Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

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According to Madshrimps, Globalfoundries is working hard on improving its existing process nodes and the results are very encouraging. Thanks to engineering experts over at Abu Dhabi-powered Dresden foundry, AMD will be able to release Phenom II 955 processor.

Phenom II 955 allegedly works at 3.2 GHz, with working voltage of only 1.25V, down 0.10V from Phenom II 920 and 940. If all things work out, P-II 3.2 GHz just may be the ticket for the upcoming launch of AMD 800 series of chipsets. We’re not sure is this processor will be market as the Black Edition model or not. AMD has a policy of not commenting on unreleased products, thus treat this as a rumor.

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Probably the most humorous motherboard of them all was Intel’s own Bad Axe motherboard. Intel shipped out different revisions of the same motherboard with Pentium 4 EE955, Pentium EE965, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad – and every time, a new CPU would not work in older rev motherboard, even though power consumption was cut dramatically.

This is LGA-1156A, third Socket for i5 and the one that will be the standard... until LGA-1156B and LGA-1156C arrive.

Enter LGA-1156. According to friends at Fudzilla, next 18 months will see the debut of LGA-1156 for Core i5, LGA-1156B supporting integrated graphics and LGA-1156C. If we take into account that the company previously planned to manufacture this socket as LGA-1160 and LGA-1158, we should really take a good look at mighty Chipzilla.
If Nvidia is swaying the market with “smart” rebrands of their old products, how should we comment Socket policy at Intel? Perhaps a new spin on infamous Australian ad for chips – “Same sh*t, but won’t work package”?

If IT industry needs one thing, it would be to wake the heck up and start making products that won’t confuse the consumer. Is it that hard to estimate what envelopes your products need to work within Tic-Toc model and make a single socket that would, by some crazy imagination, work with every CPU that comes out for it?

In the end, it will truly end up with AMD being right about Socket AM2, AM2+ and AM3, while Intel’s single socket policy failed miserably on both Socket 775 and LGA-1156. And that is sad, given the size of chip giant from Santa Clara.

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If I recall correctly, a while ago AMD claimed world’s first OpenCL demo, but it was done on a single core (and then scaled up to all four) on a Phenom II X4 CPU. If this video is correct, Nvidia gets the pole position for being the first company to demonstrate OpenCL working on a GPU, which is “usage as intended”.

Judging from the video, Nvidia showed Nbody simulation changing following parameters: point size, velocity damping, softening factor, time step, cluster scale, and velocity scale. The company used a laptop equipped with Quadro FX 570M graphics card, e.g. GeForce 8600M after a “GL” tune-up. As far as the official debut of OpenCL go, KHRONOS Group launched the API on Siggraph Asia 2008 in Singapore, from where both AMD & Nvidia videos came from.

But don’t expect OpenCL drivers until both companies supply drivers to Apple. It looks like Snow Leopard will be the beginning of OpenCL on a PC platform and Windows Vista is sitting on backburner… that’s what Microsoft get for botching OS development and sucking up to allmighty Chipzilla.

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Intel was the first manufacturer to introduce this “element” into the mix, way back in late 1990s. First “expensive turned cheap” processor was a certain Celeron processor that shared the same die as more expensive Pentium III processors. But the caveat was that specific boards recognized that CPU as Celeron with whole amount of cache, and those beasts were more overclockable than PIII processors (due to difference in FSB – 100 MHz vs. 133 MHz). And as the song goes, “here we go again”. Korean enthusiast web-site Playwares found out that Advanced Clock Calibration feature on SB700/750-equipped motherboards could be the way how AMD is creating X3 and X2 CPUs, and started to play with them on Biostar’s 790GX motherboard.

How to make a "Phenom X4 10": One X3 10, Overclocking-friendly motherboard and Page Down key on a keyboard.

As you can see in picture above, really interesting thing happened. One press on Page Down key in BIOS turned X3 into an X4, and by the stroke of luck, this X3 didn’t had a broken down core, but was one of those CPUs that was “cored-down”. Sadly, I don’t have Athlon X2 or Phenom X3 CPU here (have ASUS and GigaByte 790GX+SB750 motherboards) to test myself, but those motherboards have the same BIOS feature as tested Biostar one.

Unless this story is a hoax, all we can say is – it looks like AMD is not certain how many heads its Dragon platfrom has. It morphs

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As company description explains, this company has extremely long lead-times, needed for implementation into designs of computers from manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Acer and many others. If we take into account that the mainstream Nehalem platform (Lynnfield and Clarkdale processors, probably branded as Core i3 & i5) is set to debut this summer, it’s no wonder that i5 design appeared on AVC’s website five months before introduction.

This cooler fits almost all sockets on the market - including the upcoming LGA-1156 ;)

The company now lists several products compatible with LGA-1156 socket, from OEM solutions (competing for the boxed cooler contract) to a retail multi-heatpiped beast called Napoleon (Plus). In order to win the OEM contracts for enthusiast-class machines, Napoleon (Plus) fits inside the Intel Socket Load Limit policies – e.g. weighs in exactly 450g. A lot of enthusiast coolers weigh more than double that, and while it may be ok to keep a 1000 gram cooler mounted vertically on a horizontally mounted motherboard (e.g. testbed configuration), it is definitely not ok to keep such a monster in a chassis. Napoleon (Plus) has no such issues and can be mounted on any LGA-1156 motherboard without additional strengthening.

For the end of this post, we can probably state that most or even all LGA-1366-compatible coolers can support LGA-1156 processors as well.

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How Nvidia came into the Intel chipset market is another story – at the time, Intel was seriously hurting with its Prescott marchitecture and didn’t had anything to show in gaming and enthusiast segment. The company was playing around Nvidia and in the end – Nvidia launched “nForce 4 SLI for Intel” chipset (famous for the fact that it didn’t work with low-end Pentium D 820 processor) and started to pave way for the creation of “Axis of Evil” (comment by former ATI PR manager): Intel Core 2 CPU + GeForce 8800GTX + nForce 680i.

Also, this wasn’t the first time Chipzilla asked for help. When the company got struck with Rambus RDRAM gremlins in infamous Caminogate, Taiwanese VIA Computer skyrocketed to a shocking 60% worldwide chipset market share (for two quarters). Lack of confidence in Intel’s chipsets was proven with the launch of Intel-based workstations from Silicon Graphics. Imagine my surprise when I opened up my flashy Visual Workstation 550 (an $8,000 machine) featuring 2GB of PC-133 memory, Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz processor, first Quadro card and VIA’s Apollo Pro 133A chipset. You will probably agree it was a very weird experience. Intel pushed VIA from the market with lawsuit regarding Pentium 4 license. By the time trials came to an end, VIA was less than also-ran in the Intel-chipset arena.

Coming back to Core 2 architecture, Nvidia enjoyed its success with 650i/680i and didn’t invest in the platform (780i was nothing else but 680i with PCIe Gen2 chip). At the same time, Intel grew stronger, releasing P35/X38/X48/P45 series of chipsets and Nvidia was no longer needed. Thus, it is logical that the company wants to squeeze out pesky Santa Clara neighbor for its Core i5 and i7 series.

Ultimatively, this is a battle that customers will lose. Regardless of what court decides, incertanties are costing both companies money. Truth to be told, we saw interesting papers about the actual financial situation in Intel, and it is no wonder that the company is now attacking everybody. But to play around with chipset licenses and patents – ultimately, this is a losing game. Once that you hit the “lawsuit-trigger”, path of innovation takes the backseat and development begins to be closely monitored by legal departments.

All I can conclude here is that Nvidia has patents that could block a lot of Intel’s products. AMD could stop Intel’s CPU production, so could Intel stop AMD. And then there is a case of 3rd party companies that nobody takes seriously, yet they can change the landscape of IT industry for good. When I spoke with couple of engineers from IBM, I was told that Big Blue could block Intel, AMD, Freescale, Motorola, even Texas Instruments – “in a jiffie”.

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Confirmation came in this Valve’s monthly update to their hardware survey, probably the best statistics about gaming hardware out there, touching “only” 16+ million people. This survey shows that the Christmas shopping season smiled nicely on Intel on the CPU side and both ATI and Nvidia on the graphics side.

15% of all users dropped single-core processors between June and January...

Roughly 50.000 people who used Intel’s integrated graphics subsystem bought ATI and Nvidia GPUs, reducing Intel’s share to 5.07% (5% too much, if you ask me). ATI now owns 27.25%, while Nvidia marginally increased its share to 64.72% of all graphics cards used. Big losers were also owners of multi-GPU configurations. As users are selling their 8800GTX SLI and 9800GX2 cards, most of them opted for a single graphics card, such as GeForce GTX or Radeon 4800 series. Less than 300.000 Steam users own a multi-GPU setup, yet everybody in the industry state that multi-GPU setup is the future?

On the CPU side, things turned quite interesting for the eternal battle between AMD and Intel. As you could read in the title, 0.43% of all users use Intel’s 8-core Skulltrail platform, while Phenom X3 has marginally higher market share (0.49%). 8-core Skulltrail beat 3-Core Phenom by almost four times, and by survey for March 2009, Skulltrail will probably overtake 3-core Phenoms in terms of overall share. Rough estimate would be roughly 70.000 Skulltrail systems out there, and 80.000 Phenom X3 systems. Who earned more money?

My take is that a certain ex-ATI/now-AMD is now chewing his hat of, because it was his decision to kill FASN8, AMD’s Barcelona-powered dual-socket gaming system.
In case you missed, this also proves that a certain Voodoo-empowered HP executive was wrong in his column about the end of high-end gaming machines. A lot of workstation users bought Skulltrail machines, but this statistics applies to people who installed Steam on their computers. And as we all know, it’s not that Steam is used for distribution of AutoCAD, Maya, Adobe CS4 and other professional software packages.

This month was also big on DirectX 10 – almost 25% of all users now use DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. Then again, percentage of owners of DirectX 10 hardware and DX9 operating system (Windows XP) jumped to 27.28% (up by 2%) as well.

All in all, Steam Hardware Survey once more provided us with an invaluable insight into the world of gaming hardware. I am personally surprised with the success of Skulltrail platform, given the state of economy and prices of Skulltrail systems. Then again, it is a living proof that Francois Piednoel and his team at Intel knew what they were doing when they created V8, followed by Skulltrail.

On a side note, I can’t wait for Nehalem-EP based Skulltrail… codename Skullcrusher? Greyscull? Or again back in the car world with Bugatti-like V-16 (two 4-core CPUs feature 8 threads each, thus 16 cores visible in task manager )?

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Fast forward to January 2009, and we have SP performance at 933 GFLOPS, while achievable DP performance dipped down to 78 GFLOPS. This figure is roughly half of what Nvidia boasted about at the time of launch, and sheer evidence that both manufacturers like to overstate the performance of actual parts. What makes things interesting is the fact that Tesla GPGPU boards aren’t even most powerful parts in the Nvidia line-up. That “honor” goes to newly introduced GTX285 and 295. In professional line-up, Quadro FX 5800 has more “oomph”, thanks to higher shader clock. but even FX5800 will remain below 100 GFLOPS in dual-precision operations… making this GPU “just” 2.5x faster than quad-core Xeon processor.

Then again, if you activate parallel execution, CPU will drop to sub-10 GFLOPS values, while the GPU will remain at 78 GFLOPS for DP and 933 GFLOPS in single precision. At the same time, ATI’s architectural concept of “emulating” the DP units by pairing more processing units in one cluster resulted in actual peak performance of 900 GFLOPS for the 4870 part (claimed performance: 1.2 TFLOPS) and 250 GFLOPS for the Dual-Precision formats. This is an impressive difference, showcasing ATI’s lead from the architectural standpoint. Extractable performance is a bit different, since some ISVs managed to extract that performance, such as ElcomSoft password cracker, while some hit different walls and could not get better performance.

The real dilemma now is to wait and see what kind of computing performance lies with upcoming 40nm GPUs.

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System consisted out of AMD Phenom X4 9950, ASUS M3A78-T motherboard and 2x1GB GeIL DDR2-1066 4-4-4-12-1T memory. That memory worked either at these specs, or you could push it down to 3-3-3-7-1T on DDR2-800 and quite frankly, was the best memory I ever tested. These two year old memory sticks worked flawlessly in Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and EVGA 680i motherboard, but paired with Phenom 9950, they decided to give up the ghost after two months.

Modules died without any spectacular event happening – shut the computer down, turned it back on a day later and the system refused to POST. After typical debug session (clear CMOS, replace memory, replace the CPU) it turned out that the memory died, thus I replaced it with alternative DDR2 modules and turned the computer back on.
What I was greeted was nothing nice, Phenom X4 9950 recognizing just one core and system crashed at boot. It turns out that memory doesn’t want to work in 128-bit “gangbanged” mode, thus we enabled the single-channel 64-bit ungangbanged mode.

I managed to get four cores working, but multi-threading capability just wasn’t there. Loading two applications would crash the system, and while single-threaded games worked, multi-threaded games such as Call of Duty or Far Cry would cause a BSOD. After replacing the CPU, system is working again 100% stable, but Phenom X4 9950 is a gonner. Thus, if you plan to use old DDR3 memory in your future Phenom II or Core I7 build, be careful what modules are you putting in the system. Both 1st Gen DDR2 and DDR3 modules came with high-voltage settings even written in SPD chip, so the newer CPUs might not like those settings.
Anyways, I can trash and recycle lowest-latency modules I ever had, and they’re sadly joined by a scorching hot 140W-eating Phenom X4 9950. Damn.

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Afore mentioned three models are almost identical to already existing Core i7 920, 940 and 965, but for the QPI inteface, which is allegidly set at 5.4 GT/s on all parts. G Also, very interesting part is the similarity in names between Core and Xeon series, something we haven’t seen recently. 2.66GHz Nehalem corresponds to the name Core i7 920 and Xeon 3520, i7 940 is Xeon 3540, while the 3.2 GHz part is known as Core i7 965 and Xeon 3570. We estimate this small change in number is due to QPI link.

We all saw the execellent scores that appeared in legally leaked benchmark results on several sites on the ‘Net. Thus, AMD’s Shanghai should better brace for impact, because Nehalem is coming from high altitude.

This also practically confirms the rumors of faster Core i7 Extreme processor, since Intel had the tradition of launching higher-clocked desktop part as soon as server parts reach the clocks of desktop versions (at least, up to Core 2 Quad era).

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Auburndale and Havendale were multi-chip modules featuring two hyper-threaded cores and integrated graphics chip. According to a diagram above, Auburndale/Havendale consisted out of two pieces of silicon: CPU part with two cores sharing 4MB of L3 cache memory and a separate graphics core connected by using Quick Path Interface (QPI).

Auburndale was supposed to debut on market as 35/45W mainstream and business notebook processor, while Havendale was the desktop versions, consuming as much as 75W (higher clocks). But, the economic crisis played its part and Intel isn’t so interested in keeping the 45nm production alive for these two parts. 45nm production will be kept in place for Pentium and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors for the mainstream crowd, and Core i7 for those on higher end of scale.

But, this is not the end of Fusion concept in Santa Clara. Intel is going to replace Auburndale/Havendale with their 32nm die-shrink, known as Arandale. Arandale was originally supposed to debut for Back to School season 2010, alongside 32nm quad-core and sexa-core Westmere processors (Core i7 die-shrinks). But now, Arandale core has been brought forward by six months to Q1’2010. The debut is set probably for March (can you say CeBIT?) timeframe. We don’t have any piece of information on Arandale, besides the fact that it is a die-shrink and will probably feature larger L3 cache, probably somewhere in the range of 6MB, just like current 45nm Wolfdale processors (6MB L2 cache).

If you are wondering what’s going on with AMD’s Fusion processors, don’t think that this cancellation of 45nm parts will give AMD much needed breathing space, since AMD delayed its own Fusion CPU+GPU chips from Q3’2008 (yes, last year) to 2011! Then again, at least we’re talking about completely new CPU core, quad-core Llano and dual-core Ontario.

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On the other hand, Novafora is a company headed by Shlomo and Zaki Rakib, successful engineer and enterpreneur who worked together at Terayon Communication Systems. Their vision is to create products to video content processing for the Internet era. With this acquisition, there is little doubt that companies such as Qualcomm, Freescale, TI, Philips, Nvidia and others are getting some competition.

Only time will tell how Novafora will pan out, but there is some serious engineering talent in Israel, and being backed by funds that have over 1.3 billion USD just might result in a new star on system-on-chip market.
Last great architecture to come from Israel was no other than Intel Core architecture, also known as “Chip that saved Intel’s bacon”.

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• Vikingreviews (Danish newcomer)
• AMDZone
• AnandTech
• Bjorn3D
• Legit Reviews
• Legion Hardware
• OverclockersClub
• Tech Report

After all the sites that gave their opinions out, I am singling out HardOCP’s view of this new processor – Kyle always speaks in his balls-out, guns-blazing attitude, thus you might appreciate an alternative to other site reviews…

As far as my own review go, I’ve been plagued by several issues, namely the fact that I had huge issues getting Phenom II X4 940 to work in dual-channel mode. Had no issues about getting the memory to pass DDR2-1066 tests stable, but the Gangbanged mode is just not there – tried on both GigaByte and ASUS 790GX-based motherboards. Regardless of that, my take will be ready by the end of the week.

When it comes to testing stability, I’ve decided to put my faith in a different stress-test, wondering what the reaction will be. So far, Intel Core i7 965 failed at 3.5 GHz, Phenom II 940 did the same at 3.4 GHz. As you’ve might have guessed it, the new site will introduce Linpack tests for both CPUs and the GPUs.I will also go to explain where exactly the complete K10 (K10.5 or Phenom II included) architecture fails.

One thing is clear, though. Compared to announcements given by AMD, we have yet to see a review featuring 4.0 GHz clock on air. In a way, seeing reviews peaking at 3.8 GHz gave right to Francois Piednoel from Intel, who openly questioned the presentation in Austin as “smoke in mirrors”. I find it odd that AMD at least didn’t supply the press with 4.0 GHz capable processors and scoring a major PR coup. It seems to me that 45nm process is not mature enough for stable 4.0 GHz overclocks, but it is more than mature for feeding the CPU core with absolutely horrifying voltages. Seeing 1.6V on 45nm on air is just terrifying and horrifying at the same time. Kudos to AMD engineers that created a CPU that can work stable at 1.6V – this brings great news for extreme overclockers.

However, if you expected that your $50-60 cooler will bring you to 4.0 GHz… well… not exactly. My highest stable overclock so far was 3.5 GHz

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The Race for a New Game Machine is a fantastic title, an absolute must read. The book was penned by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps, disclosing bombastic details about the development of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It effectively shows that IBM betrayed Sony and Toshiba and took Sony’s and Tosh’s money to develop the CPU for Microsoft Xbox 360 console. Yes, you’ve read that right. The topic of this book could have ended in court if Sony and Toshiba managed to find any loopholes in their contracts with IBM – sadly for them, IBM was all too wise to sign a contract that would not give them enough free space to play with.

Long story short, IBM’s Cell PowerPC core ended up tripled and landed itself inside Microsoft Xbox 360, without Toshiba and Sony learning the truth until the bicker end. This is an excerpt from this bombastic title:

IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. Sony and Toshiba sent teams of engineers to Austin to live and work with their partners in an effort to have the Cell ready for the Playstation 3’s target launch, Christmas 2005. But a funny thing happened along the way: A new “partner” entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft’s rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM’s Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony.

All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony’s primary videogame-console competitor. The result was that Sony’s R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it.

IBM employees were hiding their work from Sony and Toshiba engineers in the cubicles next to them; the Xbox chip being tested a few floors above the Cell design teams. Mr. Shippy says that he felt “contaminated” as he sat down with the Microsoft engineers, helping them to sketch out their architectural requirements with lessons learned from his earlier work on Playstation.

MSFT: We'll just take things in red, and leave Sony and Tosh to cope with the rest.

You can buy the book for mere 15 bucks on Amazon.com and trust me, it will give you more hours of fun that most of games that came out in 2008.

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Based on his article, which speaks about the death of high-end PC computers (neatly, some years after Rahul sold his own boutique PC manufacturer to HP for a large sum of dead presidents), the world is going to evolve into small and neat things. And that is a nice pitch to launch a product like the upcoming Blackbird 003, as insinuated in a follow-up post.

And this is where it hit me. The perception of human species is that we’re an exclusive kind. One cannot co-exist with another, starting in kindergartens, throughout school, rivalry between brothers/sisters in a family or nations – does not matter, we all think of ourselves as God/Allah/Manitou-given right to exterminate the opponent because “we’re better”. However, when we look at the world in general, we see that everything is inclusive, even our position in the food chain. We cannot be different, because we would belong to a different position in the food chain, not on top of it. We are predators (Orca the killer whale is also a mammal, so don’t pull that argument that we’re cute as dolphins), we take all the best qualities, them being good or bad, and use them for our own interests. However, we do not cancel each other out. It is the competition that drives us to the best or worst of our potentials, and it does not matter who comes second, it is the matter of who makes the best product, that being your performance in a family, or a company.

The IT industry – error in global economy DNA
Factor of inclusiveness comes to life the moment you walk into the world of IT industry. This industry is best described as “disruptive”, because it continuously shakes up the world order, like it or not. We change the level playing field in every industry that we touch, that being weapons of our own destruction, or tools of our own creation. Now, why all of a sudden this industry is turning into an exclusive one, or just keeps talking about exclusiveness?

For starters, a lot of my mainstream colleagues are now writing about Apple products like nothing else exists in the world. For starters, Apple did not invent multi-touch nor does it own the technology. But, Apple is the first company that took the existing technology and did a brilliant job to create currently the best interface between humans and machines.

Tomorrow brings a whole another ballgame of alternative interfaces that will change the way how we communicate with the digital world. Perceptive Pixel, Dragon Systems/Nuance, Google Voice-activated search, and E-Plus Speech-to-Text (SMS) technologies – all of these companies are bringing technologies that are utterly brilliant, but in the end, they will be adopted by other companies. Following exclusive logic, all of these companies will keep technologies to themselves, regardless of Google being an American company, E-Plus a German mobile operator, Dragon a small UK company that exchanged more hands (corporations) than Microsoft has employees… but all of these companies bring stuff that will be adopted by other companies and they will deliver their stuff.

At the end of the day, we all will benefit – smaller and big companies, but only those that think outside the box.

What a Ferrari F1 car has to do with my car?
In order to be able to draw parallels with current situation, let’s compare computers to cars, since both share emotional similarities. There is a world crisis in car sales, as a consequence of recession. But, let’s take a deeper look into numbers, shall we? Big Three in US are in trouble, because they have millions (sadly, not exaggerating) of unsold cars. Why? Because people don’t want to buy them. Car industry missed the way what car drivers’ desire and that was punished with a dramatic decrease in sales… from makers of bog standard automobiles.

No wonder, you might add – because these cars don’t give us that buzz, that emotion. Now, let’s take a look into the world of supercars… are the sales down? Judging by the appearance of numerous supercars manufacturers, the answer is a very loud – NO. Ferrari increased its production from 4999 cars/annum in 2005 to 6700 cars in 2008, followed by 7500 cars in 2009. Current leadership of the company told yours truly that they won’t increase production for more than 10,000 cars a year, because they want to keep the exclusivity. Then again, they told me the same thing back in 2005, so don’t hold your breath. Porsche makes 80,000 cars/year, and they plan to pass the 100,000 mark with the introduction of baby SUV and a four-door limo. Crisis? What crisis?

I won’t even explain how start-ups companies like Tesla, Carbon Motors and many others are preparing the stage for either a takeover, or big ones “stealing” a lot of ideas from their 2010 cars. Let’s move forward. In the past five years, more supercar manufacturers appeared than in 10 years between 1990 and 2000. Whoever heard about companies such as British Atom or German Gumpert? Yet, these manufacturers are finding their customers than GM or Ford. Different volume? Certainly. Profitability? Well… if GM was any smart and produced real sport versions of their cars, they would not be in such a doodle. Honda Type-R was a stuff legends were made from, yet their current Civic Type-R is a heavy and non-responsive PoS of a car. What happened to sales? You’ve guessed it. In today’s world, we’re pampered by dream visions wherever we go. These marketing visions make our emotions work and make us want things. In all honesty, can a Chevy Tahoe make us drool? Hardly. It’s a workhorse, regardless how you like present it. Range Rover Sport or chrome alloys on Tahoe are nothing else but “pig with a lipstick”.

Getting back to the world of computers, did Dell, IBM, HP, Gateway and others really thought they could continue to sell beige boxes forever? The answer is very simple – NO.

HP had to buy VoodooPC, Dell had to buy Alienware, and Acer had to buy Gateway, eMachines. Why? Because all of these companies need to generate buzz around their products. Raise hands who want to buy “beige or maybe grey” PC with “ultra-interesting” 19″ LCD display (connecting to PC with analog D-SUB connector, DVI cable is more expensive) and a beige PS/2 keyboard (still have on stock) that will change color the moment you touch it?

What happened after these acquisitions? HP launched all-carbon fiber Envy 133 and more importantly, All-in-One PC with a massive 22″ or 25.5″ touchscreen. Dell implemented Alienware DNA in its XPS series while keeping the company intact (and learned to live with the fact that there are tens of thousands of people want to buy their screens, but not interested in their computers). Gateway launched a sold out notebook which specs are now emulated by ASUS, Toshiba and others. The list goes on.

How to create an industry – sandboxes anyone?
At the dying years of 20th century, the need for better coolers created a whole new industry – premium cooling that became premium cases. Could you imagine Antec Skeleton, Cooler Master Stacker, Cosmos Black Edition, and Blackbird 002 – or imagine that a Ferrari-designer Pininfarina worked with Spire to create a design case for 70 greenbacks. And all of that happened because a small group of people went nuts and overclocked Celeron 300A to 450 MHz and Duron 650 to 1.1 GHz and started to build systems around it (sorry, omitted Athlon 550 and 650 to 950 courtesy of legendary “Gold Finger” device).

This grassroots movement turned into an industry of premium components, yielding companies such as Corsair, OCZ, Mushkin from the world of system memory, BFG, Diamond, EVGA, XFX, Sapphire in the world of graphics cards, Extreme Edition and FX processors from Intel and AMD and completely changed the way how Dell, HP, Acer, ASUS and others market their computers.

Tesla Supercomputer is the latest example of taking an underground movement and creating an industry. Five years from now, every scientist will have a minimum of 100 TFLOPS on his desktop, and supercomputers will become 10-20-40 PFLOPS machines capable of solving world’s greatest problems. Because of who? Because a group of young doctors of science took four gaming cards and turned a gaming machine into a processing monster for computational topography http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/specs.html and inspired Nvidia to launch an ecosystem around Tesla cards for aspiring scientists.

Would that ever happened if there weren’t for gamers who demanded more and more realistic graphics in computer games, forcing companies to turn regular video processing chips with some texturing power into TFLOPS monsters that eat CPUs for breakfast in any stream-like application?

The answer is very simple. NO. Liked it or not, it all started with bilinear filtering of textures. 3Dfx had it, S3 and Matrox didn’t. Games looked awesome even on Pentium 100 machine, looked like crap on Matrox and Pentium 233 MMX. ATI and Nvidia came later and with wiser moves, moved ahead. End of story.

Personally, I consider that the most important product that HP has in its complete PC lineup is its TouchSmart series. Yet, I don’t see HP advertising this system wherever you go, I don’t see discussions about how controlling the computer by our own fingers is changing the world. No, that’s left to Apple and be honest; iMac does not come close to level of interactivity offered by HP’s system. Apple’s buyers used to be consisted out of dreamers, visionaries and people that don’t want to live in bog standard world. Judging by the rate of market share growth, people want to dream, live the vision and they don’t want to live in a bog standard world. That’s why Apple stuff sells like hotcakes – not to enthusiasts, but to grandmas and grandpas that want to own something beautiful. This is the place where CE industry missed the boat completely and it will get eaten by IT industry (not getting “destroyed”, but adopting IT technology to a point where you can’t tell a difference). Your telly in the living room will have a complete computer inside, or just connect to a home server that will become more important than ever. Is it a Sony TV or Sony Vaio with a larger screen? Wait and see.

High end PC – what can we make of it?
Here comes the ultimate failure of PC industry as such – it lacks people that will spark that creativity, all in the name of cutting costs, even if $2 means the difference between PoS product that nobody wants to buy or will buy only when forced (enterprises tied into their own cycles).

The problem of high-end PCs does not lie in the fact that there is no market between ultra-high end PCs and mainstream crowd. The problem, as some like to see it – actually does not exist. There will always be a market for those 300.000 people (Steam Hardware survey November 2008). That number accounts to 300 million greenbacks of revenue for graphics subsystem alone. Even in five years spread, that’s a hefty number to overlook for anyone, and this exlcuded rest of components that also belong to premium world. Most of motherboard manufacturers now focus on catering overclockers, spend hundreds of thousand of dollars on organizing overclocking competitions… all in the name of better products.

Is this market something that is going to disappear? Nope and yes, I will shave my head if I am wrong. This industry also has its heroes, like Shamino who came from overclocking world to help EVGA design ultimate motherboards, Macci who helped AMD to create an attack on Intel and change the way company markets its CPUs… examples are numerous. And no, these people will not go away, they will actually – get company.

Conclusion
In conclusion, boutique vendors like Biohazard Computers, HyperSonic-PC, SolidWavePC, Smooth Creations, YOYOTech and others will not just continue to exist, but expand their line-ups and put their DNA into more volume products. I won’t make a distinction between Biohazard and McLaren Group, or stop to mention similarities between VoodooPC/HP, Alienware/Dell and AMG/Mercedes relationship.
This industry is huge, there is more than enough room for everybody and guess what? AMD, Intel and Nvidia are not making enough chips to satisfy world’s need for computing. Once that this trio starts making 3-5 billion chips a year, we can start saying that the industry is saturated.

Then, we can start talking about exclusiveness – until then, whenever you hear an industry leader saying that users “don’t need that”, with “that” being TV-out on 3dfx Voodoo cards (Alex Leupp, 3dfx CEO), “that” being 64-bit instruction set (Patrick Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s CTO at time)… is setting its company for the fall or a hefty portion of humble pie.

The new site will have open discussions with the industry leaders outside of this industry, and then it will be interesting to see what IT industry leaders will say. Bear in mind that everybody is talking about netbooks today. First netbook in present form was a computer that a lot of industry executives and journalists claimed that it is impossible to make. Nicholas Negroponte, AMD and Quanta created netbook; ASUS came with Intel platform and created EEE. The rest is history.

And again, this would not happen if there wasn’t for Ferraris and Lambos of this industry. The future is bright for high-end PC manufacturers, but not just that. The future is bright only for open minded manufacturers that will push the envelope in their respective market.
Slow giants will be overrun, regardless of how you look at it. It is the real evolution and exclusiveness in the all-inclusive world.

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Steam has more than 15 million users worldwide and is to software distribution what World of Warcraft is in the world of MMO games. But probably the most interesting part of Steam is world famous “Steam Hardware Survey”. Every month, Valve collect data from 15 million users and lists what kind of hardware do people use. This is an invaluable process that gives developers golden information about platforms they should target. In my discussions with game developers, I had countless verbal battles with people who didn’t want to create a game for high-end hardware, because the adoption rate is too low. Well, think again.

In survey for November 2008, stats show that Intel leads the CPU share with 63.62%, while AMD owns the remaining 36.38%. Dual-core dominates with 49.04%, e.g. almost eight million people own a dual-core processor. Quad-core captured just 10.43%, which means quaddies have a mountain to climb. It is surprising to see that 40.19% still own a single-core processor, but multi-thread support is a must-have feature today, not tomorrow – 59.47% own a multi-thread capable computer.

CPU-wise, best sellers are Core 2 Duo E6600 and E6700 processors (2.4-2.66 GHz), while owners of AMD platform just cannot get enough of Athlon 64 X2 2.2 GHz (4400+). Graphics-wise, Nvidia captured 65.11% of all steam users, translated into more than 10 million gamers. Here comes the most interesting part of the survey. According to Steam, GeForce 8800 captured the hearts of no less than 32.35% of users. Out of 10 million Nvidia users, more than three million people own a high-performing GeForce 8800 card – it is almost incredible to see that amount of 3D horsepower taking more market share than numerous mainstream and low-end cards. 

API is a key decided in what platform to go with, and software developers will appreciate the fact that even though almost half of all Steam users use DirectX 10 hardware, only 21.43% of all steam users can actually use DX10 API. Windows XP is loved by more than massive majority of DX10 HW-owning users.

Numbers don't lie, and these are results from more than 15M people around the world. World's largest IT-related survey, that's for sure.

Summary

All in all, I would conclude that this survey proves just how popular Core 2 Duo and GeForce 8800 are. If you’re working on game code optimization today, and plan to launch the game on Steam in 2009, focus your efforts on following parts:

• Vista is a failure, gamers are waiting for Windows 7 to tell Good Bye to Windows XP
• Focus optimization on two cores, most likely in 2.5 GHz range
• 480.000 users overclocked their CPU beyond fastest shipping clock, additional 1.5 million moderately overclock their machines
• Users have around 100GB of free space on the hard drive
• Most of users have 512MB of video memory.
• Most popular resolution is 1024×768
• Most widescreen users use 27″ screens (surprised?), followed by 24″ ones. Thus, for widescreen focus on FullHD resolution
• Multi-GPU is esoteric at best, with 1.79% of overall share. Yes, only 280.000 people have multi-GPU configuration, with SLI dominating the share with 1.55% (240.000).
• Currently, nobody uses 4 GPUs with ATI chips and mere 4600 people own two 7950GX2 cards
• Valve currently makes world’s largest IT-based survey, and probably one of largest surveys in existence (does anybody know how many people Nielsen actually track?)  

All in all, Steam survey offered an interesting insight. I’ll follow-up on this one in our future monthly reports on Steam.

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When it comes to computers, analogy of supercars applies to high-end computers. People that criticize high-end computers mostly do so because they can’t afford one, instead of putting in an effort to acquire one. After assembling the computers for the better part of my life, I wanted to see how it is to get the final thing, assembled by well-trained professionals. Reviewing a system is quite a big difference compared to evaluating just one system component. We judge everything, from packaging, how easy it is to set it up, and look for issues each and every step of the way. Regardless are you buying system for $600 or $6000, everything has to work.

We have heard quite a lot about enthusiast PC vendors that overclock their machines, but at the end of the day, one question remains – is the system stable? With all kudos to enthusiast overclockers who will shed no tear when a graphics card or a CPU gives up the ghost after being soaked in gallons of LN2, purpose of this article is to see can a boutique vendor deliver on its promise and deliver 100% stable operation on a part that costs several thousand dollars.

Enter Biohazard’s Annihilation F.A.T.E. – this machine features Intel Core 2 Extreme processor and triple GeForce GTX 280. As you can guess, price is heaven’s high – but is it really worth that money?

The System
We have received the system based on following components:

Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650 – 3.8 GHz clock, based on 45nm Harpertown core
EVGA 790i Ultra SLI – motherboard based on nForce 3 790i Ultra SLI chipset
2GB OCZ DDR3-10666 – OCZ’s Reaper memory proved its quality, but only 2GB?
3x EVGA GeForce GTX 280 1GB – Stock clocked cards 
Western Digital RaptorX 150 GB – Oldie but Goldie… one of fastest hard drives out there
PP&C Turbo Cool 1.2 KW ESA – Monster of a power supply that feeds the whole system
LG SuperMulti Blu-ray SATA Rewriter – DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray in one place
Lian-Li PC-V1110B – Aluminum case polished to perfection
SilenX 120mm fans – Fast spinning series
Windows Vista Ultimate – we had 32-bit version on our hands.

Taking a look at components, we can see that Biohazard did not save a dime – every component in the system just calls for one thing – speed. We spoke with Josh Smith (CEO), who explained to us that the guys at Biohazard Computers tweak their systems using S.H.O.C. This is abbreviation for Stable Hyper Over-Clock, series of steps that ensures achieved clocks are sustainable in a 24×7 period throughout life of the system. As of November 2008, Annihilation F.A.T.E. features Core i7 platform, so motherboard and memory were changed.

Biohazard guarantees that the delivered system will work in temperatures that are “worst case scenario”, such as 100% load in a room with air temperature at 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. Given the demands, we were not surprised to see modifications that Biohazard did on the case in order to ensure uninterrupted airflow inside the system.

 This setup was equipped with F.A.T.E. cooling. FATE stands for Forced Air Thermal Exchange is their name for designing the system with not “as much fans as possible”, but putting fans in optimal places to ensure top cooling. For instance, Graphics cards are cooled with two fans that are discretely placed, and 3-Way SLI works with no problems. For the record, I’ve experienced a lot of instabilities with 3-Way SLI and CrossFireX setups in cases from other system vendors. Seeing a GPU at 100degC is just too much – and it looks like Biohazard nailed this one.

How we test
In order to see how this system will breathe, we tested the system using series of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We separate our testing to “everyday” and “gaming” application suite, and comparing it to our reference platform.

Our “Everyday” section is consisted out of audio encoding, video transcoding, rendering action and two synthetic benchmarks: Everest and PCMark Vantage. Encoding audio is based on using iTunes 7 to transform CD audio into AAC format. Video section is covered by transcoding a 1080p MPEG-2 video clip into MPEG-4 and from AVI to WMV-9. For transcoding the video, we’re relying on Adobe Premiere, while AVI to WMV-9 is being handled by Windows Media Encoder 9. Rendering tests are handled by Cinebench R10, which became benchmark of choice for this purpose.

Gaming suite is consisted out of optimal mix between different genres. Age of Conan is our take on world of ever-popular MMO genre, Crysis represent shooters, Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces takes the role of strategy genre, while Race Driver: GRID is something we all love to do: speedy driving. In all cases, we maxed out in-game details and see can you play the game or not.

Our target resolution is 1920×1200, and we expect that high-end systems work flawlessly in this resolution. If you use computer for gaming or movies, there is a good chance that you will connect it to a 24/27″ display or 1080p capable projector/LCD/Plasma.

Here comes the culprit. If you’re wondering why a 1920×1200 resolution, and not 2560×1600 on oh-so-many 30″ displays out there, the reason is simple. Dell 3008WFP will set you back for $1999 and yeah, it is awesome display. But for equal amount of money, you can buy a gigantic 52″ Sharp AQIOUS LCD TV screen. This screen supports 120Hz resolution, and this is very, very important feature in 2009.

Nvidia is set to launch its 3D technology next year, and this technology requires 120Hz displays. Secondly, if you want ultimate gaming experience, don’t settle for second best and sit by the computer. Biohazard Annihilation is actually an ideal computer to showcase games to friends in the living room, and the feeling of playing Fallout 3 or racing in Race Driver GRID in 1920×1200 with 16xAA and 16xAF is priceless.

Our reference platform is based upon following components:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 – 65nm Clovertown at 3.00 GHz
EVGA nForce 680i – brilliant old-school motherboard using nForce 680i chipset
2GB Corsair PC2-9136C5D – DDR2 running at 1066 MHz
PALIT GeForce GTX 280 1GB – the non-squealing GTX280
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250 GB – yep, I know it’s only 250GB, but I kinda like it. 64/64GB config for WinXP/Vista and 114GB for stuff
Thermaltake TR2 900W PSU – excellent power supply
Sony BWU-100A BD-DL Burner – Two years down the line, still the best Blu-ray burner on the market.. I wish I had SATA model
CoolIT Freezone Elite – No questions asked, this is by far the best TEC water-cooling setup that appeared on the market. Simple, and works like a charm

This platform was recently updated with GeForce GTX 280 graphics card, but in essence represents a high-end system from 2006 and just proves just how awesome job was delivered in Santa Clara – both Intel and Nvidia created a platform that is able to take on any computer manufactured today. This is also an answer regarding Annihilation. Our configuration was launched in May 2008, and it is well capable of providing a compelling gaming experience for years to come.

Experiences
Biohazard installed latest drivers on the system, and it was good to see ESA interface in action. Nvidia System Utilities were filled with details, since even the power supply supports ESA. Your geeky soul will die a little every time you see at all the gory details at how this machine works.

Bear in mind that this system emits a lot of heat, since three GTX 280 cards and quad-core CPU at 3.8 GHz can melt the polar ice. Thus, it is highly recommended that you keep this system in a room that is able to sustain decent room temperature. Having quality AC will help you out. But even with AC, this system was cooled down by fans, and even though their name alludes to silence, system was significantly audible. Thus, ideal companion for this system are either good headphones such as one by Audio-Technica or Logitech/Klipsch 5.1 surround system.

When it comes to our tests, we started off with iTunes and decoding the Audio CD. Not so nice part is the question are we going to use an actual CD or mount an image? In real world, you will not have hundreds of CDs mounted on your system and then using the power of CPU to encode the audio, but you will take a CD or a DVD and put it in the drive. In our test, we took the CD, placed in LG SuperBlu burner and saw that 94 seconds are needed to encode the whole CD. In comparison, our reference system equipped with Sony DWU-100A Blu-ray burner took 98 seconds. Advantage: Biohazard. If we would cheat and just mount the CD image from a hard drive, it would take just 24 seconds compared to our 33 seconds, clearly showing advantage of 3.8 GHz clock over our reference 2.93 GHz.

On the other hand, transcoding video was quite fun – our version of Premiere was enhanced with Elemental Technologies GPU plug-in, meaning  that our scene was encoded in just 32 seconds. This is quite impressive, since it took 4min37 seconds using Biohazard’s CPU. Our reference machine took almost six minutes.

But the biggest evidence how Biohazard’s 45 nanometer CPU demolished our old 65nm Core 2 Extreme is Windows Media Encoder 9. It took only 36 seconds to do test file encode, while our 2.93 GHz CPU took 73 seconds. This is almost twice as fast, so if transcoding is your thing, this baby ran our testbed to the ground. Sadly, GPU-accelerated plug-in does not recognize more than one GPU, so our 3-SLI setup was not exactly loaded. Elemental Technologies recently stated that they’re working on a multi-GPU support, meaning that the three GTX280 cards will eat up any transcoding in the future.

When it comes to games, we have nothing but words of praise for this system. Age of Conan was playable at 1920×1200 with settings maxed out. That includes visibility of 3500 meters and grass all the way to 1000m. You could leave VSync on and enjoy in 60fps with no major glitches with 8xAA and 16xAF. Sadly, at 16xAA, we saw framerates dipping down to mid-40s. 45 fps is still enough for a smooth gameplay in MMOs, but our target was average of 60fps and above. And this is the first time we saw a 2GB bottleneck.

Company of Heroes was quite enjoyable. In 1920×1200, you can turn AA all the way to 16xQ, leave Anisotropic Filtering at 16x and still have framerate at 130fps. Of course, we’re talking about DirectX 10 mode. Just for kicks, we loaded the game at 2560×1600, and at 16xQ/16x settings, the game barely dipped below 100fps (97.5 fps).

On the other hand, Crysis showed to us that even 3-Way SLI is not enough to get 4xAA working flawlessly at 1920×1200 with all the details on Very High. With details on High, you can freely push the game to 4xAA/16xAF and even turn the VSync on – you will have stable 60fps. Please note that our Crysis testing is actually a timedemo of last level of the game, thus it is pushing graphics cards to their maximum. Here, we have to complain about the fact that system was delivered with only 2GB of memory. We’re certain that 4GB would help this game a whole great deal, since system has more video than system memory (3GB vs. 2GB).

Race Driver: GRID gave out high framerates all the way to 1920×1200 with 16xQCSAA/16xAF, when framerates finally dipped under 60fps. If you play the game with regular 16xAA/16xAF – you will enjoy 71.11 fps at 1920×1200. At 2560×1600, we could enjoy average of 51 fps at 16xAA/16xAF.

We also tried titles such as Call of Duty 4: Warfare, Mass Effect and Unreal Tournament III. In every case, Annihilation ran the games in 1920×1200 with highest settings at comfortable VSync 60Hz and 120Hz levels.

Do the scores justify price difference... it all depends on how you look. One thing is certain - they both don't have enough RAM.

When it comes to GPGPU performance, I decided to check Folding@Home. Recently, Stanford changed the packets for Nvidia cards, and they’re now folding much more complex packets. These 511-point packets decreased the performance by roughly two packets a day, so you’re looking at around 7000 PPD from a single card. In the case of Annihilation F.A.T.E., we measured 23.350 PPD using old 480-point packets and 21.100 PPD on the new ones. This is highest number of points I’ve seen in a shipping system – and it is a very impressive number by any account. With this system, you can simulate two miliseconds in a life of a protein (per day). Hopefully, with next generation hardware, every card should be able to do a mili-second… or just order Cryosphere system and achieve that today (with three vapor-chamber chilled GTX280 cards).

Stability
For our temperature torture, we put the system in a chamber with air heated to 44C (110 degrees Fahrenheit). Then, we started anti-virus running in the background, loaded GRID and played for the next 60 minutes. System did not crash, even though the temperature of GPU2 and GPU2 went to 94 and 98 deg Celsius (201-208 degrees F). With we concluded that the setup will survive such a torture without crashing.

During our three weeks of evaluation, we saw no crashes.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, we have to say that we were extremely satisfied with the system. It passed all the tests with flying colors, and seeing that gaming with 16xAA / 16xAF at 1920×1200 became a reality for Call of Duty and GRID. Seeing playable settings in Age of Conan only makes us feel warm at heart.

However, at a price tag of around $6500, seeing a system with 2GB of memory and 32-bit operating system leaves a lot of question marks above our heads. Biohazard recently updated the system specs with Core i7, but the 2GB memory is just slowing the 3-SLI setup. 

In closing words, Annihilation F.A.T.E. is a great system, but if you decide to go for it, make sure you pick 8GB of memory and 64-bit operating system. One thing is certain: if the money was no object to us, this baby would end up on my desk, that’s for sure.

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This specification covers all GPGPU-capable hardware, regardless of that hardware being in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks or handhelds – if your GPU is able to compute, the manufacturer only needs to adopt OpenCL support in the driver and that’s that.

That should not be an issue, with AMD/ATI and Nvidia strongly standing behind the standard. Computing engineers on both sides bickered about Brooke+, CAL or CUDA in the past, but both makers are firmly behind OpenCL as the way for the future.

So far, companies that developed and ratified this initial spec include 3Dlabs, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, BARCO, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umea University.

You can learn more at the official page of OpenCL API, but I wasn’t able to check the site as it was hammered down with numerous requests (this story was written at 10:05AM CET).

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Hearing news about TLB bugs happening with Core i7 had the potential to become a story of the year, just like AMD lost huge chunk of market confidence 12 months ago with TLB-bug on Barcelona/Agena (Opteron/Phenom). Could it be that Nehalem architecture has a similar flaw?

Could it be that Nehalem (right) has the same issue as Phenom (on the left), Core 2 Duo (middle)?

Well, prior to running my story, I decided to read the document in question (Intel Core i7 Processor Extreme Edition Series and Intel Core i7 Processor Specification Update November 2008) from one side, and wait until Intel responds from another. While reading the document, it looked to me that the erratas are already fixed, and that the launch platform is actually unaffected by this problem.

Shortly after 10AM PT, I received an answer from Dan Snyder, Intel’s PR manager and CPU specialist. The answer is an official statement from Intel:

This is simply a pointer to a previous document written in April 2007.  This document is an application note (advises on programming techniques) that programmers have had since April of 2007.  This item in the Nehalem spec sheet is a web pointer, under the heading “spec clarification”.  The reporter who wrote this did not contact us and we will try to clarify this with him.

The story was not over here, I also received a detailed clarification over this “issue” that turned into a non-issue:

SPEC CLARIFICATION AAJ1 was initially added due to an issue on the Intel® Core 2 Duo processor which was previously corrected with a BIOS update; this issue does not impact the Nehalem Family of CPUs.  There are errata on the Intel® Core i7 processor that relate to the TLB.  These all relate to improper translations or error reporting, and all of those that impact functionality have been fixed via BIOS updates prior to Core i7 launch.

As you can read above, mentioned errors was “featured” in initial batch of processors with Conroe architecture (Core 2 Duo). Nehalem itself shipped with bugs (all processors do, that’s why micro-code update feature was implemented in the first place), but not with stability-challenging bug that plagued Core 2 Duo and Quad-Core Phenom/Opteron of yesteryear.

If this error was not solvable other than decreasing performance by castrating L3 cache bandwidth (like Barcelona/Phenom) or a product recall (like Pentium 100), Intel would have one heck of a disaster on their hands. But due to mechanisms implemented by both Intel and AMD (already mentioned micro-code update that is nothing else but a firmware flash for the CPU), small errors and bugs are easily squashed.

A storm in a cup of water, as my grandma would say.

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