hardware
I’ve loved many computers in my life, but the HTPC has always had a special place in my heart. It’s the only always-on workhorse computer in our house, it is utterly silent, totally reliable, sips power, and it’s at the center of our home entertainment, networking, storage,
hardware
The last sound card I purchased was in 2006, and that's only because I'm (occasionally) a bleeding edge PC gamer. The very same card was still in my current PC until a few days ago. It's perhaps too generous to describe PC sound hardware
hardware
Last summer I posted a four part series on building your own PC: * Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot * Building a PC, Part II: Burn in * Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking * Building a PC, Part IV: Now It's Your Turn My personal system is basically identical
cuda
A few recent articles have highlighted the disproportionate contribution Playstation 3 consoles are making to the Folding@Home effort. The OS statistics page for Folding@Home tells the tale: TFLOPSActive CPUsTotal CPUs Windows152160,1731,626,609 Mac/PPC78,77695,435 Mac/Intel92,8647,400 Linux4325,239216,067 GPU437332,228 PS365926,
hardware
There are two popular formulations of Moore's Law [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Formulations_of_Moore.27s_Law]: > The most popular formulation [of Moore's Law] is the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits every 18 months. At the
hardware
Intel's latest quad-core CPU, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, consists of 582 million transistors. That's a lot. But it pales in comparison to the 680 million transistors of nVidia's latest video card, the 8800 GTX. Here's a small chart of transistor counts
laptop
I was desperately trying to avoid the expense of buying a new laptop, but my work-provided Thinkpad T43 just isn't cutting it for me. The problem with Thinkpads, even the very nice new T60 models, is deeper than the hardware and the classic black box design. Thinkpads are
windows xp
I'm not sure exactly why, but the guys at winhistory.de [http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm] managed to install Windows XP on a 20 megahertz Pentium 1 system with 32 megabytes of RAM: [http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm] That puts the XP
processor
I've talked about Multiple Core CPU Futures, but how about the dual core present? The Athlon 64 X2 is now widely available in both OEM and retail* packaging, ranging from the 4200+ to 4800+. AMD just released a cheaper Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at under $400. As a
cpu
Both AMD and Intel now have dual core CPUs on the market, in the form of the Athlon 64 X2 and the Pentium 4 D series. They may be expensive now, but I fully expect dual core architectures to trickle down to the rest of the lineup within the next
processor
I've commented on .NET compiler performance before, and I recently uncovered another Xbit Labs article that confirms my previous conclusion: For compiling .NET code, the Athlon 64 is 33% faster than a Pentium 4 of the same speed. That's a significant productivity boost for a developer.