News.com heeft een stukje over Internet2, een soort universiteits netwerk in Amerika.

Internet2 will go live tomorrow, promising to enhance and speed up Web surfing through the fruits of academic and corporate research conducted over a private network.

Internet2 is five-year effort to interconnect 140 universities that will create advanced network applications, allowing students and professors to view and consult during real-time medical operations, for example, or collaborate in virtual labs. Participants committed $50 million per year to the project in hopes of shipping huge packets of data or streaming video over networks at breakneck speeds without interruption.

The university project will run on the $500 million Abilene fiber-optic backbone developed by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) in partnership with Qwest Communications, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, and Indiana University. Abilene operates at speeds up to 2.4 gigabits per second--85,000 times faster than a standard dial-up modem.

PCVelocity heeft een review van de Diamond Rio PMP300 MP3-speler. Hier een geript stukje :

What's Up With The Earphones? I also want to comment on the quality of the earphones that came with the Rio. Diamond included earplug style headphones with the Rio. I am not going to say that these earphones are uncomfortable like most people do. Instead, I think they are fine for headphone design. But I did notice that if I switch to my highend Panasonic portable earphones (also earplug style), I get much better bass. The sounds coming out of Rio earphones are just not that great. And any serious listener should consider replacing them with better ones.

No Piracy Allowed? As a note to Diamond's anti-piracy protection, the Rio natively cannot upload files to computers, and it cannot do recordings. The only way to get music is to download it from the computer. This design makes Diamond immune from legal issues with the Rio.

Hier staat de review.

Thresh's Firingsquad heeft een artikel over de Dual Celeron tegenover de PII. Ook veel tips over het maken van je eigen Dual-Celeronsysteem! Even een stukje :

In so many ways, Intel's Celeron processor was truly the "CPU for the rest of us." Combining state of the art technology (no other shipping consumer processor has an on-die L2 cache), enough raw performance to go head to head with the flagship Pentium II (and Pentium III) line, and an absurdly low price point, what more could you ask for?

How about multiprocessing? When the Celeron was conceived, it was created specifically to be (or at least appear) inferior to the Pentium II, even though the processors are virtually interchangeable, and at one point even shared the same core. Among other things, this meant that the chip was intentionally crippled in some subtle ways to provide less functionality that the P2 cash cow. One of the main modifications made was to block the capability for running dual Celeron processors on a standard dual-processor motherboard.

While SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) immediately brings to mind images of high performance servers and workstations, it's once-prohibitive price point has been greatly diminished by the lowering cost of components (specifically of CPUs and dual-slot motherboards). Add to this the potential of being able to run sub-$100 Celeron processors in dual, and for once the average Joe has an excuse to toss out Win98 and jump on the power-user train.

But what are the advantages of running on multiple processors, especially compared to the Pentium II standard? Heck, how does it compare to a standard single-processor system? FiringSquad's rigged up a few dual-processor systems to test out the power of two, and here's what we found!

In dit verhaaltje staat de rest.

Op Anandtech staat een artikeltje van de hand van Ga'ash dat SSE (KNI) en 3DNow! met elkaar vergelijkt.

Perhaps the most touted improvement the Pentium III has over it's older brother the Pentium II is the addition of Streaming SIMD Extensions, or SSE for short. As described in Anandtech's Pentium III review, SIMD is:

SIMD, or Single Instruction Multiple Data (in this case SIMD-FP as it applies to FPU instructions, whereas MMX offered SIMD-Int for Integer instructions) allows a single command (or instruction) to be applied to multiple sets of data simultaneously. The key to understanding the benefits of SIMD-FP instructions is the emphasis on the simultaneous execution of commonly used instructions such as multiplies, divides, and adds.

Specifically applied to SSE, SIMD is the ability perform a single instruction on four pairs of 32bit floating point values in one clock cycle. Clearly, SIMD offers a vast improvement in performance; however, AMD has used 3DNow (a SIMD instruction set) for many months. What is it that sets SSE and 3DNow apart, if anything?

Het hele verhaal.

Clive Turvey heeft de PIII KNI instructies ge-reverse-engineered en heeft dit lijstje met info over opcodes al bij elkaar weten te sprokkelen. Dit zegt hij er zelf nog even over :

KNI/MMX2 instructions. I ran into an application on Intel's public FTP site that contains what I believe to be the KNI/MMX2 instruction set. I haven't got the whole encoding figured out, but the following table shows where they fit into the opcode map. The application also makes reference to registers XMM0 thru 7, which I believe will be a set of FP MMX registers that are separate and distinct from the integer registers MM0 thru 7. Given the size of the context space "conveniently" provided by FXSAVE/FXRSTOR (512 bytes), this would allow each register to be 40 bytes in size, or 4 x 80 bit FP / 8 x 40 bit FP. If you look at the instructions you'll see a lot of SS & PS references, I'm not sure if this means single/double precision or primary/secondary registers! In any case Intel's FPUs typically deal with 80 bit FP values and given 8 registers you could easily represent two 4x4 matrices.

These are the new instructions: addps, addss, andnps, andps, cmpeqps, cmpeqss, cmpleps, cmpless, cmpltps, cmpltss, cmpneqps, cmpneqss, cmpnleps, cmpnless, cmpnltps, cmpnltss, cmpordps, cmpordss, cmpunordps, cmpunordss, comiss, cvtpi2ps, cvtps2pi, cvtsi2ss, cvtss2si, cvttps2pi, cvttss2si, divps, divss, fxrstor, fxsave, ldmxcsr, maskmovq, maxps, maxss, minps, minss, movaps, movhps, movlps, movmskps, movntps, movntq, movss, movups, mulps, mulss, orps, pavgb, pavgw, pextrw, pinsrw, pmaxsw, pmaxub, pminsw, pminub, pmovmskb, pmulhuw, prefetchnta, prefetcht0, prefetcht1, prefetcht2, psadbw, pshufw, rcpps, rcpss, rsqrtps, rsqrtss, sfence, shufps, sqrtps, sqrtss, stmxcsr, subps, subss, ucomiss, unpckhps, unpcklps & xorps

Vast wel interessant voor hardcore-programmeurs, maar ik snap er weinig van.

Sinds Micro$oft Hotmail heeft overgenomen gaat het technisch wat minder (toeval?). In dit stukje op CNET staat :

For the second time in as many months, Microsoft's MSN Hotmail has acknowledged that users of its market-leading free Web-based email service are encountering delays and service glitches.

"Over the last few days some MSN Hotmail members have experienced slow performance caused by some back-end issues," said a Hotmail spokesperson. "We've been working hard to address these issues, and members will be seeing improved performance soon."

Hotmail declined to specify what kind of back-end issues were causing the delays, which in some cases prevented mail from being delivered. Other users reported being shut out of their accounts.

Intel gaat voor de PIII een nieuwe soket ontwikkelen. Deze is geschikt voor kleine moederplankjes die goed in "designer-cases" passen. Gezien op The Register.

Senior Intel VP Paul Otellini today put flesh on the bones of its new motherboard design and said the Pentium III will have a new socket design shortly (see Intel Flex ATX motherboard to use 810 chipset).

In an interview with The Register, Otellini said: "We will have small form factor Pentium III products and most will ship with some kind of socket design in time for when these machines ship. I won't commit to what kind of socket it will have."

Otellini said the first machines using the new form factor will "certainly" be available by Christmas this year. He said Intel would have liked to have started shipping in August. Instead, machines are likely to arrive between September the first and November the first.

The form factor machines are likely to be cheaper to manufacture than current PCs, but end users can expect to pay more for them.

Tom heeft ook een gigantisch artikel over de K6-III en de Intel P-III in elkaar gedraaid. Hier het intro:

We are almost there, the wait for the new microprocessors from AMD and Intel is finally close to an end. Intel’s upcoming Pentium III is an upgrade of the well known Pentium II-core with the new ‘streaming SIMD extension, and AMD’s new K6-3 is nothing but the latest K6-2-core with 256 kB on-die L2-cache running at core-clock. Before we start looking at the scores of those new CPUs, let’s first consider what we should expect.

De rest kan je hier lezen.

Sharky heeft een exclusieve preview van een metabyte TNT SLI setup. Dat beestje is natuurlijk supersnel! Hier even een knip/plak stukje :

Here's where it gets good people, a large bomb is about to be dropped on the gaming world and the reason for the PCI and AGP versions of Metabyte's TNT is about to be made clear:

There's a fully functional SLI capable port on each of Metabyte's PCI and AGP TNT cards.

Oh good lord, there we've said it, and we feel like a load's been lifted off our shoulders. The secret's out for good, and the repercussions will be felt worldwide.

Now you say you want the gory details, including how, why, when, and how much the Metabyte TNT cards will check in at?

Read on friends…

Wreed. Hier staat de rest.