All Computer Information

AMD Athlon™ Processor Product Brief

2008-06-23T05:15:00.001-07:00

Get powerful performance for your unique digital experience

AMD Athlon™ Processor Overview
The AMD Athlon™ processor is the first Windows®-compatible 64-bit PC processor. The AMD Athlon™ processor runs on AMD64 technology, a revolutionary technology that allows the processor to run 32-bit applications at full speed while enabling a new generation of powerful 64-bit software applications. Advanced 64-bit operating systems designed for the AMD64 platform from Microsoft, Red Hat, SuSE, and TurboLinux have already been announced.

With the introduction of the AMD Athlon™ processor, AMD provides customers a solution that can address their current and future computing needs. As the first desktop PC processor to run on the AMD64 platform, the AMD Athlon™ processor helps ensure superior performance on today’s software with readiness for the coming wave of 64-bit computing. With AMD64 technology, customers can embrace the new capabilities of 64-bit computing on their own terms and achieve compatibility with existing software and operating systems.

Enhanced Virus Protection with Windows® XP Service Pack 2
With a unique combination of hardware and software technologies that offer you an added layer of protection, certain types of viruses don't stand a chance. The AMD Athlon™ processor features Enhanced Virus Protection, when support by the OS*, and can help protect against viruses, worms, and other malicious attacks. When combined with protective software, Enhanced Virus Protection is part of an overall security solution that helps keep your information safer.

Industry-leading performance for today’s software
It 's not just about email, Web browsing and word processing anymore. The AMD Athlon™ processor gives you full-throttle performance to go wherever your digital world takes you. Whether you're watching videos, ripping and playing music, or playing games, AMD64 performance helps you to fully enjoy any multimedia experience with a “you are there” reality. The revolutionary architecture of the AMD Athlon™ processor enables industry-leading performance to help maximize productivity and deliver a true-to-life digital entertainment experience. HyperTransport™ technology can increase overall system performance by removing I/O bottlenecks, increasing system bandwidth, and reducing system latency. A fully integrated DDR memory controller helps speed access to memory by offering the processor a direct connection to the main memory. As a result, end users can enjoy quicker application loading and extraordinary application performance.

With 3DNow!™ Professional technology and support for SSE3, the AMD Athlon™ processor has more ways to accelerate multimedia applications, enabling stellar performance when working with audio, video and photography software. For a superior experience with high-speed Internet, the AMD Athlon™ processor combines high-speed memory access and I/O connectivity to help ensure that end users can fully take advantage of a broadband connection to streaming video and audio, and a riveting online gaming experience.

Ready for the 64-bit future
The AMD Athlon™ processor is designed for people who want to stay at the forefront of technology and for those who depend on their PCs to keep them connected, informed, and entertained. Systems based on AMD Athlon™ processors are able to deliver leading-edge performance for demanding productivity and entertainment software today and in the future.

With AMD64 technology, the AMD Athlon™ processor is fully compatible with existing software, while enabling a seamless transition to 64-bit applications. Both 32- and 64-bit applications can run virtually simultaneously and transparently on the same platform. AMD64 technology enables new, cinematic computing experiences and capabilities, in addition to increased performance. AMD64 technology allows end users to take advantage of new innovations such as real-time encryption, more life-like games, accurate speech interfaces, cinema-quality graphic effects, and easy-to-use video and audio editing.

Protect investments with a technically superior PC processor
The AMD Athlon™ processor is the world’s most technically advanced PC processor and the first Windows-compatible 64-bit PC processor. Advanced technologies in the AMD Athlon™ processor include:

* AMD64 technology which doubles the number of processor registers and dramatically increases the system memory addressability
* Enhanced multimedia instructions support including 3DNow! Professional technology and SSE2/3
* With up to a 2000 MHz system bus using HyperTransport technology with up to 14.4 GB/sec total processor-to-system bandwidth
* An integrated memory controller with peak memory bandwidth of up to 6.4 GB/sec, supporting PC3200, PC2700, PC2100, or PC1600 DDR SDRAM
* Native execution of 32-bit software, allowing today’s PC software to provide leading-edge performance while enabling a seamless migration to 64-bit software

The combination of these innovations and features provides customers with performance they need along with tremendous flexibility. Customers can experience outstanding performance running today’s applications and prepare for the next generation of software without having to upgrade or change hardware. For business customers, this extends system life cycles, simplifies technology transition and reduces total cost of ownership.

Purchase with confidence
The AMD Athlon™ processor is the only industry standard x86 processor with the ability to move beyond the limits of 32-bit computing. The AMD Athlon™ processor is compatible with Microsoft Windows XP and tens of thousands of PC applications that people around the world use every day. The award-winning AMD Athlon™ processor won over 100 industry accolades and was the first 1GHz PC processor. Now, the AMD Athlon™ processor reaches a new milestone by building a path to 64-bit computing for millions of PC users.

Founded in 1969, AMD has shipped more than 300 million PC processors worldwide. Customers can depend on the AMD Athlon™ processor and AMD for compatibility and reliability. AMD processors undergo extensive testing to help ensure compatibility with Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT®, Windows 2000, as well as Linux and other PC operating systems. AMD works collaboratively with Microsoft and other partners to achieve compatibility of AMD processors and to expand the capability of software and hardware products leveraging AMD64 technology. AMD conducts rigorous research, development, and validation to help ensure the continued integrity and performance of its products.

Saving Power on Hard Drives

2008-06-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

There are two major items for consideration when you think of the power consumption of conventional hard drives. The first item is the power requirement of the mechanical parts: this includes the spindle motor, which is used to drive the physical platters, but also the actuator, which positions the read/write heads. More power is required to reach faster spindle speeds, and power requirements also depend on the diameter of the platters, the number of platters, and on the bearings used.

More power is also required to reach short access times, because the actuator may need to accelerate and decelerate quickly in order to move the heads from one surface location to the next. Again, the number of platters has an influence on actuator power requirements, as one actuator arm is needed to position every two heads (one on each side of each platter).

Performance features such as Native Command Queuing (NCQ) may contribute to saving power under load. NCQ lines up all incoming commands, analyzes them, and reorders them for execution in a way that minimizes head movement. However, NCQ is only really interesting in server-type environments.

The second major area of power consumption in a hard drive is the circuit board, which carries the controller, cache memory and interface logic. Increasing levels of integration have contributed to making the hard drive core logic more and more efficient. However, it still cannot be left out of the power equation.

Obviously, power savings can be achieved on the physical level, by reducing the spindle speed or by slowing down acceleration and break performance for the actuator. Optimizing the bearings is difficult, as most hard drives are already based on so-called fluid dynamic bearings (FDB). Deploying new, lighter materials can also help to reduce power consumption. However, robustness and reliability is an issue that must not be underestimated, and it’s hard to reduce parameters such as the thickness of a platter, due to the impact on other areas, such as ensuring smooth rotation. On the PCB side, it’s certainly possible to deploy power-saving mechanisms just like on other silicon components. Logic that isn’t being used, such as the cache memory, could be temporarily disabled.

Energy-Efficient Hard Drives Compared

2008-06-09T06:15:00.000-07:00

These hard drives are not meant to break new records in performance, but they might be able to break records when it comes to storage capacity per watt of power used. Both Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) and Western Digital have now released disk drives that cater to the power-conscious audience. The Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 and the WD GreenPower series reduce power consumption by up to 40% compared to conventional hard drives. We wanted to know what the impact on performance was of these design changes, which must not be significant for these products to be accepted in the market.

Looking at power requirements of 50 to 120 W for TFT displays, 20 to 120 W for processors, 25 to 200 W for discrete graphics solutions, up to 50 W for high-end motherboards and another 10 to 20% of the component power requirements due to losses in the power supply, a discussion of hard drive power requirements might seems of little interest. After all, the typical power consumption of a desktop hard drive lies anywhere between 5 and 15 W, depending on the model, spindle speed and platter count. In fact, choosing one drive or another does seem to have little impact on the power consumption of a desktop PC.

Yet the hard drive does have a measurable impact on power requirement in applications outside of a typical desktop PC environment: think of data centers, where thousands of hard drives are required to satisfy enormous storage requirements. And while any device not only consumes a certain amount of power when it operates, it is also produces heat that must be removed via air conditioning solutions. As a matter of fact, the effort and cost of deploying large-scale, fail-safe air conditioning solutions may be more significant than the direct cost and impact of device power consumption.

Other applications for low-power hard drives are consumer electronics devices such as personal video recorders (PVRs), set-top boxes with integrated storage, and all sorts of backup devices such as external hard drives and RAID-based solutions for near-line storage. These need to be as cool, quiet and as easy to maintain as possible, and they don’t even require great performance. Most of the hard drives that are integrated into consumer electronics products are actually still based on UltraATA interfaces rather than on Serial ATA.

Hitachi and Western Digital both have products to cater to these markets: the Hitachi Deskstar P7K500, where the P stands for “power”, and the Western Digital GreenPower series, which includes a number of power optimizations that can be found across various WD product lines.

DELIVER INNOVATIVE IDEAS IN PRINT

2008-06-07T22:34:00.000-07:00

Adobe® Creative Suite® 3.3 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web, and mobile publishing. Creativity is rarely confined to one medium, so put your vector illustrations in motion, moving fluidly between Adobe Illustrator® CS3 and Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional. And use Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended to design and slice a web page for publishing with Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3. Design Premium combines essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment.

Now with new Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro plus special offering: Adobe Fireworks® CS3.

NFORCE 780a SLI Motherboard Comparison

2008-05-28T04:25:00.000-07:00

nVidia. Last week nVidia shocked the enthusiast market by releasing a top-model chipset with integrated graphics. NVidia knew that no self-respecting enthusiast would actually rely on integrated 3D engines, but that wasn’t the point of its 780a SLI. Instead, the announced primary intent was to provide the entire graphics system a way to drop into low power mode when few 3D calculations were required, such as while surfing the internet.ast week nVidia shocked the enthusiast market by releasing a top-model chipset with integrated graphics. NVidia knew that no self-respecting enthusiast would actually rely on integrated 3D engines, but that wasn’t the point of its 780a SLI. Instead, the announced primary intent was to provide the entire graphics system a way to drop into low power mode when few 3D calculations were required, such as while surfing the internet.

What sets the 780a SLI apart from the lower-budget GeForce 8000 series chipsets isn’t the 780a SLI MCP, but instead the nForce 200 PCI-Express bridge. This bridge provides PCI-Express 2.0 mode to two full-bandwidth x16 slots, or three x16 slots with two in x8 mode. This is the same component that nVidia used to transform its 680i Intel chipset into the 780i, and we’re almost certain that the 780a SLI MCP uses the same 8000 series core as nVidia’s lower-budget parts.

Yes, the nForce 780a SLI still supports GeForce Boost, which is the major feature of the 8000 series to allow low-cost motherboards and graphics cards to be combined into middle-market performers. We tested that feature last week, and found that it worked well for an 8400GS and adequately for an 8500GT. But we didn’t test Hybrid Power because the motherboard we used died before we got that far.

Our experience with the nForce 780i SLI has shown that the nForce 200 bridge is an adequate part for 2-way and 3-way SLI performance, but other tests have proven that AMD’s current processors simply don’t have the performance needed to properly stress such an extensive graphics system.

Shuttle's Korporate Perfect Cube (KPC) Hits The Street

2008-05-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: shuttle, kpc

Shuttle.When it’s your job to review new PC hardware, it’s easy to get caught up in the cutting edge of technology. We see and evaluate some of the world’s newest computer components on a daily basis, and usually "newer" is synonymous with faster, stronger, and more power-hungry.

However, not everyone requires the fastest hardware; some folks have never touched a PC game, and there are tons of people out there who don’t use their PCs to convert video files. Many PC users just want to edit documents, surf the Internet, and maybe look at their digital photographs. For these people, a quad-core CPU and dual-videocard setup is grotesque overkill.

It is for these folks that Shuttle introduced the KPC, which stands for "Korporate Personal Computer". The KPC is not a powerhouse - it is a basic personal computer that will perform all of the every-day tasks you need, while having a minimal effect on both your electricity bill and your finances.

In fact, Shuttle’s main marketing drive behind the KPC underlines four strengths; it aims to be user-friendly, customizable, expandable, and green. With Shuttle now delivering the KPC in limited numbers as a barebones or complete system, we decided to see if it can deliver on these features as promised.