Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 17 Aug 2005 14:42:54 GMT
The official Xbox360 prices are out. There will be two models:
Microsoft hasn’t announced a launch date yet, but the rumor is that it’ll be available on Black Friday).
Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 28 Jun 2005 02:28:37 GMT
Somehow I missed this earlier this month–Gigabyte has announced a $50-ish PCI card that takes up to 4 DDR DIMMs and acts like a SATA RAMDISK. It has a battery that supposedly lasts 12-16 hours and will recharge via the PCI standby power line.
I’ve seen a bunch of people excited about using this as a boot disk or a Windows paging disk, but personally I’d love to see this used as an external journal for EXT3 filesystems. For some workloads, this would result in huge performance boosts for an amazingly small amount of cash. It’d be nice to have more battery life (36-72 hours would be ideal)–my personal record for a home power outage is 13 hours. All of my work-related outages have been brief, except for the facility in Manhattan that was dark for about a week in September of 2001.
via Ambient Irony
Update: I’ve been thinking about this, and the whole thing would be massively more useful with a couple small additions. First, add a Compact Flash socket to the board, and then update the ASIC that runs the board so it will copy the contents of the RAM onto the CF card after an hour or two without power. Then copy it all back when the power comes back up. You should be able to buy 1 GB of DRAM and 1 GB of CF flash for around $150; adding $100 for the PCI card give you 1 GB of seriously non-volatile memory for $250. I’d probably make them a standard feature in every server that I bought, just for the performance boost.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:24:53 GMT
The Inquirer reports that Intel’s Tukwila chip is going to have an on-board memory controller, just like all of AMD’s newer chips. Tukwila is a multi-core Itanium, and is due sometime in 2007; the Inquirer suggests that Xeons will probably get on-board memory controllers in the same basic timeframe, simply because this will let Intel use the same controller chips for both Xeon and Itanium systems.
Assuming that the rumor is true (and considering how well AMD’s on-board controller works, I’d be surprised if it’s not), Intel will probably end up putting 4-6 FB-DIMM channels per CPU; since each channel’s good for around 10 GB/sec, a dual-chip system could potentially have 120 GB/sec in memory bandwidth. Even better, it’d be possible to build a high-capacity server with 48 DIMM sockets spread over the 12 channels; with 4 GB DIMMs, that’s 192 GB in a relatively simple box.
This assumes that multi-CPU systems remain common; given the way that multiple core systems are progressing, I’m not sure that there will really be a market for commodity multiple-CPU-chip systems after 2007 or so–if you can get 8 cores on a single chip, why would you pay the complexity cost of adding more chips, except for really high-end stuff? Even today, compare the cost and performance of an Athlon 64 x2 vs a system with 2 single-core Opteron 2xx chips–the Opteron system will have a bit more memory bandwidth, but they’ll have similar performance on a lot of workloads and an Athlon 64 x2 with cheap motherboard will be cheaper then most dual-CPU Opteron motherbards, never mind the CPUs.
Dual-CPU systems have been the bread and butter of the PC server world for the last 5-7 years, but I doubt that they have more then another two years to go before they fade into the sunset. Personally, I’d much rather manage a handful of single-chip 8-core clustered, virtualized (where virtual environments can migrate between physical systems under explicit admin control) systems then a smaller number of 2-4 CPU 16-32 core systems.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 12 May 2005 17:24:19 GMT
The Inquirer has a photo of one of Broadcom’s upcoming SAS (Serial Attached SCSI, basically SCSI over the SATA physical layer) cards. The interesting thing about this card is that it’s both a PCI-E and a PCI-X card–you can flip it over and plug it in either way.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sort of thing done–there were ISA/MCA cards on the market for a while in the late 80s–but they’ve always been extremely rare. I doubt Broadcom will have this card on the market for very long, because it’s almost certainly cheaper to make two different models then one model with two different interfaces.
I’m really interested in seeing how SAS hardware is priced, because it could be extremely useful in low-end servers. Unlike old parallel SCSI, SAS is a point-to-point network–no daisy-chaining drives on a single cable. Unlike SATA, though, SAS is designed to support “fan-out” devices, so you can plug multiple drives into a single controller channel. Supposedly it’s possible to plug SATA drives into SAS controller; if it’s possible to plug SATA drives into a SAS fan-out enclosure, then we’d get the best of both worlds–the ability to buy big, cheap (but slow) SATA drives and the ability to hang a dozen or so drives off of a single server without needing a dozen different cables. I don’t know if any vendors will be aggressive enough with their pricing to make this cost-effective, though.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:32:08 GMT
The parts for my latest home PC arrived yesterday afternoon and Gabe and I spent a couple hours assembling them into a workable system. It’s amazing how much help a 4-year-old can provide, even around delicate PC parts. I now have a working Athlon 64 3000+ (S939) system with 1 GB of ram and a reasonably large amount of disk space sitting on my desk. I’m going to be using this for Xen testing, but I’ll write more about that later. For now, I want to concentrate on the hardware.
I went out on a limb a bit when ordering this system, because the motherboard I picked, MSI’s RS480M2-IL, is the first motherboard on the market with ATI’s first Athlon 64 chipset (the Radeon Xpress 200), and Google doesn’t give any clear Linux success stories for the motherboard or chipset. However, this is the only socket 939 board that I could find with on-board video, and I really like on-board video for servers. It was also quite a bit cheaper then buying a comparable board plus an AGP video card. A bit of poking around suggested that the SATA ports might be trouble, and it was unclear how well X supports the on-board video, but I don’t really care about either of those for this system. The parallel IDE ports and Ethernet are the only really important parts for me.
So, after installing all of the hardware, I burned a new Ubuntu install CD and gave it a spin. It booted up okay, found the network, found the IDE hard drives, and installed without any serious problems. Ubuntu’s install CD doesn’t seem to have a driver for ATI’s IDE chipset, so I was stuck in slow PIO mode, but it still worked. Once the install finished, I rebooted and watched Ubuntu try to add all of Gnome and OpenOffice to my nice little server system–yikes. After stopping that, I installed gcc, downloaded the source for Linux 2.6.11.4, and build a new kernel.
After booting the new kernel, almost everything looks okay. Here are the drivers needed for this hardware:
I’m currently fighting two problems:
Update (3/18/2005): Disabling the APIC fixed the clock problem, but not the reboot problem. I tried changing a number of power management settings without success. Most likely, the APIC will start working with a future BIOS revision. This problem seems to be preventing me from booting Xen right now, but that’ll probably be fixed by a new version of Xen in the fairly short term.
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 14 Mar 2005 19:46:16 GMT
No matter how much you like Fry’s, 4 visits in a single week is just too much.
I think I’ve ODed on Fry’s. At this point, all I see when I walk in the door is a Walmart with their core demographic switched from rednecks to rabid gamer wannabes. When looking for a cheap, non-tacky PC case on Saturday, I asked a wandering sales guy about cases without plexiglas windows in the side and he replied “we don’t have a lot of demand for those. Pretty much everyone wants to show off their mods.”
Hmm. Looks like both modfree.com and modfree.org are free. I see a merchandizing opportunity here. If anyone wants to pick them up and run with them, let me know–I’ll be first in line to order the “my PC is beige” t-shirt.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 06 Jan 2005 20:22:20 GMT
The Inquirer is reporting that the CompactFlash trade group released a newer CF spec at CES, bumping the top speed for CF cards from 16 MBps to 66 MBps. This should be great news for photographers–most DSLRs use CF cards, but they’ve been falling behind in the flash speed race. For example, on Canon’s newest 1D-series cameras, the camera’s SD slot runs rings around the CF slot. In fact, the SD slot on Canon’s new cameras seems to be faster then any CF slot on any camera, so it’s not just an issue for Canon’s CF implementation. CF has been falling behind; hopefully this speed boost will let the next generation of cards and devices double or triple their CF transfer speeds.
It’s not widely appreciated just how many different modes of operation modern CF cards have. They’re basically miniature PCMCIA cards, with their own ISA-style IDE controller built in. They’re also IDE devices–you can get an adapter to connect them directly to your motherboard’s IDE interfaces. In addition, modern CF+ cards have a USB interface onboard. I think there are a couple other modes of operation as well, like legacy PCMCIA flash stuff, but I’m a bit hazy on the details.
In spite of all of the complexity, they’re still the cheapest type of flash media on the market.
Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:38:33 GMT
A friend just sent me a link to this week’s ads for Fry’s Electronics in Seattle. This has been a long-running irritation for both of us–unless we go out and buy a paper, we don’t know what Fry’s is selling this week. It seems ridiculous that they don’t post their sales online themselves; instead, this link above comes from one of the two major Seattle papers; they’re both hosted in nwsource.com.
While it’s nice to see their ads show up online, it’d be even nicer if they were actually usable–as it is, you get an unreadably small image of the ad; you can click to zoom, but the zoomed image only shows a single segment of the ad, usually one or two items. So, to read the whole ad, you’d have to load at least 100 distinct images. Nice work, guys.
Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 13 Nov 2004 01:39:11 GMT
CNet has a summary of AMD’s latest analyst meeting, including details on future chips:
On the high end, AMD will release chips with two processing cores in 2005 and then follow in 2006 with chips based around a new chip core code-named Pacifica.
The company is relatively tight-lipped about Pacifica, but said it will be a dual-core chip that also contains virtualization technology–which allows a computer to run multiple OSes–and a security technology called Presidio. Pacifica will appear in desktops, notebooks and servers in 2006. AMD says it will also come out with a new ultra low-power chip for notebooks.
The article also mentions that Intel has been talking about virtualization lately. Considering that PCs have been fighting with virtualization since the 386 was first introduced, I’m amazed that it’s taken 20 years to get full-blown virtualization support in mainstream PC chips. Anyone who’s been around PCs for a while remembers the whole mess with 386–they could run multiple DOS programs at the same time, given a decent vm86 environment, like Desqview or Windows/386–but as soon as you tried to run something that needed 286- or 386-specific features, the whole house of cards came tumbling down, because the 386 couldn’t virtualize itself. Neither could the 486, Pentium, or any of the other x86 chips that have shown up since then.
Of course, we’re better at cheating now: programs like VMWare and Xen have shown that it isn’t really that hard to work around the CPU’s virtualization problems, but you end up paying a price. With VMWare, it’s performance; with Xen it’s patching the guest OSes to not use specific CPU instructions.
Even once that CPU’s been virtualized, the hardest part remains: virtualizing the rest of the machine. Xen’s approach is very open-source centric: they require the guest OS to be ported to Xen, including Xen-specific drivers, rather then emulate specific PC hardware in the virtual machine monitor. Long-term, that’s probably the most reasonable way to handle things, at least in the open-source world.
I’m looking forward to AMD’s new offerings. Pity we have to wait more then a year for them.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:12:14 GMT
According to CNET, Intel has dropped their plans for a 4 GHz Pentium 4 chip, replacing it with a 3.8 GHz chip with a 2 MB cache. Intel is spinning this as a deliberate move to distance themselves from the “more MHz is better” mindset:
Behind the shift is Intel President Paul Otellini, who wants the company to move away from focusing on increases in chip speed, measured in megahertz, as the primary way to increase performance. Intel has talked about such a shift for years, but remained fond of the clock-speed approach until recently. Speeches by executives about moving away from megahertz were often closely followed by announcements of faster chips.
Of course, the spin is wearing a bit thin on this–if Intel could release a 4 GHz P4, then they’d jump at the opportunity. It’s certainly cheaper to produce P4s with 1 MB of cache then with 2 MB; replacing their entire 1 MB line with 2 MB models will lower their profit (assuming that the replacement chips sell for more or less the same price).
On a similar note, Om Malik points out that Intel’s latest quarterly earnings were quite a bit worse then Intel’s been spinning.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 08 Sep 2004 15:44:43 GMT
Remember Infinium Labs, the makers of the Phantom game console, which has been total vaporware for at least a couple years? Their latest quarterly report filing says that they’re almost out of cash. While a lot of people online don’t seem too surprised by this, I have a slightly different perspective, and what I’ve seen doesn’t look like a company that’s about to implode.
As mentioned before, Infinium’s Seattle R&D office was right next to my office, and I saw their people daily until they moved into bigger offices on September 1st. They certainly weren’t acting like they were broke–the employees were working long hours right up to their move-out date. I saw glimpses of Phantom prototypes and production samples from time to time, but I never got a demo. One of their managers had a wall-mounted countdown clock, set to trigger in November–they were really focused on getting their product out on time.
Personally, I expect them to ship the thing, perhaps on time, perhaps a bit late. I don’t have high expectations for their product, but I don’t expect them to implode before they ship.
(via Gizmodo and Firing Squad)
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 01 Sep 2004 20:36:21 GMT
There’s been a fair bit of discussion online about ”Horus”, Newisys’s glue chip for building 8–32 processor Opteron systems. The Horus architecture glues 4-processor clumps of CPUs into a larger system. This lets them overcome the Opteron’s 8-processor scaling limit and build really big boxes.
Fortunately, one of Horus’s designers has posted some details to comp.arch. Here’s a quick summary:
We can expect to see Horus systems show up late next year. Since AMD’s dual-core Opterons are due in about the same timeframe, we should see some fascinatingly huge PCs by Christmas 2004. The basic design should be similar to Sun’s Enterprise Server [3456]xxx systems–a bunch of plug-in slots that take 4 CPUs and a bunch of RAM each. Since Horus clearly wants I/O to be local to each quad, it’s unclear exactly how networking and disk I/O will work–will there be FC and GigE controllers on each quad, and the system routes them through to the backplane? Will each card have I/O on the front panel, even though that makes swapping CPU cards a royal pain? Will the manufacturers include an “I/O node” on the motherboard with its own Horus and a bunch of HT-to-PCI-X bridge chips? Hopefully, we’ll see a few of each design and the market can sort it out.
Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 28 Aug 2004 00:15:31 GMT
As mentioned before, I have two TiVos at home, a Series 1 upstairs and a Series 2 downstairs. I love the things. At this point, I refuse to watch TV without them. They’re genuinely changed the way I interact with my TV, and that’s mostly a good thing.
I just wish they’d stop dying on me.
It started a few months ago, when the Series 2 TiVo started locking up once or twice per day. I ended up replacing the hard drive in it, and as part of the upgrade process, I discovered that the old drive had a number of bad sectors right in the middle of the swap partition. It worked perfectly after the drive swap was complete, so I assumed that the worst was over and I was in for another year or two of trouble-free TiVo use.
Unfortunately, in early July it started crashing again, and by the end of the month, it wouldn’t stay up for more then an hour without freezing. We ended up unplugging it entirely and leaving the TV off for the first half of August. Eventually, though, the lack of TV got to us, and I ordered a new drive from newegg to replace the 120 GB drive in the TiVo, assuming that the drive had failed again.
Unfortunately, swapping drives didn’t help this time. I didn’t see any media errors while copying data, and the TiVo is still locking up at least once per day. At this point, I’m getting fed up with the whole thing. At some point this weekend I’m going to rip the box back open and make sure that the IDE cable isn’t broken, but after that I’m out of things to try. I’m going to have to call TiVo and see if there’s anything that they can do for me.
Since new TiVos are selling for as little as $100 this week, and this one is almost two years old, I wouldn’t normally be that irritated. Unfortunately, we paid for lifetime service on the dying box, and that’s currently going for $300. So, the dying TiVo would cost $400 to replace, not just $100. And that’s more then enough money to get me to spend an hour or two sitting on hold, waiting to yell at their support people. That’s because the “lifetime service” is good for the lifetime of the box, not the life of the owner. When the box dies, your $300 evaporates.
I tried calling TiVo’s support line. They try really hard to shunt you off to their web site, or into their automated support recordings. Of course none of the options provided have anything at all do with “my TiVo crashes several times every day.” By playing the “other” “other” “other” game, I eventually got through to a real person, but all he could do was give me a case number and punt me into the 35+ minute tech support queue. And I don’t have time for that now.
I swear, I’m inches from selling both TiVos and building myself a bunch of cheap MythTV boxes.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 25 Aug 2004 01:16:16 GMT
Around a year and a half ago, there was a story going around about a boatload of bad motherboard capacitors. It had all sorts of fun elements–industrial espionage, corporate cost-cutting, bad customer support, and so on. The general gist of the story was that a lot of motherboards were going to fail after a few months of use due to bad capacitors.
Interesting story, but it didn’t really affect me much. I hadn’t seen any failed systems in a while, and I was down to a dozen or so systems, from the 700+ that I managed at my previous job, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I forgot all about it.
Fast-forward a year. At work, we have a handful of really cheap test boxes. Lowest bidder, no-name parts, lousy design, but they work. Or, they did until a few weeks ago, when one failed. Then another. We lost a third one today. The first two were running the same software, so we were concerned–had we broken something? The third one was completely different, though, but it died with the same symptoms, and I was able to reproduce the problem running “known good” software from a year ago. My boss looked a bit skeptical and wanted to know how you get 3 machines from the same batch to all fail synchronously. It was a good question, and I didn’t have an answer, until I remembered the capacitor story.
I went back to my office and popped the cover off of one of the bad cases and there it was–half of the caps on the motherboard were leaking khaki-colored gunk. The other two dying boxes showed the same problem, as did one box that hasn’t failed yet. It’s nice to know what’s wrong. Now we’re just one little order from newegg away from having the boxes back in use.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 17 Jun 2004 19:10:07 GMT
It looks like Tyan is getting into the server business. Their hot new 4-proc Opteron motherboard just started shipping, and they’re going down the same road as Supermicro, selling motherboards as well as bare-bones servers based on the motherboards.
By and large, this is a good thing–this class of system tends to be a bit better-integrated then the usual generic white box rackmount server. I’m still waiting for someone to put a decent managed power supply into a cheap server, though. Intel’s had specs for extending IPMI into power supplies for years, but no one really seems to care enough. Since power supplies are the flakiest component in most systems, anything that can be done to improve their reliability would be great. Even if it’s just giving a few hours’ warning before the power supply dies.
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