FM radio and a cassette player. If it wasn't so frustrating, it would be funny how many times the recording and broadcasting industries have been up in arms about some new technology that threatened their business model. It's high time they embraced the combination of changing technologies and consumer attitudes that lead to products like Time Trax. Who knows — if they gave consumers a product they wanted they might actually see revenues increase and make their shareholders happy.

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Dual core Opterons shown off

Posted August 31, 2004 @ 11:37AM, by Eric Bangeman

With the megahertz race having slowed down to a crawl, the major CPU makers have turned their attention towards dual-core CPUs. Both Intel and AMD have targeted Spring-Summer 2005 for the introduction of their dual-core processors, but AMD will be the first to demo a dual-core system, as they take the wraps off of an HP ProLiant server with four dual-core Opterons.

The two cores will be connected via AMD's Direct Connect (HyperTransport) bus, and the Socket 940 CPUs will be built on the 90nm process. AMD is currently transitioning its processor line to 90nm, and recently began shipping its first CPUs fabbed on the new process (the Mobile Athlon 64). While the dual-core chips will likely cost a bit more than today's single-core models, AMD is sure that the ease of dropping a set of dual-core Opterons into a server and turning a four-way server into a four-socket, eight-core server will make the new Opterons (and Athlon 64s) attractive options. The four-way server shows up as having eight processors when Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is loaded on it (so does that mean you will need four licenses or eight?).

Intel is also expected to show off its dual-core server Smithfield CPUs in the near future, which are based on the Prescott/Xeon architecture. Both AMD and Intel will be racing to get their dual-core chips out the door as quickly as possible next year, especially as the "budget" x86-64 server market which AMD created growing as it is.

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Intel details 65 nanometer plans

Posted August 31, 2004 @ 10:11AM, by Eric Bangeman

Intel is apparently feeling confident that its problems with the 90nm transition are behind it and will not affect the next process shrink to 65nm. The world's largest CPU maker announced plans to begin volume production of 65nm CPUs in late 2005. Using an enhanced version of its strained silicon process, Intel claims that its 65nm CPUs will be able to cut down on current leakage by a factor of four, improve performance by 30% over chips made without strained silicon, or both.

The biggest architectural change in the 65nm chips will be the addition of sleep transistors in the cache array and the use of a low-k dielectric insulator, both of which should cut down on SRAM leakage. Such power-saving features will be important for Intel as they move down from 90nm — the shrink from 130nm to 90nm meant an increase in power draw from 82 watts for Northwood at its peak to 90W for the first round of Prescotts. Aside from that, the 65nm chips will be quite similar to the 90nm. Intel is betting that with the transition being a mostly "pure" process shrink — as opposed to the move to 90nm from 130nm which involved a number of changes — things should go much more smoothly this time.

Intel has fabbed some 70Mb SRAM chips on the new process so far, and demonstrated a 4Mb SRAM chip on the same process as early as last Fall. However, it's a long way from a 70Mb SRAM chip to a Pentium 4. Intel was quite confident about the move to 90nm and we all know how that has gone so far. On the other hand, if Intel can lick the power consumption problem at 65nm, the new process combined with the Pentium-M core (or dual core) would make for a spiffy little CPU. But don't count on being able to get one in late 2005.

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iMac G5 unveiled

Posted August 31, 2004 @ 7:17AM, by Eric Bangeman

Phil Schiller was the host today at the Paris Expo Keynote 2004, and as anticipated, the iMac G5 has now surfaced. Mimicking the lines of the recently announced Aluminium Cinema Displays, the new iMac shares the same style of enclosure and packs a 17" or 20" LCD into 2 and 2.2 inches of depth, respectively. The internals are grouped into the customary three models, Good, Better, and Best, specs as follows:

• iMac G5 17", 1.6Ghz/256MB/80GB/Combo Drive
• iMac G5 17", 1.8Ghz/256MB/80GB/SuperDrive
• iMac G5 20", 1.8Ghz/256MB/160GB/SuperDrive

All models feature a DDR400 RAM (with support for up to 2GB), Serial ATA drives, 8x AGP, and graphics courtesy of the NVIDIA GeForce FX5200 64MB. The 1.6GHz model sports a 533MHz FSB while the faster model has a 600MHz FSB. Slated to ship world wide as of mid-September, prices start at US$1,299 for the low-end model, rising to $1,499 for midrange, and $1,899 for the 20" monster.

Unfortunate omissions to the new iMac include things that many users are beginning to take for granted, such as FireWire 800, and shockingly, Bluetooth (which is available as a build-to-order option).

The new iMac can be mounted on the vertical surface of your choosing with an optional VESA mount, but with the lack of built-in Bluetooth for wireless keyboards and mice, wall mounting it might look a bit ungainly unless you add this technology to your order. The other sticking point of the new iMac is the large bezel under the display, something brought about by the internalization of the power supply. A PowerBook- or Cube-style power brick would be far more preferable than the vast expanse of white emptiness that now unfortunately dominates the iMac's face. In all, a somewhat disappointing adventure, and with the lack of Bluetooth — and it has to be said — lackluster graphics, it does not look like the new iMac will be able to turn around Apple's fortunes in the consumer market. ~Write-up by Diego "mat catastrophe" Iaconelli

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System Guide: Gaming Boxes

Posted August 30, 2004 @ 10:55PM, by Eric Bangeman

This month we have another new twist on the venerable Ars System Guide: the Gaming Box. Built with the serious gamer in mind, the Ultimate Gaming Box and Performance Gaming Box are a response to the latest generation of demanding games.

Major upgrades are often driven by software, not hardware. And one of the biggest software categories driving upgrades is games. Excitement over dual-channel memory or the NVIDIA 6800/ATI X800 series video cards is great, but without a compelling need to upgrade, excitement does not always generate sales. Far Cry brought many older systems to their knees a few months ago. Today, Doom3 does the same to many almost-new systems.

If the recent release of Doom 3 has you thinking about either upgrading your system or moving to an all new one, then the Gaming System Guide may be exactly what you need.

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96 CPUs in one (large) desktop workstation

Posted August 30, 2004 @ 4:15PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

What do you do when one, two, or even four CPUs isn't enough? Orion Multisystems hopes you'll consider their newly announced cluster workstations. In an attempt to bring high-performance computing (HPC) to the desktop, the company has launched a product line aimed at scientists and content creators who need workstation-sized packages that can outperform some of the most powerful offerings from the likes of Sun, SGI, and others. Using Transmeta's Efficeon processor (coverage here), Orion is offering a Fedora Core 2-powered 12-processor workstation for $10,000, or a Super-Size-Me 96-processor system for less than $100,000. The specs will make any geek jealous.

Orion's DS-96 deskside Cluster Workstation has 96 nodes with 300 gigaflops (Gflops) peak performance (150 Gflops sustained), up to 192 gigabytes of memory and up to 9.6 terabytes of storage. It consumes less than 1500 watts and fits unobtrusively under a desk. Orion's DT-12 desktop Cluster Workstation has 12 nodes with 36 Gflops peak performance (18 Gflops sustained), up to 24 gigabytes of DDR SDRAM memory and up to 1 terabyte of internal disk storage. (1) The DT-12 consumes less than 220 watts and is scalable to 48 nodes by stacking up to four systems.

The company is hoping that these powerful workstations will convince potential customers of the benefits of workstation computing. In the last 10 years workstations have been attacked on both sides; desktop systems have become increasingly capable of performing complex tasks far beyond the needs of consumers, while server technology has made processing power available at a price that few dreamed of a decade ago. Clustered servers, while cheaper than in the past, tend to consume a great deal of power, and they have this nasty habit of taking up a good deal of space. They're also in high-demand in scientific facilities and content creation shops, where people have to to vie for time to even use the machines. In that sense, Orion hopes to justify their workstations as a much needed middle-point.

The middle point, of course, is more than just raw CPU power. A massively parallels system such as this is aimed squarely at computations which are inefficient to perform in a serial manner. If you can imagine rendering a complex 3D animated scene, you can see how having 96 processors working on a frame at the same time can be ideal when compared to only two or four processors, even if they are considerable faster than those in the nodes.

Of course, Orion is a curious company. The Santa Clara CA-based company was founded by none other than Colin Hunter, a co-founder not only of Transmeta, but also OQO. It seems Hunter's vision is Efficeon everywhere: HPC servers, tiny handheld devices, maybe even a notebook or two.

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Half-Life 2 pre-pre-(pre?)-load

Posted August 30, 2004 @ 3:23PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

Gamers got a shot of excitement late last week when it was announced that the much awaited Half-Life 2 was "pre-loading" to users of Valve's controversial Steam client. Steam is Valve's new content-distribution software aimed at making games available via the Internet, but Half-Life 2 will also show up in retail outlets. Some users have maligned Steam, seeing it as a way to monetize the mod community and potentially milk gamers for more than their fare share of the take through subscription like systems. Until the game is released, Steam's popularity and ultimate features will be only a matter of speculation.

Many were quick to assume that this pre-load meant that Half-Life 2 was finished, but the relatively small size of the download (less than 1GB) indicates that the entire game has not been put up on Steam. Nevertheless, an individual claiming to be Gabe Newell announced on an online forum that the game had in fact gone gold, but as it turns out, it was only a hoax by someone else. This curious turn of events comes not long after die-hard Half-Life 2 fans chastised the press, including Ars, for not taking forum posts by "Newell" relating to shipping dates seriously.

"After a close scrutiny of Gabe Newell's account history on the forums, we've come to the conclusion that the gold post is a fake... After one crazy night of theories, server mayhem, and IP tracing, we've finally gotten to the bottom of this mess. In a twist of hilarity, it seems that Gabe Newell's account password was set to 'gaben.' Person x guessed this and made the "going gold on Monday" post, which we've heard so much about. The user (who we believe is the same person x) then made this post just minutes ago using Gabe's account:  "Maybe he shouldn't have used 'gaben' for his password. Come on Gabe, you could of [sic] thought of something better than that."  After a quick double-check, it seems that this was exactly what happened."

GameSpot has said that the pre-load so far only includes items that are "set in stone," such as audio files, some artwork, and the like. So, despite a few bits flying here and there, there's no sign of anything other than a Steam test happening so far.

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Command & Conquer laser weapons becoming reality

Posted August 30, 2004 @ 10:53AM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

If you've played Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour, you may have had the chance to play as general Townes, the "USA Laser General." Amongst his arsenal are a number of laser-based weapons that, among other things, are often mounted on mobile vehicles for the purposes of destroying incoming missiles with rapid fire and precision.

In recent real life tests, the US Army's Tactical High Energy Laser successfully shot down a series of mortar attacks using speed-of-light bursts to destroy the incoming targets.

The tests were conducted by the Army as part of the Mobile THEL (MTHEL) program. The MTHEL program is the responsibility of the SHORAD Project Office under the U.S. Army's Program Executive Office for Air, Space, and Missile Defense. The purpose of the MTHEL program is to develop and test the first mobile Directed Energy weapon system capable of detecting, tracking, engaging, and defeating Rockets/Artillery/Mortars (RAM), cruise missiles, short-range ballistic missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Earlier this year the technology also managed to knock out a missile flying faster and higher than previously capable, although challenges remain. While mobile, the lasers are still massive, and require tremendous power to operate; they are also understandably sensitive with regards to calibration. Nevertheless, the military is looking to lasers as a key defensive solution to both long-range missile attacks and short range, short travel time attacks such as those posed by mortars. The Air Force also tested a similar laser project this year, with one key difference: the laser was installed in a specially configured 747-400F. Where's Val Kilmer and a massive foil ball of popcorn when you need him?

P.S. General Townes rules.

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PowerPC on Apple: An Architectural History, Part I

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