Naast Anandtech heeft ook Sharky Extreme een Pentium III 550 onder de loep genomen.

At an estimated price tag of $650 - $750 the new Intel desktop flagship is not for the faint of heart. Luckily it seems to be getting more and more clear that SSE support will not fade back into the woodwork as MMX has, instead it will be used to prolong the effective lifespan of the P3 line well into the next decade. As Intel rival AMD readies their next generation CPU, the K7, for production, it's interesting to note that the P3-550 is already in the ring waiting for the fight to begin. Intel's massive infrastructure of design and manufacturing has produced a fantastic example of technology with the P3-550, will AMD's counter punch be enough to stem the tide of Intel's advance? And will "3DNow2" offer the same degree of software support and performance enhancements that SSE is beginning to already? These questions will have to wait to be answered until mid/late July (the time that the K7-500 will begin to ship in light to medium quantities). For now the bar has been raised to a new high with the P3-550's introduction, and it will surely be tough for any semiconductor manufacturer to match it, much less exceed it anytime soon.

Voor alle Voodoo3 bezitters een zeer handige tool, de Voodoo3 overclocker. De nieuwe versie 2.1 is net uit.

The new Voodoo3 Q3A drivers use a different method to turn the D3D Video Filter On. The first set of drivers put an entry in the registry set to "1" to turn the D3D Video Filter Off and removed the entry to turn it On. The new Q3A drivers always leave the entry in and change the value to control the on/off state. My code should have allowed for either method but due to a bug on my part it didn't. So I've modified the read/write portion of the code to correctly allow for either method. My code now follows the new drivers method and leaves the entry in and changes the value for state changes.

Blabla, allemaal heel interessant, hier kun je hem naar beneden laden (hoe verzint ie het)

Tom heeft nu een editorial geschreven over zijn methode om Q3Test te benchmarken. Ook biedt hij zijn excuses aan aan zijn lezers en Brian Hook:

The next thing I need to say is addressed to Brian Hook. I am fully aware of the fact that I haven't been particularly nice to him and I am indeed impressed about his pretty humble response to my posting. As little as I know about Brian, I know that humbleness is not exactly one of his major virtues and thus it was certainly not easy for him to be as politically correct as he was. Now many of you are certainly convinced that humbleness is not exactly one of my major virtues either and I know that it would be a waste of our all time if I should comment on that. However, since Brian gave an impressive example indeed, I will try my best to be politically correct as well. Dear Brian, I am sorry if I should have insulted you. You are the one person who probably knows best why I felt forced to make a point against you. The emails I received from you in the past have not exactly been examples for good etiquette and your postings, as the infamous 'Gramdmaster B', could also not increase my respect for you. Other people may pay homage to you as if you were some kind of god, only due to the fact that you work at Id. I see you as a normal human being made from flesh and blood, who happens to take part in the development of software developed by Id. I know that you are not directly responsible for the 'timedemo'-part of the code, which is why I did not accept you as an authority in this matter. The vague comments that 'timedemo is not working properly' didn't bother me too much, since this was more than obvious in the first place. The combination of those facts with the wrong anticipation that my 'timedemo'-scores would be untouchable made me make my comments, which turned out to be unfortunate and wrong.

Toch wel interessant om even te lezen

Nieuwsgierig naar die 700MHz CPU waar Anand het al een tijdje over heeft? Iedereen maar tegen beter weten in hopen dat het toch de K7 zou zijn, maar nee hoor: het blijkt gewoon een PIII-550 te zijn, die met moeite 700MHz haalt...

Maar goed, 700MHz is nog steeds niet iets om onblij over te zijn :

n terms of overclocking, the 550 definitely has the ability to run at much higher frequencies than the 500 could. While most 500MHz Pentium III?s maxed out at around 560MHz (112MHz x 5.0), the 550 can easily hit 616MHz (112MHz x 5.5) with L2 cache enabled. After reaching 616MHz the ability to run the 550 any higher begins to be dependent on the quality of and the cooling applied to (if any) the processor?s L2 cache. At 616MHz, the L2 cache operates at 308MHz, over 10% above its rated operating frequency. The next possible setting is 644MHz (117MHz x 5.5) which was stable with some added cooling, although your success will vary even more from chip to chip than the ability to hit 616. At 644MHz, the L2 cache runs at 322MHz, around 17% above the specified operating frequency. After 644MHz it quickly becomes very difficult to overclock the 550 with L2 cache enabled. [break]Waar die 700Mhz nou is? Dat was zonder L2 cache :[/break]An interesting phenomenon occurred after manipulating the clock multiplier of the processor, the L2 cache was disabled. This allowed the core of the Pentium III 550 to truly be put to the test, and after booting into Windows 98 at 100MHz x 6.5 (650MHz) the next step was running at the big 700 (100MHz x 7.0). Surprisingly enough, the sample hit 700MHz without any added cooling (other than the retail heatsink/fan) although its stability was next to nonexistent.

Nog maar net gereleased en nu al een review bij Operation Sports. Het lukt ze alleen nog niet om er erg positief over te zijn: problemen met V2's, slecht geluid, een zwaar irritante copy protection en veel spellen die er niet eens mee starten. Hier heppie een stuk:

First lets talk about the graphics. In software mode, a lot of games work fine. They look just like they do on the PlayStation and run remarkably smooth. There are still a lot of games that do not run at all or have some major flaws so you can't play them well. In Direct 3D mode, the games look much better than on the PlayStation, but even more games have graphical flaws that ruin the game. Also the speed of the game increases greatly, making it impossible to play. Once these flaws are ironed out though, the Direct 3D mode is going to be awesome!

The audio is just plain terrible. Now I know why they took it out of the demo. I would have never bought bleem! if I knew the audio was this bad. I have tried every possible combination of settings on a MX200 and MX300 and the sound was terrible. I hope they spend a good amount of time trying to improve this part of the emulation. This emulator is not worth a penny with the sound the way it is right now.

Gurutech heeft een artikel geschreven over het gebruik van koper als geleider in chips. Koperen draadjes zijn beter/sneller/kleiner:

Most processors now-a-days use alluminum wiring. But the more transistors a CPU has, the slower the electricity flow. And slower electricity flow = slower processing speeds. So what's to be done? Upgrade the wiring to something faster...and that's where Copper comes in.

...but not quite yet. The thing with Copper is, for it to really increase the speed of the processor, the process size would have to be 0.13 micron, and no semiconducter manufacturers are reportedly going to be supporting this size until 2000. But that doesn't stop some people.

Gamecenter heeft een aantal screenshots van het Opposing Force expansion pack voor Half-Life gepost. Ik heb ff drie tumbnails gemaakt:

Gamespy heeft 10 super wazige screenshot (foto's) van Team Fortress 2 gepost. De shots vind je hier, maar zoals gezegd is de kwaliteit niet overweldigend.

AGN 3D heeft verse info over een lading nieuwe hardware van Logitech: de WingMan Gaming mouse, SoundMan X1 / X2 speakers, Wingman Force Feedback mouse en de WingMan Gamepad Extreme.

Die force feedback muis moet weird zijn. Dit is wat Joshua Krane van AGN 3D er van zegt:

While the mouse has some decent out of the box support, I wish I could say the same about the performance. The mouse was just too damn hard to get used to for my tastes. Logitech has been able to compensate for the lack of being able to pick up and re-center the mouse, but the trade off is rather awkward axis mapping that is too sensitive to make discrete small movements essential to FPS games. I won't know for sure until I get one into the office, but if you can't adjust the poll rate, this mouse is one to pass by.

Ace's Hardware heeft deel 5 gepost in z'n serie 'Secrets of High Performance CPUs' artikelen. In dit deel komt de EPIC instruction set aan de beurt:

Intel's x86 architecture is now 20 years old, and it is crystal clear that designing a fast x86 CPU is like designing a race car with the brakes on. While the Pentium was a big step forward compared to the 486, the PII could not show the same improvement over the Pentium.

Intel is well aware that the x86 instruction set is limiting CPU performance and is working hard on the next Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): EPIC. To Intel, "IA-64 is the architecture for the next 10 to 15 years." This new ISA should allow Intel to ditch the old x86 architecture, and design CPUs which would dwarf all older RISC and x86 CPUs.

What are the advantages of EPIC? Why does Intel want to get rid of the x86 architecture that made them famous and rich? Find out in the fifth part of the "Secrets" series: the final showdown between EPIC and the others!

Maxium Hardware heeft een zooitje door bezoekers ingestuurde benchmarks van Unreal gepost. Check ze hier.

Ondanks dappere pogingen van Sony om release te voorkomen is de uiteindelijke versie van Bleem, de Playstation emulator voor PC dan toch eindelijk uit.

in a nutshell, bleem! is a SOFTWARE EMULATOR that lets you play many Playstation games on your PC! As we approach launch, we'll post a list of games that we know work with bleem! so you can check for your favorites - and to be absolutely positive, we'll have a free demo version online so you can try bleem! for yourself!

Je kunt hem hier vinden.

De ontwikkeling van Linux gaat sneller dan Bill kan knipogen. Gisteren maakten we melding van de release van development kernel 2.3.1, nu is kernel 2.3.2 alweer te krijgen op de bekende plaatsen. Een korte breakdown van de verbeteringen:

• Alpha architecture updates.
• More code updated to the new wait queue scheme.
• x86 MTRR code updates: Minor cleanups. Centaur C6 MCRs now supported.
• Minor IDE driver update.
• Minor SCSI driver updates.
• USB updates.
• Skeleton USB Abstract Control Model support added.
• 16 color VGA framebuffer console driver added.
• Minor MDA console driver update.
• Read only EFS filesystem support added.
• Minor buffer code update.
• Minor ext2 filesystem driver update.
• FAT filesystem driver updates: Cache changed to use starting cluster. Bogosity with FAT32 fixed. Other updates.
• Major HPFS filesystem driver updates.
• VFS updates.
• MS-DOS filesystem driver updates.
• NCP network filesystem driver updates.
• Minor kernel NFS daemon update.
• Typo in SMB filesystem driver fixed. (Missing semicolon.)
• UMSDOS filesystem driver updates.
• VFAT filesystem driver updates.
• Minor ipv4 update.

Als je pas net met Linux bent begonnen hoef je hier trouwens niet aan te beginnen en kun je beter wachten tot de nieuwe features tot de stable kernels zijn doorgedrongen. Die is inmiddels gevorderd tot versie 2.2.9, trouwens.