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News for the Week Ending Jan 23, 2003 commodore.ca | Windows .NET is dead, Long Live Windows 2003
ZDNet.com | Intel Set to Release 800Mhz Bus ...(Intel is set to release) a new chipset, code-named Springdale, for Pentium 4 PCs. The chipset runs at 800MHz, substantially faster than the 400MHz and 533MHz chipsets currently available for Pentium 4 computers, according to sources close to the company. The new chipset will be released with a 3.2GHz version of the Pentium 4, the sources said... Among other tasks, the chipset creates a data path, or system bus, between the processor and a computer's memory. Speeding it up increases both the rate the processor can obtain data and the amount that can be transferred. The imbalance between processor speeds, which top out at 3GHz, and memory and system buses, which are far slower, has made the system bus look more like a street than a freeway because of the imbalance. Often, processors hum along in idle mode because of a lack of data. Likewise, latency, the time gap between when a chip has requested data and when it arrives, has grown. Overall, the increase in bus speed could boost performance by 3 percent to 5 percent, he said... ZDNet.com | AMD Set to Release Athlon64 with Integrated Memory Controller ...AMD, though, will counter with its Athlon 64, the first desktop chip based around the Hammer architecture, in late March or early April. Hammer chips will come with an integrated memory controller--the part of the chipset that creates the system bus--that will run at the same speed as the chip, making it faster than Intel... BetaNews.com |
MS Ordered to Include SUN Java in Windows ...District Judge J. Frederick
Motz, Microsoft was ordered to carry Sun Microsystem's latest Java revision in
Windows. Microsoft had
dropped Java support in Windows XP, citing previous litigation from Sun, and
made available an outdated Java release via Windows Update. Reuters.com |
Dell Enters Cash Register Business Dell Computer Corp. (NasdaqNM:DELL - news) expanded its push into new markets by launching check-out computers for medium and large stores, the No. 1 personal computer maker said on Monday . ..."Dell has hit some big revenue pools with PCs but it's looking for other places it can go .... They are turning over a lot of stones right now," said Roger Kay, an analyst with research firm IDC. He added that while the cash register business may not offer high growth, it is a business with high margins -- a traditional target for Dell. The company said its retail check-out systems start at $1,800 and will compete against systems that cost more than twice as much... ZDNet.com | Email Hygiene - Spam Blocking to Be Big Business in 2003/4 ...Companies that have viewed spam as little more than a nuisance for the past several years will become far more aggressive in combating this electronic pestilence. Meta Group expects most companies to spend $7 to $10 per user during the next year in buying spam-blocking software (with a similar figure for annual maintenance after the first year), and to dedicate one full-time employee per every 10,000 users for spam-blocking operations. These costs are similar to antivirus spending, so companies should anticipate a doubling of the budget dedicated to e-mail hygiene during 2003-04. By 2007, Meta Group believes e-mail hygiene spending will have doubled again (rising to $28 to $40 per user, per year), as companies turn to single vendor solutions for all mail hygiene needs, including virus and spam blocking, denial-of-service attack protection, pornography detection, illicit intellectual property disclosure detection, and offensive-mail blocking services. By that time, Meta Group believes (as with virus protection) hygiene services will be run on all three e-mail tiers--the client, the mailbox server, and the SMTP gateway--and run across multiple e-mail accessible ports (ports 25, 443, 80, and 465, for example). Reuters.com | HP Accused of "Improper Tactics" Used to Thwart Gov't Investigation California's attorney general has accused Hewlett-Packard and its lawyers of misleading investigators and frustrating state and federal probes into potential defects in millions of computers, according to a Monday rep... The Journal said the allegation surrounds $27.5 million in consulting fees HP paid to Phillip Adams, a computer expert who had alerted law-enforcement officials about suspected flaws in floppy-disk drives in HP's and other companies' PCs that can randomly delete or alter data without a person's knowledge. As state and federal officials investigated his claims, the paper said, Adams abruptly switched sides and signed a lucrative consulting agreement to help defend HP in certain future litigation. He also handed over his patented software "fix" to the company and pledged that he wouldn't assist private plaintiffs' lawyers seeking damages from HP, the Journal said, citing the court documents. According to the paper, over the weekend, a representative for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said that the state went after the "truly extraordinary conduct" of HP and Adams "to prevent whistle-blowers from switching sides in (a case) midstream, colluding with the defendants" for financial gain "and then undermining" state cases. ZDNet.com | IBM Is Number 1 for Patents For 10th Year in a Row ...Big Blue was awarded 3,288 patents during the past year, making it the top recipient among private sector companies for the 10th year in a row, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Canon ranked second during in 2002 with 1,893 patents. IBM has generated just over 22,000 patents during the last 10 years... Many of the company's newest patents are related to servers; grid computing; and self-healing, or autonomic, computers and how to better put them to use for customers. Most of the new patents also fit into the framework of IBM's computing on demand initiative, announced late last year, said Ravi Arimilli, an IBM research fellow. ...Big Blue, which spent $5.5 billion on research in 2001, has a cadre of about 3,000 researchers, though about 5,000 people across the company contributed to its 2002 patent total. This year's patents came from several areas around the company. Although a large chunk--600--came straight from IBM Research, about 1,200 patents were awarded for work done by IBM's Technology Group, which includes the company's Microelectronics Division. Microelectronics is responsible for processors like the PowerPC. IBM's server group, which stewards the Power4, contributed nearly 600 patents to the total. IBM's software group had 470 patents in 2002... ExtremeTech.com | Serial ATA Promises Big Performance The first ATA hard drives appeared on the scene in the late 1980's, and have evolved into the latest ATA100 and ATA133 standards. Also known as IDE (for integrated drive electronics), the ATA standard has gone through a number of iterations. Today's ATA hard drives max out at 133MB/sec (Maxtor) and 100MB/sec (everyone else). The original ATA standard specified a connection speed of 3.3MB/sec. Early ATA drives offered 10-40MB of storage -- a staggering amount at the time, but completely useless for most PC applications today. Capacities have evolved along with connection speeds, and we now have 320GB ATA drives available. However, today's hard drives still use an interconnect standard that's over fifteen years old, even as capacities and drive technologies have progressed. The ATA standard is a 16-bit, parallel connection. Parallel ATA uses source-synchronous (non-interlocked) clocking, which means that the clock signal is actually sent with the data. This can create problems as data rates -- and hence, clock rates -- increase. Because of potential signal reflection and signal skew issues, the ATA100 standard reduced the voltage for ATA100 signaling to 3.3v. The high clock rates also require 80-conductor cables, with alternating ground and signal wires. The net result is a maximum cable length of 18 inches for reliable operation in a wide variety of environments. Serial ATA Defined: Serial ATA is, as the name
implies, a serial link. A single Serial ATA (S-ATA) cable consists of a minimum
of four wires, with differential pairs for transmitting and receiving data. The
standard also a S-ATA is also point-to-point. Each S-ATA connection supports a single drive, so the days of figuring out which jumper to set for master or slave will become an historic artifact. Making S-ATA point-to-point also makes termination much easier, as opposed to parallel ATA's requirement to have a device attached to the middle of the cable. Today's systems typically only support two S-ATA connections. This is partly because current systems still require parallel ATA connections and partly because all of today's Serial ATA implementations work through PCI host adapter cards or chips. Being bound to PCI adds additional overhead and potentially limits throughput. S-ATA also offers "first party" DMA support, meaning that devices aren't dependent on a host controller for DMA. The standard also has hot-swapping designed in, which means you can (in theory) swap drives while the system is running. S-ATA uses a 7-pin connector (to accommodate any additional ground wires), and is considerably more compact than the parallel ATA plug. As you can see, four S-ATA cables and connectors take up roughly the same room as a single parallel ATA cable. In the future, when motherboard core logic directly supports S-ATA, we'll probably see as many as four S-ATA connections on a motherboard. Unfortunately, parallel ATA won't vanish overnight. If nothing else, optical drive makers will transition to S-ATA more slowly, since they view the additional bandwidth as more a luxury than a necessity for their applications... ...S-ATA achieves improved raw performance by increasing the data rate substantially. The clock rate of Serial ATA is 1.5GHz. The data is encoded with 8b/10b encoding, which reduces the potential bandwidth by 20%. This yields a net bandwidth of 150 megabytes per second of actual data... ...The issue of performance is a complex one, due to the fact that the PCI bus lies between today's S-ATA host adapters and the rest of the system. If there is no contention on the PCI bus, then the maximum data rate theoretically possible is 133MB/sec. In practice, this is usually less -- more like 85-90MB/sec on Intel-based systems and as low as 40-50MB/sec in systems using older (pre-8233) Via South Bridge chips. However, most hard drives -- even fast, high-density, 7200RPM drives -- can't push data out at 150MB/sec. In practice, the best single hard drive data rates for ATA drives max out at around 44MB/sec sustained, from the outer tracks. Substantial PCI traffic from other sources, such as NICs or sound cards can adversely impact the overall PCI throughput. The picture gets worse once you move to RAID devices. What this means is that we're unlikely to get a true picture of Serial ATA performance until we have core logic that places the S-ATA controller north of the PCI bus...
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In an astoundingly common
sense move MS renounced it's ridiculous naming convention first seen with "XP"
and scheduled for ".NET Server". Instead Microsoft will return to the
"year" model and will put new ".NET Connected" logo's on the packaging products
that were to be called .NET . Windows Server 2003 will be the first
release to use the 'new' system and they assure us that this change will have no
effect on the April release date. Click
