January 28th, 2008

Mac Pro is now the cheapest high-end workstation

Posted by George Ou @ 12:40 am

Categories: Apple, Build it yourself, Hardware, Intel, Processors, Workstations

Tags: Hard Drive, Video Card, Apple Macintosh, Memory, Apple Inc., CPU, Bottom Line, Mac Pro, Desktops, Workstations

Earlier this month I wrote “Build a Mac Pro equivalent workstation for 1/3 the cost” and the pricing didn’t look good for the Mac.  Now that the new Mac Pro with updated specifications and a much lower price has come out, I figured it’s time to do an updated comparison.  But during my research I came to a stunning conclusion: it’s the cheapest name brand dual-processor workstation on the market IF you know how to buy third party memory and storage.  It’s not only cheaper than the slower $3817 Dell workstation I looked at earlier this month, but I can’t even build a cheaper generic PC clone unless I switched to a lower-end CPU.  If you’re in the market for a high-performance Apple workstation, keep reading to learn how to get the best deal.

The new Mac Pro uses Intel’s latest 5400 series “Stoakley” platform with the “Seaburg” chipset.  For the CPU, it uses the 1600 MHz FSB version of the 5400 series CPUs which have clock speeds of 2.8, 3.0, and 3.2 GHz.  The graphics card has gone from AMD/ATI 1900XT to an NVIDIA 8800GT.  The memory was upgraded from Fully Buffered DDR2-667 to Fully Buffered DDR2-800.

As configured in the screen shot to the left, the stripped down system is $2999 with relatively few memory DIMMs and two minimum hard drives.  Since they’re only going to reduce the price by $500 if you only buy one processor and the fact that it would cost you $900 to replace that chip, it’s not worth buying one CPU from Apple.  The memory and hard drives were still too expensive so I left them on the default settings but you will most likely have to take them out and replace them.  The video card will also cost more to replace with a third party brand so it isn’t worth skipping either.  It’s also possible that a third party 8800GT might not work so I wouldn’t even bother trying.

Now once you buy this system, you’re going to need to buy some fully buffered DDR2-800 memory which is still very hard to find at this time.  I found some for $245 (vendor claims Mac Pro tested) which is way more money expensive than other generic memory but it’s way better than the $1500 Apple is asking for.  A few other people in talkback posted this link for two 2GB DDR2-800 at $220.  The price will probably drop $40 in coming months as these get more common but I think the price isn’t too bad at this point.  You will need to buy two of these for $440 if you want the system to run with the max four-channel memory but be sure to populate each DIMM in a separate channel to get the maximum benefit.  Note that CPU-Z for Windows will let you confirm how many channels you’re running though I’m not sure about a Mac equivalent applet but I’ll update if I find out.

The hard drives can be replaced with any 3.5″ SATA hard drive and you can usually buy two 500 GB Seagate hard drives for $240 and put them in a RAID-1 configuration.  This does mean that you’ll either need to leave your OS on the single 320 GB hard drive or you’ll need to manually move the OS to the 500 GB RAID-1 volume which makes the OS boot faster.

Now you have a 2.8 GHz Mac Pro for less than $3800 with all the trimmings which makes it the cheapest high-end workstation on the market.  It’s still possible to get a great PC 2.33 GHz dual-processor workstation for less than $2400 but the high-end belongs to Apple.  However, it’s not really practical to build a lower-end Mac Pro since I’ve got it stripped down to the bone so Apple still has plenty of profit to make even if you don’t buy their outrageous components.  The bottom line is that Mac users can get a much better deal on Mac Pros than at the beginning of this month.

Update 10:30AM
If you’re installing Boot Camp and Windows, do the installation after you set up the RAID-1 volume.  You will need these drivers from Intel’s website for Windows XP, Vista, and Server.  If you don’t want to spend $3700 and you can live with a perfectly good dual-processor 2.33 GHz workstation for $2370 which has the same 5400 series chipset.  Apple seems to have figured out the perfect strategy to keep a high margin yet keep you from building a cheaper clone with exact specifications.

January 18th, 2008

Don't believe the low bit-rate 'HD' lie

Posted by George Ou @ 3:57 am

Categories: Apple, Consumer electronics, Infrastructure, Microsoft, Networking, News

Tags: Video, Blu-ray, Mbps, HD, Corporate Communications, Hd Dvd, Marketing, Personal Technology, DVD, Home Entertainment

Update 6:00PM - Here’s what fake HD video looks like.

Last week at CES, Comcast announced their “HD” video on demand download service over its future DOCSIS 3.0 that allows 4 minute downloads of entire HD movies.  Attendees at MacWorld this week were told that disk-based HD formats like HD DVD and Blu-ray are essentially obsolete because you can simply download “HD” movies from your Apple TV 2.0 box on demand.  Microsoft started offering HD downloads for the XBOX360 starting in late 2006.  You can even watch “HD” videos from ABC right from the web.  There are even YouTube competitors that offer user uploaded “HD” content.  There’s just one minor little problem, it’s not HD.

As I’ve tried to educate my readers last year with my blog “Why HD movie downloads are a big lie“, these so-called HD movies use very low bit-rates compared to even standard definition DVDs let alone something like HD DVD or Blu-ray DVD.  Raw uncompressed 1080p video at 60 frames per second is about 3000 mbps so even HD DVD’s 28 mbps needs to be compressed about 107 to 1 with the H.264 or VC-1 codec.  By all reasonable standards this needs to be the minimum bit-rate for acceptable loss in quality on 1080p video.

Updated 4:30PM - Standard definition 480i DVD movies are typically 5 to 8 mbps (megabits per second) MPEG-2 whereas these so-called HD wannabes weigh in at a pathetic 1.5 to 4 mbps of 720p H.264.  Apple’s new HD service is capable of 4 mbps which simply isn’t enough to be considered HD.  XBOX360 downloads are 6.8 mbps 720p VC-1 so they’re semi-decent borderline HD.  Marketing will push the nicer sounding “720p” aspect of the video but they don’t tell you it’s way too compressed to offer good video fidelity.  Blu-ray has a maximum bit-rate of 40 mbps while HD DVD offers a maximum of 28 mbps.  Over the air broadcasts can be up to 24 19.38 mbps.

Modern video compression codecs like H.264 or VC-1 can hide these compression artifact problems much better than MPEG-2 video compression but there’s only so much it can do.  At best you might get away 50% more compression over older compression technology but 1.5 to 4 mbps H.264 will not be better than 8 mbps MPEG-2 under most video complexity requirements.  The only time 4 mbps 720p will look better than 8 mbps 480i is when the video on the screen is almost entirely stationary or it’s a low-complexity video such as animation movies.  Under most normal circumstances, the low bit-rate 720p so-called “HD” video will be inferior though many companies are betting that consumers won’t know any better. 

So the bottom line is that so-called “HD” video from Microsoft’s XBOX360 HD download service and Apple’s new Apple TV service or any other web download service is simply not HD by any respectable definition.  These companies cannot and should not use the “HD” name with video that is lower fidelity than standard DVD.  As for Comcast, there’s not much detail on it but I highly doubt it’s more than 4 to 8 mbps even on DOCSIS 3.0 because its 160 mbps total capacity is divided between 50 to 400 customers.  Only FiOS technology with its massive 620 mbps per 32-user capacity and possibly U-Verse (but slower than real time) has sufficient last-mile capacity to deliver true HD movie downloads at the quality of HD DVD and Blu-ray technology.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these services from Apple, or other services that offer low bit-rate 720p video downloads, but consumers must be aware of the fact that they’re slightly worse than a 1080p up-converted DVD.  Microsoft’s XBOX service is border-line HD that is slightly better than DVD but nowhere near 1080i over-the-air HD broadcast quality.

January 16th, 2008

Why DIDN'T the MacBook Air get the new 45nm CPU?

Posted by George Ou @ 3:36 am

Categories: Apple, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors

Tags: Apple MacBook, Apple Inc., CPU, Intel Corp., Notebooks, Processors, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Semiconductors, Components

Intel launched their brand new 45nm mobile dual-core processors last week with 60% smaller packaging size.  Yesterday Apple announced their Über-sleek MacBook Air ultra-slim notebook which also uses a specially designed Intel dual-core CPU with 60% smaller packaging.  Naturally I assumed the new MacBook Air uses Intel’s latest Penryn-class 45nm technology with low leakage hafnium metal gates and I called Intel for confirmation of this “special” processor.  I thought to myself: What’s so special about it if every PC vendor can use the same shrunken CPU?

To my surprise, Apple didn’t use the newest 45nm mobile processor with 107mm^2 die size; they really did use a “one-off” “Merom” 65nm 143mm^2 die designed-just-for-Apple CPU from Intel.  Intel specially designed a larger 65nm core with a specially designed package that’s 60% smaller.  This means instead of using the latest 45nm processors that are faster and more energy efficient and are already that small without any special packaging, Apple got a “special” 65nm chip.

This begs the question why Intel doesn’t make its new 45nm packaging even smaller than the current 60% reduction in size if it can reduce its packaging by 60% on 65nm technology.  It also begs the question why Apple had to go to the trouble of a tailor made 65nm part when the 45nm part launched 3 weeks before the launch of the MacBook Air.  Several other PC makers were already showing off their 45nm based notebooks last week at CES.

I spoke to a few people about this and asked for some theories and we came to a somewhat reasonable guess so I’ll offer these up as some possible reasons.  For a product as specialized at exotic as the MacBook Air, the design would have needed to start some time ago.  When that design started, it may not have been a certainty if 45nm Mobile Penryn would be ready to ship with MacWorld and there may not have been working samples to start the design process.

Despite the fact that other PC makers have 45nm based notebooks ready to launch, none of them are this sleek.  So ultimately it doesn’t really change the appeal of the MacBook Air and it will be the thinnest notebook on the market.  In 20/20 hindsight perhaps it would have been better if the MacBook Air had shipped with a 45nm CPU and maybe we’ll see a quick refresh from Apple to the new processor since the size is obviously not a problem.  It’s just that “special” in this case isn’t a flattering thing when referencing the older CPU used in the MacBook Air, but the MacBook Air is still every bit special in a flattering way.

January 3rd, 2008

Build a Mac Pro equivalent workstation for 1/3 the cost

Posted by George Ou @ 5:04 am

Categories: Apple, Build it yourself, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, Processors, Workstations

Tags: Processor, Apple Macintosh, Workstation, Wisdom, Dual Processor, Intel Corp., Mac Pro, Serial ATA, Chipsets, Workstations

Conventional wisdom tells us that a digital content creation and CAD professional had to fork out $6000 to $10,000 dollars for a high-end 8-core dual-processor workstation, but this is Real World IT where I say screw conventional wisdom.  I’ve put on my mad scientist hat again and brewed something up for $2311 with equal or better performance than a $6803 Mac Pro (as configured in Apple screen cap to the left).  Now granted you can’t run Mac OS X so that might be a show stopper for a Mac user, but there are plenty of Windows users who want something that will run just as fast.  If that’s you, then keep reading!

The Mac Pro is essentially based on an Intel 5000 series dual-processor chipset.  At present time, it still only comes with 65nm “Clovertown” processors maxing out at 3.0 GHz and not the recently launched 45nm “Harpertown” processors and newer motherboard that use the Intel 5100 series “San Clemente” chipset.  As I showed in my quad-core CPU comparisons, the newer 45nm processors costing $300 can rival $1200 65nm processors.  Furthermore, the 5100 series chipset supports cheaper and more energy efficient registered DDR2 memory instead of the power-hungry FBDIMMs (fully buffered DDR2 memory) used in the Intel 5000 series motherboards.

My home-brew 8-core solution costs about a third of the price with performance equal or better than the fastest Mac Pro you can buy on the market.  But when it comes to SSE4 optimized video encoding which nearly every video encoding software package is going to support, you can expect a massive increase in performance over the 65nm “Clovertown” quad-core processors.  Other improvements in my solution is a 5-drive hot-swap SATA back plane which allows you to easily swap out up to five hard drives.  The video card I used is an NVIDIA Quadro NVS290 designed specifically for the workstation market and it is also used in Sun’s single processor workstation.

Apple on the other hand uses the out-dated ATI Radeon X1900 XT which is actually a desktop gaming graphics card and not a workstation card.  Below is the exact configuration and pricing for this system.  I also threw in a cordless Logitech EX110 keyboard and optical mouse.  Since Apple includes free shipping, my quoted prices (as usual) includes the cost of shipping.  I also rounded to the nearest dollar and I do not include the effect of rebates in the quoted prices though I mention one rebate in the part description.  I got these prices by roaming the search engines to find reasonable prices mostly from places that I have personally shopped before.

Updated 5:45PM - All Windows drivers for the Intel 5100 series “San Clemente” chipset have now been confirmed and can be downloaded here so both systems are confirmed to operate any x86 or x64 version of Windows XP, 2003, Vista.  I have also verified XP and Vista x86/x64 driver support for all the other components.

Note that the use of FBDIMMs on the 5400 series platform adds about 7 watts of power consumption per DIMM, but the 5400 series ”Seaburg” chipset has the added benefit of a 50% larger snoop filter and official DDR2-800 support so it’s a higher end chipset.  While the 5400 series chipset supports up to 16 FBDIMMs, the 5400 motherboard listed below has 4 DIMM slots whereas the 5100 series motherboard listed below has 8 DIMM slots.  You can get higher memory capacity 5400 series motherboards but they cost a little more so it a toss up which chipset you should use.  You can get a Supermicro X7DWN+B for example which has dual gigabit LAN and 16 FBDIMM slots for an extra $150 over the price of the Tyan S5392ANR.

High-end 8-core 2P Workstation (5400 series “Seaburg” version):

High-end 8-core 2P workstation (5100 series “San Clemente” version):

If you don’t know how to build a PC or you’re rusty, here’s a step-by-step guide.  You can also have a local PC shop assemble the whole thing for around $100 or so and some will even install the OS for a little more money.  Other shops may just sell you all the parts for a minimal markup with no charge on assembly if you take this parts list to them.

As for which LCD display to buy, make sure you buy something that isn’t a typical TN type panel with lousy viewing angles and lousy 18-bit color.  Dell’s $700 24″ 2407WFP-HC is highly rated and it uses a high color PVA type panel with true wide viewing angles that don’t drastically drop in contrast ratio when viewed off center.  The inexpensive $300 24″ Soyo (available at Office Max) is actually an MVA type panel with true 24-bit color and wide viewing angles.  If you don’t need a super high color gamut, picking up two of the 24″ Soyos for dual-screens might be a great solution.  For comparison purposes, the Apple iMac 20″ uses the lousy TN type display while the 24″ iMac uses the superior PVA, MVA, or IPS TFT technology.

Update 5:45AM - What about Dell workstations?

Larry Dignan asked me what about Dell solutions for the workstation market.  That’s a great question and I just looked it up on Dell’s website.  I configured a Dell Precision T7400 with identical CPU and GPU configuration but with the older Intel 5000 series chipset [Update 6:40AM - reader s_souche pointed out that the T7400 is actually based on the newer 5400 series "Seaburg" chipset which also uses FBDIMMs and has the highest memory capacity].  One problem was that it only allowed me to configure half the memory using 4 1GB FBDIMMs.  This makes me wonder if there are only four DIMM slots in the entire system which would be rather unusual for a 5400 series motherboard.

It was also crazy that they charge an extra $350 to upgrade to a 500 GB SATA hard drive when those drives are barely worth $100 to begin with.  The total price for the RAM deficient system was $3817.  You will have to go out and buy your own 2GB FBDIMMs if you want to get up to 8GB RAM.  That’s not as bad as the Mac Pro configuration above but it’s still far worse than my home brew.

October 10th, 2007

The all-in-one dual-core VESA Stand PC mod

Posted by George Ou @ 4:12 am

Categories: Apple, Build it yourself, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Linux, Microsoft

Tags: Dual-core, PC, LCD, Monitors & Displays, Hardware, Components, George Ou

Can you spot the PC in this picture? It’s behind the 22″ LCD display and it’s actually holding up the LCD.  [See my image gallery for more and larger photos.] There’s plenty of room under the display for all your important stuff. Now you can actually put your CENTER speakers in the center rather than off to the side because the LCD monitor stand is taking up center. The Polycom Communicator also found a home underneath the LCD taking center stage. There’s also a convenient power strip right under the display so you don’t need to crawl under the desk. There’s even flat space above the LCD for things like speakers and video cameras.

Last week I had The poor man’s all-in-one PC for $380 and The 22″ dual-core all-in-one game PC for $765. Last weekend I bit the bullet and labored 2 full days to build the all-in-one dual-core VESA Stand PC. This piece of oak board in the photo was sacrificed in the making of this PC because your’s truly is an absolute noob when it comes to wood working and thought he could do this project with a jig saw. I ended up buying a table saw and spent 6 hours assembling it (3 hours wasted because I got a defective unit). I had to exchange the table saw because the lifting/lowering mechanism was jammed. Once the saw was up and running, it didn’t take long to cut the wood.

After 6 hours of hard labor (most of the time figuring out what to do), I cranked out this box. I learned the hard way that this type of real birch wood is hard to work with and I used the wrong saw blade for it.

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I should have gotten a nail gun but those things aren’t cheap. I also didn’t counter sink the screws which made them stick out a little. I didn’t have enough clamps and I didn’t use them properly. Oh well, I did the best I could since I’ve never really done any wood work and next time I know better.

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This was a $20 VESA LCD mount that supports tilting and quick release. I had to get something that didn’t make the LCD stick out too much and tip the entire box over.

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Just finished mounting the motherboard and power supply. I screwed up the screw location for the PSU so I need to fix that. I haven’t decided where to permanently mount the hard drive yet so that’s just held there by tape and a single screw.

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The back plate was made of thin wood since it’s not load bearing. The fact that “1/4 inch” wood isn’t actually 1/4″ thick also threw me for a loop when this board was 1/16th inch shy of 1/4″.

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I used two one-foot long power cords to power both the VESA Stand PC and the LCD display. It certainly helps reduce cable clutter.

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Looking at the entire PC from the side, it really doesn’t take all that much room. While it’s certainly no work of art like the Apple iMac, I can load this thing up with inexpensive standard components with higher performance and I have more usable desk space.

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I’ve got a small Wi-Fi antenna hiding behind that LCD stub on the bottom (visible in first photo) that I’d like to get rid of but can’t thanks to Acer’s poor design.

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I probably could have made it cleaner if I used a Blue Tooth keyboard and mouse since that only requires a small USB dongle like this Microsoft Wireless Entertainment 7000. Those are a bit more expensive and they use 2.4 GHz which may degrade Wi-Fi because of signal leakage.

Well there you have it ladies and gentlemen, the all-in-one PC using industry standard components. The PC mod spirit is alive and well.

October 1st, 2007

The poor man's all-in-one PC for $380

Posted by George Ou @ 5:48 am

Categories: Apple, Build it yourself, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, Linux, Microsoft, Networking, Processors, Servers

Tags: Hard Drive, PC, Apple Inc., Power Supply, CPU, LCD, Hardboard, Monitors & Displays, Hardware, Components

UPDATE 10/3/2007 - The 22″ dual-core all-in-one game PC for $765

Apple has their iMac and Gateway has their One, but both of them are in the $1300 to $2300 range depending on the various options.  What about the person on a budget?  Can you get something for less than $400?  You can but you’re going to have to build it yourself and I really do mean BUILD.

It’s time to pull out the handy jigsaw and drill and do some wood working.  See gallery here with full screen downloadable schematics I created.

Now this might look ugly at first glance… ok it is ugly and it’s no iMac by any stretch of the imagination but this is a very crude mock-up cranked out on a Sunday afternoon.  But that’s not a problem since the actual schematic has the sides and top covered so you won’t see the internal guts and it will muffle the sound of the hard drives.  When I get around to it, I’ll do the full build and repost the finished pictures.

It’s currently one of those things that only a mother or builder could love but what’s important is that it successfully booted Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.  I managed to move the device from room to room without having to connect the monitor and PC individually.  I surfed the web and watch DVDs pulled off the network since this unit doesn’t have a DVD drive though we can certainly add a slim model to it.

Pictured below is the full schematic but you can click on it for a full screen download.

The poor man’s all-in-one PC costs $380 including a 20″ wide-screen LCD. Image shows an older 19″ LCD with a crude mock-up attached to the back.  The entire computer including the LCD takes 58W in idle and 64W at peak CPU operation.  The PC itself consumes 30W idle and 36W CPU peak so I’m sure the folks at Climate Savers will approve.  The CPU is a 1.33 GHz Celeron 215 processor based on the “Yonah” Core Microarchitecture with the equivalent performance if a Pentium 4 2.2 GHz.

The motherboard and CPU is a D201GLY which costs $70 at Fry’s Electronics.  The one annoying thing about this particular motherboard is that it doesn’t support S3 sleep so it can’t really save any power when you suspend the PC although it doesn’t use much to begin with and it would be good for something you intend to keep on 24×7 such as a file server or firewall device.  I also got a $3 on/off switch at Fry’s that connects to a 2-pin prong on the motherboard.  The power supply is an “80 Plus” 1U PSU from Sparkle Power Inc that costs $50.  You could try this 20″ Acer or 20″ Sceptre LCD display with VGA and DVI ports for $180 each and you really won’t save that much money if you tried looking for 17″ or 19″ LCDs.  What’s important is that the VESA mount is completely exposed so that we can hang our PC off the back.  Two screws 100mm apart are used to bolt the computer to the VESA mount on the back of the LCD.  You can buy a pair of 512MB DDR2-667 DIMMs for $36 and get 512 MB for two computers so the cost per unit is only $20 including shipping.  Here you can get a 250GB 3.5″ hard drive for $50.

The entire thing measures 87.7 mm thick (3.45″) so it will not stick out too far from the back of the LCD when completed.  That’s actually the perfect thickness for mounting a silent 80mm fan if we load it up with two Hard Drives and cover up all the sides.  All the cables are self contained though I had to twist the two power cords together and they both connect near the same location for the PC and the LCD.  The VGA or DVI cord can be tidied up for a very short run from the PC to the back of the LCD and the same for the USB.  The sides are half-inch thick MDF wood.  The top and bottom are quarter-inch thick hardboard.  The cost for the wood material is almost negligible since it was around $7 for a 2×4 foot panel and I picked it up at Home Depot though most hardware stores will have it.

Hardboard is relatively light and strong and you can drill some smaller holes and screw the four motherboard mounts directly in to it.  Just be careful you don’t screw it in so tight that you strip the wood and fiber and it’s probably a good idea to use wood glue to hold it in permanently.  The same goes for the two power supply holes used to hold down the PSU.  The two holes for the VESA mount were larger and loose because the screws go in to the back of the LCD and the same goes for the four hard drive holes.

This design leaves enough room for two hard drives mounted on the top and bottom but you’re going to have to wait for the D201GLY2 which has two SATA ports in addition to a PATA IDE port before you can actually use two hard drives.  There is also enough room for a half-height PCI card so we can plug in a TV tuner card or Gigabit network adapter if we want to use this thing as a high-speed NAS (Network Attached Storage).  The rest is up to your imagination.

August 30th, 2007

Does a disagreement on Mac fonts warrant libel and a death note?

Posted by George Ou @ 2:57 am

Categories: Apple, Microsoft, Vista

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Blog, Microsoft Windows Vista, Blogging, Font, George Ou

Last week, some blogger in San Francisco has written a hit piece on me complete with a hacked up photo of my face calling me a Microsoft shill despite the fact that I’ve recently praised Apple’s iMac form factor, praised the iPhone, and even called Microsoft Office a zero-day liability.  He accused me of rigging a test in my Vista versus Mac font comparison blog which is easily disputed with hard evidence.  Now I’ve got some crazy zealot who read that hit piece emailing me to go die.

Look folks, OS X does a lot of things better than Windows (such as Mac Expose versus the useless Flip3D feature in Vista).  But most people do care about readability first and foremost especially in their web browser and they believe that Vista font rendering - while it takes liberties with Typography - is more pragmatic and proven to be more readable.  It’s just silly to represent someone as a shill for simply saying that Vista ClearType is more readable and is a better solution for web browsing.

Since I didn’t want to bother giving this person any link love if I called him out in public, I simply sent him an email pointing out the issues point out that:

1. I did not “stack the deck” against the Mac font rendering by disabling sub-pixel rendering. I have at least 2 Macs in the SF CNET office building that have 24″ Dell LCDs running an obvious LCD resolution of 1920×1200 16:10 aspect ratio (connected by DVI).  Mac OS X default automatic mode had sub-pixel rendering off which is optimized for CRT.  This is despite the fact that I can’t think of any CRTs that use this aspect ratio or resolution. So the default automatic setting failed, it was not an attempt to cripple and sabotage the Mac.
2. As soon as people complained about this, a second set of samples that were LCD-optimized were added to the blog within 10 hours of the original posting to be as fair as possible. The results were still not as readable as the Vista fonts and most experts agree this was because of Apple’s design decision to be faithful to the purity of typography rather than deal with the limitations of the pixel grid. I never represented this as incompetence or ignorance on Apple’s part; just that it was a design decision geared for Desktop Publishing and not web browsing. This design decision in my opinion was the wrong decision since we’re talking about a web browser where readability should take priority over the purity of typography.

The blogger simply refused to acknowledge the errors and claimed that he was merely pointing out that I was “a shill”.  After a few more exchanges, I didn’t bother trying to reason with him and just forgot about it.  The problem now is that so-called researchers like Peter Gutmann with the help of Chris Keall (PCWorld New Zealand) started linking to the smear piece to attack me on a personal level which left me no choice but to write this blog.

Blogging is a new and wonderful communication medium on the Internet and I would hope that people won’t take it to the gutter level or wish death upon people.  It’s only an Operating System and some people really need to get a grip.  I’m here to stimulate debate and people can disagree with me and criticize me in their blogs or in my talkback without censorship so long as it’s not vulgar or excessively personal in nature.  But at the end of the day we need to remember that we’re there are just human beings and there are more important things in life and let’s ease up on personal stuff.

My colleague Steven Warren (contributor for TechRepublic) use to set my priorities straight by saying: What are you doing worried about what someone says on the net when you should go and hug your kids!  Well Steven, you’re absolutely right and I always remember what you say at times like these.  At the end of the day I don’t care what OS or web browser or font you use and I have plenty of friends who use Macs and Linux machines (I use Linux myself).  So at least for this blog posting, I’m not going to mix it up with anyone in the talkback no matter what anyone says to me.

August 20th, 2007

Why watermarking is a bigger devil than DRM

Posted by George Ou @ 2:20 am

Categories: Apple, Consumer electronics, Microsoft, News, Security

Tags: Digital-rights Management, Music, George Ou

There’s been much news lately about the record industry getting ready to give up on DRM. DRM (Digital Rights Management or some call it Digital Restrictions Management) is a form of copy protection that protects the rights of content owners and restricts the usage of the customers it it’s probably one of the most hated technologies in the consumer world. That hatred doesn’t necessarily stem from a fundamental opposition to copy protection; it’s because DRM impinges on the consumer’s right to fair use. So when news came that record companies are looking at dumping DRM, consumers cheered. All it takes is a single stolen credit card buying a bunch of songs and uploading it to break the entire schemeBut we might be celebrating a bit early because the record companies are sneaking in a bigger devil in the form of watermarking. This was confirmed by Wired Listening Post.

You can say a lot of bad things about DRM, but one thing it didn’t do was ruin the quality of the content. Watermarking advocates will tell you that their technology is “inaudible” or “invisible” to the human ears or eyes, but that’s fundamentally impossible if the watermarking is to be effective. If the watermarking was truly inaudible, then it can be removed through analog filtering without affecting the quality of the image or audio. Since that would make the watermarking useless, it usually is visible or audible which means you’ve irreparably changed the content. It’s bad enough that downloaded music and video are worse than audio CDs or DVDs (even so-called HD video downloads are worse than DVD quality) because the bitrates are too low, but mucking it up with watermarking is just too much to bear.

One other potential usage of watermarking is user tracking. A. L. Friedman (writer for Contentinople) says that there will be no user tracking. That may very well be the case initially since music would have to be individually encoded for each customer, but it doesn’t rule it out in the future. Friedman noted that some of these fears are rooted in Apple’s embedding of the buyer’s name in the DRM-free music from EMI. The justification for these watermarks which are unique to each track but not unique to the user is to track which songs are being pirated on peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent and how often they’re traded. But if that’s all they want to do, then it would be just as easy to leave the watermark out of the track and simply track the hash of the file.

Quick definition of hash: A hash is a number created by a hash function from a data file. This number is effectively a digest of the original file that can be used as a digital fingerprint for identification or integrity checking purposes. Hashes generated from quality hash functions like SHA-256 are for all intents and purposes unique. Hashes aren’t truly unique, but they’re unique enough that the odds of finding a different file that generates the same hash are astronomical. A good hash function is resilient enough that even the best crypto researchers in the world can’t find two files with the same hash.

While I don’t particularly care for DRM, I’ll put up with it like most consumers. I’m not even so sure I have a problem with my name being embedded in the music file since it doesn’t restrict me from doing legal things with my content so long as the record companies have to prove I uploaded it illegally and that it wasn’t merely a case of theft. But I definitely have a problem with my music being polluted with watermarks no matter how supposedly inaudible they are.

[Update 3:05PM - There's some debate as to whether watermarking causes perceptible noise or not and I think that misses the whole point. If it's not perceptible, then it can be stripped out and watermarking is pointless. If it is perceptible then I don't want it. But the most compelling argument against this entire watermarking scheme is that all it takes is a single stolen credit card buying a bunch of songs and uploading it to break the entire scheme. The whole scheme is pointless.]

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August 17th, 2007

Vista puts Mac OS X font rendering to shame

Posted by George Ou @ 12:26 am

Categories: Apple, Desktop, Microsoft, Vista

Tags: Apple Mac OS, Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Font, George Ou

[Update 8/24/2007 - Some people are still going around accusing me of stacking the deck and fabricating evidence against Apple by disabling sub-pixel rendering on Mac OS X.  It turns out that there is a problem with the default "automatic" font setting which is suppose to detect if the display is an LCD or CRT.  The original Mac OS X sample I got from my colleague at the CNET/ZDNet office in San Francisco was a PowerPC Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 with a nice 24" Dell LCD attached to it.  The automatic setting on the Mac failed to detect the display was an LCD and it turned off sub-pixel rendering.

At first I thought this was because my colleague was running in portrait mode and the Mac was smart enough to turn off sub-pixel rendering for portrait mode but that was not the case.  A Mac right next to it was running the same kind of Mac with a 24" Dell LCD in normal landscape mode and its automatic setting failed to detect the presence of an LCD display and automatically disabled sub-pixel rendering.  That is a problem with the Mac default automatic setting and not an attempt to sabotage the Mac.  But even with the improved setting on the Mac, it still produced a more blurry font.

As I explained below, this is because Apple chose a different design philosophy which prioritizes the purity of typography with the size and spacing of the fonts more than it acknowledges the limitations of the pixel grid and all modern displays.  While that may be the right design decision if we're talking about pre-press and typesetting applications or for a future display technology capable of 200+ DPI resolution, it's the wrong approach for desktop and browser font rendering.  Jeff Atwood explained this best when he says: "Apple is asking us to sacrifice the present at the altar of the future"]

One of the first things I noticed when I switched to Windows Vista earlier this year was how much of an improvement in font readability Vista has over earlier versions of Windows for the screen fonts.  Windows XP had an older version of “Clear type” that I was never satisfied with so I always ended up using zero font smoothing technology.  The fonts in XP were either too thin or too thick and it just didn’t work right with Clear type.

But I got an even bigger shock when I looked at a Mac this week.  I was at a colleague’s desk and noticed how messed up his fonts were on his shiny Mac so I asked him to capture a screen shot of his Safari web browser pointed at the bnet.com website and send the image to me.  Once I got the image I went ahead and captured a portion of the screen with black text on white background and created a 300% zoom of the image.  Then I created a comparison chart of the fonts side by side along with the magnified version below.

Comparison of font rendering technology

Mac OS X 10.4	Windows Vista	Windows XP

Clearly, Mac OS X was the blurriest and faintest of the three major operating systems and it’s the least readable by far and even pales in comparison to Windows XP.  Windows Vista using sub-pixel rendering (which works best in landscape display mode) clearly has the best font rendering technology.

Update 1:30AM - Reader “tombalablomba” submitted a screenshot of Ubuntu and Firefox in the talkback section so I’ve added the following comparison for it.  Thanks!

Mac OS X 10.4	Windows Vista	Ubuntu/Firefox

I would probably rate Ubuntu and Firefox same or slightly better than Windows XP but below Vista.  The font looks clean but it’s too thin and the “e” doesn’t look as true to the typography like Vista and Mac.  Mac OS X 10.4 is true to the typography but it’s way too faded out and it doesn’t use sub-pixel rendering sticking only with grey scale edges.  Vista seems to strike the right balance of typography and readability.  [Update 2:40AM - the sample submitted for Ubuntu may have been tweaked to be thinner to the user's liking and it's using a different font than Vista or Mac OS X.

While font technology isn't what's typically considered a killer application or killer feature, it is by far one of the most important usability features in an operating system.  We simply cannot place a price tag on eye strain and someone who works all day long in front of a computer like me greatly appreciates the font rendering technology in Windows Vista.  Mac OS X might have the fancier animated UI but I can't imagine myself looking at those fonts.  Even if you gave me a brand new MacBook Pro - which I happen to think is a very nice though expensive notebook - the first thing I'll do is install Boot camp and Windows Vista.

[Update 2:40AM - Some insist that this is simply a difference in design philosophy from Apple where typography and being faithful to font size is king.  They argue that is Apple is geared for its desktop publishing roots.  I can’t accept that for the following reasons.

• What percentage of Mac users sit around all day doing nothing but pre-press work?
• Even if a Mac user works in the desktop publishing industry, do they need that while surfing the web or looking at desktop screen fonts? What In the world do you need to pre-press a web browser for?
• I can understand prioritizing the font size and typography for something like PageMaker or QuarkXPress, but do it there and leave the desktop and browser fonts alone.
• There’s nothing to prevent a Windows computer application from doing its own pre-press rendering.

I don't care if someone is using a 30" LCD with 2560x1600 resolution; you're not going to remove the need for sub-pixel rendering and sub-pixel shifting to account for the pixel grid. You must respect the grid if you want to respect the user's eyes.

Managing a desktop operating system and web browsing is NOT a Desktop Publishing pre-press application and therefore trying to prioritize the font typography and size above ALL else is simply the wrong solution for the problem at hand.]

Update 12:20PM - Reader “saddino” submitted a screenshot of Mac OS X with sub pixel rendering turned on.

Saddino submitted	Windows Vista	Mac OS X 10.4

It looks like it’s been tweaked quite a bit and the word “Insight” has been made too thick to the point that the dot in the “i” is only one pixel away from the letter “n” in bnet.  While it’s certainly better looking than the screenshot I got from my colleague who uses a 24″ LCD with default Mac settings, it’s still not as clear as the Vista rendering.  But why should a Mac user have to turn this on when Apple only sells LCDs?  Soundn’t things “just work” on a Mac?

The improved settings still doesn’t look good because it’s too thick and the word “Insight” looks very exaggerated.  Look at the horizontal line in the letter “e” and it clearly looks blurry.  Clearly the Mac font rendering technology has been designed for a display technology that does not yet exist.  So even with sub-pixel rendering, the Mac fonts still don’t cut it.

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August 8th, 2007

How can iPhone render pictures better than desktop computers?

Posted by George Ou @ 11:37 pm

Categories: Apple, Browsers, Desktop, Development, Microsoft

Tags: Apple iPhone, Desktop, Web Browser, Image, Computer, Desktop Computer, George Ou

One of the things I noticed about the iPhone is how snappy the GUI (Graphical User Interface) is even by the standards of a desktop PC and how clean the Web page images are rendered while being resized in real time.  Take a look at the image scaling results below.  The image on the left was scaled using a good quality Bicubic resizing and the image on the right was using a sloppy “nearest neighbor” rescaling algorithm.

The shocking thing is that all the desktop Web Browser from Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and the Palm Foleo uses the sloppy nearest neighbor resizing algorithm on the right while the iPhone is probably using something like the algorithm on the left.

[UPDATE 8/10/2007 - The folks at Opera have taken me to task and they've posted their own screen captures of Opera rendering.  OK, I'll admit Opera's better than the nearest neighbor algorithm used in IE7, but it's still not as good as the Bicubic zoom.  Some IE7 users have sworn to me that they don't have this poor image quality scaling issue in IE7 but I've got multiple computers I can test on Vista and Windows XP and I get the same lousy scaling quality every time.]

Note: Safari for Windows and Mozilla Firefox do not support full page zoom.  Firefox 3 when it comes out will finally support full-page zoom.

Furthermore, the iPhone seems to rescale the images through the intermediate sizes at a fairly smooth frame rate so that it looks like the picture is being stretched in real time.  Yet the full blown desktop computer (PC, Mac, or Foleo) with a lot more processing power at its disposal can’t even do a simple one-time resize without using the ugly nearest neighbor algorithm.  I would say that this is rather pathetic that a tiny iPhone is beating the Computer on image rendering quality while animating the resize and it’s time the Microsofts and Mozilla take note.  Apple current version of Safari 3.03 for Windows doesn’t even support any kind of full page zoom which is kind of ironic.

I say it’s about time the Desktop Browser adds an automatic fit-to-width mode regardless of the size of your Browser Window.  Once that’s done, web developers should use at least double the dimensions for image resolution so that they look clean and sharp when scaled from 20 to 200%.  Adding Browser support for JPEG 2000 and wide-gamut HD Photo support should also be a priority.

At this point in time Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has a pretty good zoom interface on the bottom of the Browser that allows you to snap back to 100% mode fairly easily.  But we need to move beyond just simple discrete sizes and give the standard Web Browser an analog zoom that animates the resizing while rendering a good quality image and the iPhone has proven this is even possible in a hand-held form factor.  The New York Times Reader shows that this can be done on the Desktop computer and there’s no reason not to do it for the standard Web Browser.

August 8th, 2007

Apple leads PC design again with iMac

Posted by George Ou @ 5:50 pm

Categories: Apple, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, Mobile/Wireless

Tags: PC, Industry, Apple iMac, Apple Inc., Computer, George Ou

Nearly a decade after the original rainbow colored iMac that looked like the back-end of a VW Bug; Apple is changing the face of the desktop computing world with the new 20- and 24-inch iMac.  The Apple Advertisement above seems to tell the whole story and it’s a shocking comparison of why the traditional Desktop box is doomed to the niche Enthusiast and Workstation market.  If Mr. Dell and the rest of the PC industry aren’t scrambling around for ideas, they should be.

I’m not completely endorsing the iMac because of its price of $1200 to $2300 when a much more powerful computer with a 22″ monitor could be built at $800 but I cannot deny the form factor appeal of the iMac.  My only criticism of the new iMac form factor is that the keyboard and mouse weren’t wireless and rechargeable.  It also would have been REALLY cool if it used a standard Cat-5 Ethernet cable to provide up to 60 watts of 802.3at power and gigabit Ethernet using an in-line power injector though doing 802.3at PoE might be really pushing it a bit since a 20″ display already uses around 40 watts.

While I personally love to build powerful computers on a reasonable budget, I never understood why the mainstream PC market hasn’t abandoned the traditional box design since components are small enough to fit inside the LCD display or at least in an add-on module in the back of the LCD.  I’ve seen integrated designs from Sony and some others but they’ve all been very expensive and the PC industry as a whole has stuck with the ATX, MicroATX, or BTX box.

There is no reason that the PC industry as a whole can’t come up with a standardized modular MicroBTX PC box with a small PCI-Express slot that plugs in to the back of the standard 20″ to 30″ display and automatically connect the Power, DVI, USB, and Audio ports.  That in my mind would be the best of all worlds because I’m not forced to toss my monitor if I want to upgrade the computer and I get the video card of my choice.  I generally change to a new computer every two years but I will keep using the same monitor for four to six years.

July 24th, 2007

AMD 690G versus Intel G965 PC shootout

Posted by George Ou @ 3:59 am

Categories: AMD, Apple, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, Microsoft, Processors, Servers, Storage, Vista

Tags: Game, Chipset, Result, PC, Power Consumption, Video, Motherboard, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Graphics, Watt

The integrated graphics market is one of the least glamorous platforms in desktop computing, but it is probably one of the most important since 90% of the PC market is dominated by integrated graphics.  Not only is the chipset itself a valuable prize to AMD and Intel, but the chipset also determines which CPU gets put in to the system.  This article will compare AMD’s latest 690G integrated graphics chipset to Intel’s G965 integrated graphics chipset.

The AMD 690G launched back in March 2007 and the Intel G965 is more than a year old with its successor the G35 due later this quarter.  That leads to the question of why bother with this comparison since the Intel G35 is due in a month or two.  The reason I’m doing releasing this now is because there is a lot of contention over which CPU is more energy efficient, which chipset does better at gaming, and which chipset is better at playing back video.  The results of this test will also give us a general idea of what to expect with Intel’s G35 chipset and it also gives much needed coverage for AMD’s integrated graphics chipsets since many people are still under the false impression that AMD doesn’t have a motherboard chipset.

As soon as I can get my hands on a G35 chipset or updated drivers that resolve some of the problems, I will post a follow up to this shootout.  I’ll also be able to quickly test the upcoming energy efficient AMD BE-2350 low-power processors and some of Intel’s newer Core 2 CPUs which have been refined.

Hardware and Software configuration:

Feature and price comparisons

<Next page - AMD versus Intel on Energy efficiency>

May 30th, 2007

Free Wi-Fi Driver vulnerability auditing tool released!

Posted by George Ou @ 5:51 pm

Categories: Apple, Desktop, Hardware, Infrastructure, Intel, Microsoft, Mobile/Wireless, Networking, News, Security

Tags: Security, Vulnerability, Auditing, Wi-Fi, Tool, Wireless, George Ou

In this last year, we’ve had a rash of critical wireless driver vulnerabilities affecting major vendors from Apple, Intel, Broadcom, to D-Link (Atheros).  Driver vulnerabilities even extended in to the Video driver space with the NVIDIA flaw.  Then there are the weaponized penetration tools like Metasploit 3 that can demonstrate the effectiveness of these exploits and wireless fingerprinting research from Johnny Cache that can pinpoint vulnerable driver versions.  Just about the only ones in the security world that haven’t started looking at driver exploits is the security patch management industry which is shameful.  When I spoke with the patch management companies at RSA 2007 in February and asked them about driver patches, they looked at me with a blank stare as if they didn’t even know what I was talking about.

Fortunately, someone is looking out for our interests and Joshua Wright of Aruba Networks has released this free Wi-Fi driver vulnerability assessment tool to help you figure out how vulnerable you are and where you need to patch your Wi-Fi clients.  The tool will search out your entire network using the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) API with your administrative credentials and scan every PC on your network for vulnerable Wireless LAN device drivers.  Every IT department should be downloading these tools as soon as possible and audit their PCs.  These vulnerabilities are very serious and can lead to total system compromise even if the user doesn’t have administrative credentials.

April 20th, 2007

Killing the crapware problem on PCs

Posted by George Ou @ 5:35 pm

Categories: Apple, Desktop, Hardware, Microsoft

Tags:

As many readers know, I'm not a fan of the Apple ads, but this one was spot on and not to mention funny. Poor old PC looked like a balloon and his dangling arms almost made him look like Jabba the Hutt.

One of the things that bother me the most about the PC industry is the inclusion of all that crapware (or crapplets) PC makers put into their computers. The same thing extends to the software industry as a whole. Every time you download some software, you're prompted (often the default setting) to install some kind of add-on for your Web Browser. By the time it's all said and done, we're looking at a computer that spends three to five minutes booting up and a Web Browser that's so jacked up that half the screen real estate is taken up by utilities that people never use. Of course, this isn't entirely unique to the PC industry, and I've seen Macs loaded with lots of junk during the startup process as well, but at least you don't get all that crap in a brand new Mac.

The first thing I do whenever I get a PC from any computer maker is format the entire hard drive and start with a clean slate. This isn't feasible for most people, so I'll usually resort to my second option, which is to clean out the startup with the MSCONFIG utility you can run from the start - run prompt (run prompt not needed with Vista).

The first thing I do is nuke all services that didn't come pre-installed with Windows. I simply check Hide All Microsoft Services and clear out everything else. There's no reason software needs extra services to work, with the exception of antivirus software and some VPN or network connectivity software (not entirely happy about that). A lot of IT departments like to load a bunch of junk utilities, and I've never been a big fan of that (at least when I was setting the desktop imaging standards). Some readers know I'm not a fan of desktop antivirus either, but I realize that your normal user will need it. The least obnoxious desktop antivirus solution is a free one from AVG. TrendMicro's corporate products seem to be tolerable and they're easy to manage, though I do wish they would audit their code better so that the next malformed compressed file doesn't completely root your PC.

As you can see from my configuration, VMware tends to load a bunch of junk that you don't need for the routine operation of VMware workstation. Anyone who loads Oracle will be in shock when they see how many services and startups it loads. Logitech in the past has loaded a bunch of junk into the services and startup area for its video conferencing products, but I've been using the native Vista drivers instead. A lot of printers and other consumer products like routers will load junk into the services and startup area if you follow their instructions and load their CDs. Internet service providers ask their users to load "Internet Acceleration" software, which inevitably causes serious issues with the computer.  Everyone in the entire PC industry from PC makers to accessory makers are in a race to see who can load the most crapware in people's computers.

The next thing I do is kill all the startup junk under the startup tab in MSCONFIG.

The picture above is actually just the tip of the iceberg, and there's tons of other stuff that I disabled as well. I'm pretty careful about the software I load on my computer and even I have so much stuff to disable. I've seen the typical user desktops that have so much junk loaded that their task tray lines the entire bottom of the screen and their startup list is a mile long. What I generally do is click the Disable All button in the lower-right corner of the screen and then selectively enable the things I know I want. The only thing you'll need to enable is your desktop antivirus solution. I'm a regular user of Live Messenger and Skype, so I keep those things in the startup list. Groove is something that comes with Office 2007, and I haven't figured out how to disable that yet without having it automatically come back, though it doesn't seem to be causing any problems.

[Update 4/23/2007 - Reader "Master Tech" posted this awesome tip.  Microsoft Sysinternals has this tool called Autoruns, which is even better than MSCONFIG. It shows you all the hidden stuff that crapware/adware/malware might inject that may be hidden. Autoruns can hide all the digitally signed entries so that it will show you ALL of the non-Microsoft entries that gum up your PC.]

Between clearing out the non-Microsoft services and almost the entire startup folder, Windows XP should boot in 25 seconds (not including the system post time). A crapware-free install of Windows Vista should take about 35 seconds (excluding the system post times) to boot up, while shutdown times should never exceed a few seconds on XP or Vista.

If you've had your computer for a while and you've installed more junk over the years that clogged up the registry and hard drive, a more extreme measure is to use CCleaner, but that requires some care.  I'll follow up with another article on how to use CCleaner to clean out even more crapware embedded in the file system and registry.

April 20th, 2007

Mac hijacked in "PWN 2 0WN" contest

Posted by George Ou @ 3:48 pm

Categories: Apple, Desktop, Malware alert, News, Security

Tags:

Via Rich Mogull, a fully patched Mac OS X MacBook has been rooted hijacked in the "PWN 2 0WN" contest at the CanSecWest security conference. Dino Dai Zovi developed the exploit last night and will get the $10,000 reward, but Shane Macaulay, who pulled off the exploit, will get to keep the MacBook.  [Update 4/21/2007 - This is the first Mac that was hacked. It was hacked via zero-day Safari exploit, and the hacker obtained user-level permissions. To win the contest for the second Mac, it has to be hijacked and with privilege escalation to obtain root.  The same exploit used to hijack the first Mac cannot be used again on the second Mac.]

April 4th, 2007

Strike 3 for AMD hypocrisy on benchmarking

Posted by George Ou @ 6:15 pm

Categories: Apple, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors, Servers

Tags:

AMD swung hard at Intel for what it deemed as ethics violations, but since then, it has pulled the same stunt it's been criticizing Intel for three times in a row. I called out AMD's hypocrisy on strike one; David Berlind called it out on strike two; and now AMD is doing the same thing by cherry-picking the benchmarks and omitting superior Intel scores. Intel's Nick Knuppffer was rather upset with these omissions today and called AMD's benchmark postings "rubbish."

AMD, in this latest round, showed three sets of benchmarks comparing three products. It shows the latest AMD Opteron 2222 SE, which was released only this month, going against an Intel 5160 from mid-2006 and against an Intel 5355 released November 2006. The problem is that AMD omits the scores on two of the benchmarks and shows only the Intel 5355 in its worst light with SPECompMbase2001, which is a relatively obscure and less often cited benchmark to begin with. AMD selectively omits Intel's 5355 numbers for the more common SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks and then claims victory on all three sets of benchmarks. Here is the chart reconstructed with the best available scores posted by AMD, but I've also included the omitted 5355 scores highlighted in yellow.

So even without Intel's latest CPU in the lineup, Intel wins the two more common benchmarks by a significant margin. The biggest margin of victory goes to the integer performance of Intel's 2.66 GHz XEON 5355, and that gap will get even wider once Intel's just-released 3 GHz quad-core XEON gets included in this lineup.  Earlier today, I explained the benefits of quad-core computing and what lies ahead for the two chip companies.

Cherry-picking benchmarks to show one's own product in its best light is fairly common in the industry, but not after publicly slamming one's opponent for unethical benchmarking. If AMD insists on calling Intel unethical for cherry-picking benchmarks, reasonable people have no choice but to call AMD hypocritical when it does the same thing. Since this is strike three on AMD hypocrisy in barely over a month, this appears to be a pattern that won't stop anytime soon.

April 4th, 2007

Apple bursts out with 8-core 3 GHz Intel quad-core

Posted by George Ou @ 2:04 pm

Categories: AMD, Apple, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors, Servers

Tags:

As AMD finally celebrates its symbolic victory over last year's Intel dual-core 3 GHz Core 2 XEON processor, Intel and Apple are moving on with quad-core 3 GHz Core 2 XEON processors. Apple, with its exclusive partnership with Intel, gets to be the first to launch Intel's 3 GHz "Clovertown" quad-core processor in a dual-socket configuration. This gives the new Mac Pro record-breaking performance in the first 8-core workstation computer.

Server manufacturers like HP, IBM, Dell, and Fujitsu aren't far behind, and they will soon be releasing their 3 GHz quad-core dual-socket servers. While Intel's quad-core CPUs are hundreds of dollars more expensive than AMD's dual-core CPUs, the cost of the CPU is only a small part of the total system cost. In some cases, it can even be less expensive if a customer opts for a single quad-core CPU instead of two dual-core CPUs. That also decreases the costs due to power consumption because a single quad-core CPU will always be more efficient than two dual-core CPUs. This means Intel is able to offer dual-socket servers at roughly half the price of a quad-socket AMD server with nearly the same performance. The other major factor to consider is that most Enterprise software vendors charge by the socket and not by the number of CPU cores. By trimming the number of CPU sockets in half, customers can easily save $100,000 per CPU socket that isn't used.

AMD isn't standing still, and it's trying to release its own quad-core CPU, code-named "Barcelona." The chip will probably launch in July of this year, but that puts it eight months behind Intel's quad-core offering. AMD's marketing strategy for dealing with this deficiency has been to say that its quad-core chip will be a "native" quad-core and that Intel's quad-core is merely two dual-core CPUs stuffed into a single CPU package. The problem with that argument is that customers don't really care how they get four cores in a socket so long as they're being charged less money for software licensing, they're paying less for servers with fewer sockets, and they're getting the performance of four CPU cores out of a single CPU. AMD seems to be in agreement with this assessment when its executive vice president, Mario Rivas, stated, "If I could do something different, I wish we would have immediately done a MCM - two dual cores and call it a quad-core."

While AMD is praying for Barcelona to make up for its time lost, time doesn't seem to be on its side. AMD had been promising that Barcelona — when it comes out — will beat Intel's quad-core 2.66 GHz Clovertown, but Intel doesn't seem to want to sit still and wait for AMD to regain the lead. With the release of the 3 GHz quad-core CPU, Intel has significantly raised the bar so that AMD will most likely fall short on dethroning Clovertown on Integer performance in the mainstream dual-socket market. Barcelona will, however, take the Floating-point performance lead. But that's useful only for certain scientific workloads, which doesn't benefit most business applications.

Intel will most likely be releasing another update before or during the launch of AMD Barcelona with a jacked-up front side bus at 1600 MHz, up from the current 1333 MHz front side bus. That memory performance boost isn't without power consumption penalty, though, and it does mean that the memory will drain even more power. Intel's usage of FB (fully buffered) memory already means that every DIMM will take an extra 4.5 watts, compared to the kind of memory AMD systems use. Jacking up the FSB will mean even more power being used in the memory for Intel-based servers, unless Intel finds some way to reduce the power consumption of the buffers. This means that despite losing the overall performance advantage, AMD's Barcelona may at least regain the performance/watt advantage on most workloads. AMD doesn't use FB memory and it doesn't need to jack up the memory clock because of AMD's integrated memory controller and Hypertransport architecture.

AMD's integrated memory controller and Hypertransport architecture is what allows AMD to scale multi-core performance so perfectly, and it's keeping AMD in the game as far as four-core and eight-core performance goes. Intel currently blasts AMD on single- and dual-threaded performance, which is why it dominates the gaming benchmarks. But Intel's massive single-thread lead is cut down to a slight edge by the time you get to eight CPU threads. Intel plans to rectify this situation in the second half of 2008 with its next CPU architecture, code-named Nehalem, which uses its own integrated memory controller. AMD, on the other hand, hopes to close the manufacturing gap at around the same time by going to a new wet lithography 45 nm process. It's going to be interesting to see who comes out on top as this seesaw battle continues.

March 31st, 2007

Get a full blown Mac for $299?

Posted by George Ou @ 10:36 pm

Categories: Apple

Tags:

It looks like someone has hacked the Apple TV to run Mac OS X along with the full instructions. I got a feeling these instructions or the hacked kernel won't stay there for long, so hurry while it lasts. You will need to supply your own display and plug in a USB hub for keyboard and mouse. Now you can actually buy a brand-new Mac for $299!

The only issue I see with it is whether you can upgrade the RAM beyond 256 MBs. The RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, so you'll have to void the warranty if you want to replace the memory. I won't be surprised if someone tries to upgrade the RAM.

March 28th, 2007

Did Apple install a rootkit in Apple TV? No.

Posted by George Ou @ 11:46 pm

Categories: Apple, Fun Stuff, Hardware

Tags:

[Update 4/5/2007 - Apple says it's your box but be mindful of voiding that warrantee]

Several Apple TV modders are complaining that their enhancements to Apple TV, such as adding VNC and SSH, are being disabled over night. As some of my readers may recall, I wrote "Apple TV might obsolete the x86 appliance market" two months ago with some high hopes for it. I'm also hearing rumors that the USB port is disabled.

I'll be running some tests this week to see how we can hack this thing to run some cool applications like IPCop or Asterisk, but I admit I'm getting a little more discouraged, and it sounds like a little more work needs to be done. I'm beginning to wonder who owns the hardware, Apple or the user.

March 28th, 2007

Adobe 'no64' Photoshop CS3 launches

Posted by George Ou @ 1:24 am

Categories: AMD, Apple, Desktop, Hardware, Intel, Vista

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe PhotoShop, 64-bit, George Ou

Yesterday saw the launch of Adobe "no64" CS3 with no AMD or Intel x64 64-bit extensions support. So what really prompted me to write this blog? Simple: It was Adobe's cavalier attitude that you'll get 64-bit support when Adobe says it's time. I found that link via Adobe blogger John Nack's post insinuating that I though 64-bit was "magic," which was written in response to my blog "Choosing between Vista x86 32 bit or x64 64 bit." Maybe I'm overreacting, but at no time did I ever suggest that there was anything magical about 64-bit computing, nor did I exaggerate the advantages of 64-bit computing.

I'll quickly recap the advantages x64 64-bit computing, all of which would benefit a resource-intensive application like Adobe CS3 immensely:

• Beyond 4-GB RAM support, which is important for a graphics application dealing with large and many bitmap images.
• Double-wide 64-bit CPU registers, which allow larger number calculations to be performed in fewer CPU cycles.
• Double the number of registers, which can even benefit 32-bit applications because more operations can be handled at the same time without going to slower CPU Cache or RAM.

Why is Adobe is so quick to discount the need for an x64 version of CS3? Is the need to avoid 64-bit binaries in parallel with 32-bit binaries more important than producing a better product?  Adobe insists that few people are running x64 operating systems. But isn't that because companies like Adobe refuse to take the next logical evolutionary step in computing? It seems to me that there could potentially be more Windows XP x64 or Vista x64 users than there are all of Mac users combined if Adobe ever offered an x64 64-bit version of CS3 for Windows — yet Adobe is happy to create a Mac version of CS3.

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