Goutama heeft op het Silicon Investor message board een interessante analyse gemaakt over Intel's plannen met Coppermine en de nieuwe 0,18micron Celerons, die feitelijk gecastreerde Coppermines zijn met gesaboteerde L2 cache. Zijn verhaal loopt ongeveer als volgt: Om aan de vraag naar snelle PIII's te voldoen moet Intel veel Coppermines produceren, daardoor worden er veel processors geproduceerd die alleen geschikt zijn voor lagere kloksnelheden (ivm lage yields van hoger geklokte PIII's). Dit komt inmiddels tot uiting in de grote voorraden 533, 550 en 600MHz PIII's die bij distributeurs Micro X-Press en Insight worden opgebouwd. Het overschot aan lager geklokte PIII's kan Intel wegwerken door deze processors voor lage prijzen onder de Celeron merknaam te verkopen. Tevens kan de totale produktie (en daarmee het aantal hoger geklokte PIII's) omhoog omdat de PIII en Celeron op dezelfde produktielijnen geproduceerd kunnen worden:

Saracasm or not, I give Intel a lot of credit for the tacticl moves it made of late. Something is better than I personally think this is a side benefit of the segmentation scam (er, I mean scheme). I think this is how it works: Cut down Celeron production, move production to CuMine

• Increases short-term ASPs
• Increases CuMine units and the units at high MHz
• Sell the lower MHz parts in to supply-constrained environment. Once the supply/demand comes in to balance, take the lower MHz bin-splits parts kill half the cache and sell'em as Celerons. (also recovers some parts failing from cache-related yield losses)

Viola! Reduces costs, increases high-end units. Keeps them in the game at higher end a little longer. Makes lower-end more competitive against AMD and turns up the heat a notch.

Within the limitation of the CuMine core, this is SMART strategy - don't you think?

This is what exactly happening now. In order to meet the demand at high MHz, Intel is ending up with tons of lower MHz cumines (as many of us on this thread predicted) due to binsplit problems- far exceeding the demand. Only way to salvage this situation while maintaining the PIII prices at the low end is to sell the same parts under Celeron brand name with half the catch disabled. But I believe, release of spitfire will annihilate the pricing differences between Celeron and PIII low speed cpus that Intel is trying to maintain - that is, the segmentation of Celerons and PIIIs at low speed may come to an end pretty soon. Based on the data I have been collecting, Intel seems to be having bin splits of 5 to 10X more at lower speeds(550MHz & 600MHz) than at high end.

This is what I have noticed by monitoring Microexpress and Insight online data -

• Their stocks of low MHz cumines have exploded in the recent weeks.
• Their stocks of Athlons have dwindled to very few parts after the Feb price cuts. This indicates to me that Athlons are presently capacity constrained.

Here is the data from the two dealers for the past few days.

De voorraden van Micro X-Press en Insight suggereren dat de Athlon momenteel moeilijker leverbaar is. Check de SI post voor details.

xoror komt vertellen dat de final van het handige CDRWin 3.8A bakprogramma is gereleased. Hier een overzicht van de nieuwe features:

• Support for many new recorders has been added. Please see Supported Devices for a complete list of new recorder models.
• Surprise feature... MP3 file support!! You can now record MP3 files directly to an audio disc without converting them to WAV files first (they will be decoded "on the fly" automatically). The files can be recorded by either specifying them in a cuesheet or by using the "Load Tracks" feature. The MP3 decoding library was licensed from Xaudio Inc. Note: This feature is not available in the 16-bit DOS and ALPHA NT versions.
• File backup operations on the "File Backup and Tools" screen has been greatly enhanced. You can now specify directory names, file names, or wildcards (such as C:\TEST\*.EXE). You can also save a list of names to a project file and then reload them at a later date.
• Support for the "Discmatic AD1050" disc transporter has been added. This is a very nice unit that can automatically make 50 copies of a single disc without user intervention (full information on this device can be found at www.discmatic.com).

CDRWin 3.8A kun je vanaf deze link naar beneden takelen.

Overclockers Workbench brengt ons een review van de Soltek SL-77KV, een KX133 plank die er op het eerste gezicht vrij goedkoop uit ziet (kleine condensators, slot-A retention unit in iMac kleurtjes). Desondanks bleek het exemplaar dat door OCW werd getest stabiel te functioneren op busspeeds tot 115MHz en dat is absoluut niet slecht voor een Slot A mobo:

Recently, there is a craze on overclocking athlons. I gave it a try and I was able to run the Athlon 550 at an amazing 632.5Mhz (115x5.5) just by changing the FSB. You wouldn't be able to do that on an ASUS K7M although it has 1Mhz Stepping for FSB.

Well, only if Soltek is able to modify their design to incorporate a 1mhz FSB stepping on it's FSB. It will definitely be on par with the MSI K7Pro which is able to overclock to 119Mhz FSB without hitches. The performance rating is also very high.

nVidia heeft bekend gemaakt dat Microsoft een licentie heeft genomen op haar Volume Texture Compression technologie waarmee drie dimensionale textures in filesize geplet kunnen worden. VTC zal dankzij deze deal geïntegreerd worden in toekomstige versies van DirectX:

March 23, 2000 — In a move that will help bring stunning 3D graphics to internet users, NVIDIA™ Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) and Microsoft® Corp. today announced the adoption of NVIDIA's technology for Volume Texture Compression Format (VTC) for Microsoft DirectX APIs. Today's 3D internet sites are plagued with inadequate image quality due to bandwidth constraints of transmitting high-resolution textures over standard communications systems. Even for high-performance PCs, the limited amount of texture storage forces game developers to use lower-resolution textures, resulting in imagery that lacks detail. Scheduled for release in 2000, NVIDIA's VTC format enables a superior level of image quality that allows web and content developers to produce 3D objects that depict their natural characteristics.

[...] Limited texture storage has historically been a problem for game application developers, forcing compromises in image quality and performance. The texture-storage problem is exacerbated by volume textures, which are truly 3D data, unlike traditional 2D textures. Volume textures are so much larger than 2D textures that the texture compression format becomes extremely important. NVIDIA's volume texture compression format organizes 3D volume-texture data to take advantage of the 3D nature of the data, which increases the effective texture bandwidth by an enormous factor. NVIDIA has developed a proprietary method to reorder the 3D data within a volumetric image cube to account for the linear accessing required for the optimal use of the memory system of a typical computer system.

3D Wars heeft een nieuwe, super originele naam gekregen en heet nu 'Tech Extreme'. Alsof dat nog niet genoeg reden tot blijdschap is worden we ook nog getrakteerd op een review van de almachtige Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32A EIDE brander:

Clearly, the OEM system doesn't live up to the PlexWriter's potential. Still, many users have slower OEM systems, and the PlexWriter will nonetheless provide benefits to them, just not as fast as one would find on a faster system. The High-End Pentium would presumably perform better than a PC with lower performance on any piece of hardware, as was the case here. But overall, benchmark differences aside, the drive was an excellent deal for the money - not to mention that this was the fastest drive I have every tested, and the best to pass through our labs (worthy praise for any hardware). And while the instructions included in the manual were not as clear as they probably could have been (assuming a user has no previous knowledge of installing drives), most OEM manuals or case manuals should provide you with the necessary information to properly install a drive. To wrap up, I think it's fair to say the PlexWriter provides everything a consumer buying a new CDR would want at a price they won't lose sleep over- not a bad deal.

Gamers Depot heeft een korte review van de Asus K7V-RM online gezet. Het betreft hier de MicroATX versie van de K7V, geen mobo voor de hardcore tweakers maar gezien het feit dat er nog weinig K7V reviews zijn geweest is deze bespreking wellicht toch interessant voor een aantal mensen. Het bord bleek in vergelijking met de Epox 7KXA net iets slechter te presteren. Wat betreft overklokbaarheid kunnen we weinig conclusies uit de review trekken. De plank werd getest met een 1GHz Athlon die niet verder wilde dan 103MHz FSB, maar dat ligt dus waarschijnlijk aan de processor en niet aan de bord:

After a quick look at this board you'll notice that it is equipped with 1 AGP, 3PCI, 1 AMR slot, and 3 168-Pin DIMM sockets. Having an AMR slot on an MicroATX board like this makes sense as most people who'd use this board would want to save as many PCI slots as possible for other cards. For those who aren't sure what an AMR is, it's a new slot that many OEMs are utilizing as it combines both the Modem and audio onto a single PCB.

During our testing we filled up all the PCI slots with various cards, fired the machine up several times, and let it run like that for hours on end. Never once did it give us any headaches with IRQ sharing or any nuances that can plague motherboards. Our only complaint is how close the DIMM sockets are to the AGP slot, which proved to be in the way most of the time when you have a video card installed and try to swap out the memory. The lever on the end of the DIMM socket hits the video card, and makes it somewhat difficult opening it up all the way.

Het is vandaag een leerzame dag voor alle tweakers, na de monitor guide van firing squad heeft Tech-Review nu een guide on-line gezet waarin uit de doeken wordt gedaan hoe die mooie USB poortjes werken.

The arrival of USB has finally delivered an easy way to attach additional peripherals to a computer. No longer do we need to install a separate adapter card for use with a scanner, just simply plug it into the USB port and you're set to go. This idea makes so much sense that it even has a competitor by the name of FireWire.

Long touted as the ultra fast alternative to USB, FireWire has been promising an easy interface that could be used with hard drives and other installation frustrating peripherals. Owned by Apple, FireWire has made simply no impact on the current state of PC computers, and only a minor impact on Apple setups. Mainly used for transferring video from a FireWire capable video camera, onto the computer, it looks like USB 2.0 could simply put the nails in FireWire's coffin.

These two technologies however show that the computing industry is finally taking the initiative to produce an easier to build and use PC. Are we finally coming to the age of easy computing, where everything will become much more simple and self-maintained? If so, let us hope that it solves more problems than it creates.

KidPaddle schrijft dat HP aan technologie werkt, vergelijkbaar met de transmeta, waarmee binaries sneller uitgevoerd kunnen worden. Dit wordt in tegenstelling tot de transmeta in de software gedaan en daardoor zou deze technologie ook op onze P2,3 en Athlons toegepast kunnen worden om een de performance tot 20% omhoog te halen .

Dynamo is an odd beast. It is, in essence, an interpreter for HP's PA-8000 instruction set that itself runs on a PA-8000 processor. That's right -- it interprets programs that could just as easily be executed natively on the same hardware. For a research prototype, this isn't as strange as it seems. The Dynamo project was started to investigate issues in what was seen as an increasingly important area -- dynamic translation of non-native binaries to native code. For that purpose it doesn't really matter if the original binaries are non-native or not, only that, whatever they are, they're read into some internal form, munged, and spit back out for native execution. The question is only, "How can this translation be efficient, both in time and space?" What's surprising is that Dynamo "inadvertently" became practical. Programs "interpreted" by Dynamo are often faster than if they were run natively. Sometimes by 20% or more.

[...] So what's the bottom line? The following graph illustrates that "interpreting" your programs with Dynamo can provide significant performance improvements. The programs shown are part of the SPEC benchmark suite. The bars indicate Dynamo's speedup compared to binaries compiled with "+02" using HP's commercial compiler. As it turns out, HP prices their machines, in part, on the basis of their performance on these benchmarks. As a result, HP's compiler teams get big bonuses if they improve performance by even small amounts on the SPEC suite, so they spend their days trying to eke out a cycle here, a cycle there. When the Dynamo team brought their results to the compiler team it caused quite a stir.

AMD Zone kreeg dit interessante mailtje toegestuurd van een informant bij Motorola, over de G4e (codenaam Nitro - zie deze eerdere posting van vandaag) en de nauwe samenwerking tussen AMD en Motorola bij de ontwikkeling van deze proc:

Would have loved to break this news to you and everyone else back in Jan. when we started the production ramp, but it's been under pretty tight wraps. Since it was leaked, I feel I can comment and add one or two more "goodies" for ya!

Incredibly accurate, surprised they didn't mention copper though (maybe it is assumed with these two companies working together).[edit: I DID assume it. It IS copper]

Back in January on one of my first ever posts mentioned an AMD/MOT golf polo shirt being distributed at the Campuses, guess what it has on it? NITRO, an AMD/MOT collaboration.

While AMD has never formally announced a Dresden partner, that doesn't mean two companies aren't CURRENTLY using the same FAB space under an informal partnership.

The last little tidbit I'll add is this, if AMD is helping MOT with its future(G4e), could MOT be helping AMD with its future (well, I'll let you keep guessing)? (I have seen the "future" for both these companies, and I'm glad they make up over 80% of my current portfolio.)-motman

molenkamp@myrealbox.com" rel="external">Onno schrijft: "NDS eDirectory is zojuist beschikbaar gesteld op Novell's download pagina. Ik heb 'm natuurlijk meteen gedownload, en er zit een Linux client in! Voor zover ik kan zien is de client (nog?) niet geschikt om NetWare schijven te mounten, maar wel voor de alle soorten authenticatie van gebruikers en voor name resolution via NDS. Single Sign On is ook een erg handige feature":

What are the features provided by NDS on Linux? NDS provides the following features and utilities on Linux:

• NDS server
• LDAP version 3 server (with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support)
• Import LDIF data into NDS (ndsbulkload)
• Trace the NDS server (ndstrace)
• Manage and repair the NDS database (ndsrepair)
• Backup and restore NDS objects (ndsbackup)
• Service Location Protocol User and Service Agents
• ConsoleOne utility to manage objects in NDS
• NDS UAM, the user account management component.
• Single Sign On for Linux to allow users who have logged into a Linux system on the enterprise network to establish other sessions (telnet, rlogin) without re-entering their user names and passwords.
• NDS Manager utility to manage NDS partitions Novell Public Key Infrastructure Services that allow you to protect confidential data transmissions over public communications channels such as the Internet. This includes:
  -Novell International Cryptographic Infrastructure (NICI)
  -Novell Modular Authentication Services (NMAS) which includes the Secure Socket Layer implementation
  -Novell Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services

Hot Hardware verkreeg middels een niet nader te noemen bron de specificaties van Abit's KX133 bord. Naast de gegevens die al bekend waren (zie deze nieuwsposting van vorige week) weten we nu dat de KA7 wordt uitgevoerd met busspeed settings tot 183MHz in stappen van 1MHz! Uiteraard is Vcore tweakbaar en verder is Abit tot inzicht gekomen dat wij tweakers absoluut géén AMR willen. Daarvoor in de plaats krijgen we een erg handig zesde PCI slot. Als het op features aan komt heeft de KA7 het potentieel om een killer plank te worden, nu nog hopen dat het ding stabiel functioneert. Mogelijk weten we dit al over enkele weken, want volgens de informant van Hot Hardware zal de KA7 binnenkort aangekondigd worden:

OK, we hope you are not color blind here and may have missed two very distinct features of this particular Athlon Motherboard. To date, we know of no other motherboard manufacturer that has been able to boast FSB speeds up to 183MHz. on an Athlon board nor the ability to adjust core voltage of the processor. This should be a beautiful thing for most hard core overclocking types out there. Abit clearly is delivering once again to the high end power user community.

The engineers at Abit also put on their thinking caps when they decided to incorporate 6 PCI Slots and forgo the AMR slot. Another curious point here is that Abit is incorporating Data Buffers on the Memory Bank Interfaces. We are not sure, quite frankly, why this is needed but when you get up to 2GB of system memory on a board (the KA7's max) things are pretty heavily loaded.

Are you excited now? Well, you won't have to keep your cool for long because our oh-so-cooperative informant let us know that this motherboard may be available in "a couple of weeks". Abit may even be officially announcing it this Friday! Sit tight kids. This should be fun.

Thanks vsmb@superweb.nl" rel="external">ovs voor de tip.

The Rock schrijft: dat het mogelijk is om de Amerikaanse militaire wapensytemen te hacken en dat het niet alleen mogelijk is maar dat een Air Force officer het zelfs heeft gedaan als test! :

Army officials are concerned that skilled computer enthusiasts, and in particular those engaged by hostile military organisations, can hack into military weapons systems and control them remotely, Federal Computer Week reports.

The potential exists for hackers to access computerised systems used for navigation and weapons targeting, US Army Information Assurance Program Manager Major Sheryl French explained during a recent military information management conference in Houston, Texas.

According to the article, the US Department of Defence (DoD) has established through testing that a malicious hacker could penetrate the control systems of major weapons.

According to a Defense Information Systems Agency training CD-ROM, an Air Force officer in a Boston hotel used a laptop computer to break into the computers of a Navy ship at sea, and implanted spurious data in its navigation systems.

"This actually happened," the training module warns. "Fortunately, this was only a controlled test to see what could be done. In reality, the type of crime and its objective is limited only by people’s imagination and ability."

Tomson schrijft: "Mischien een beetje te klein voor de gemiddelde tweaker hier, maar GameFan meldt ons dat de langverwachte Gameboy Advance in april eindelijk aan developers zal worden voorgesteld":

The mystery that is Game Boy Advance shall soon be no more--uh, if you’re a Game Boy developer, that is. Good folks like you and I will have to wait a while, because Nintendo didn’t see fit to invite all of us to its Game Boy Advance Developers Conference 2000 on April 10th.

If you were lucky enough to have received an invite, then pack your bags for a trip to Redmond, Washington, and bring a note pad, because there could very well be a test when it’s all over... The handheld’s network capabilities and options like e-mail, Internet and online play are all expected to be discussed at the event. The GBA-Dolphin interface that Nintendo wants to emphasize when both consoles are released in 2001 is also expected to be discussed.

Tweakotine schrijft: "Na veel onduidelijkheid schijnt er toch wat licht in de zaak betreffende SMP ondersteuning voor de FC-PGA Coppermine. Volgens onderstaande post op het message board van Powerleap geeft Intel in de updated Pentium III processor specificatie aan dat de Pentium III toch support biedt voor multi-processing:":

Ok I know you guys won't belive me unless you get it from the horses mouth so here. Download: "Intel Processor Specification Update Release Date: March 2000". Look at page 13 it gives the list of FC-PGA Processors you can use together in a dual setup. Intel main concern here is that cache step and cpu clock speed is same as stated on page 11. I hope you you guys at Powerleap can now give official backing of 500e and 550e SMP that you couldn't in past.

Dit opent hopelijk nieuwe perspectieven voor Abit BP6 bezitters. Op de CeBIT werden door diverse mobo fabrikanten dual socket370 server borden gedemonstreerd, zoals de Asus CUR-DLS. Aangezien Intel uiteindelijk van plan is om volledig over te stappen op FC-PGA is het niet meer dan logisch dat deze processors SMP ondersteunen.

Via Ace's Hardware kwam ik bij deze (niet-officiële) AMD roadmap van Akiba's PC Watch. Volgens dit grafiekje wordt de Thunderbird op snelheden van 700 tot 900MHz geïntroduceerd, later gevolgd door een 950 en 1GHz versie. De Mustang zou pas begin 2001 komen en de Sledgehammer eind 2001:

Intel heeft een memootje naar z'n channel partners gestuurd waarin het duidelijk maakt dat de 1GHz Pentium III tot het derde kwartaal niet aan distributeurs en dealers geleverd zal worden. In eerste instantie komen uitsluitend de grote OEMs (Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM) aan de beurt:

"On March 8, 2000 Intel announced the introduction of the Intel® Pentium® lll processor 1GHz. Intel is initially working with customers that can provide the biggest impact in the consumer enthusiast segment at launch. Broader quantities of Pentium lll processors 1GHz will be available in Q3'00. Shipment of Boxed Intel Pentium lll processors 1GHz are expected to begin at that time."

So it will be the third quarter before there will be boxed Intel 1GHz processors. There's no word yet to the channel on when they can expect to receive boxed 866MHz and boxed 850MHz processors. But if the above is anything to go by, they'd better not promise their customers too much.

Aldus The Register.

Lost Circuits pijnigde een Epox 7KXA op haar testbank en kwam tot de conclusie dat dit KX133 plankje qua performance nogal fragiel is. Overklokken middels de 110MHz FSB setting bleek ook weinig succesvol te zijn:

The performance of the 7KXA is, at the current state of affairs, not quite up to the competition using the older AMD 751 chipset. That is, in CAD applications it is actually superior but for most games and especially Ziff Davis benchmarks, there is a substantial lag. The factor holding back the gaming performance is quite certainly the integrated sound controller in the South Bridge. In business applications, our numbers point towards a rather poor implementation of the IDE I/O interface which, incidentally, again concerns the South Bridge. A, what it seems, still immature BIOS does not help to overcome these weaknesses. Hardware alone cannot be blamed for the mediocre performance since the Tyan S2380, even though the tested version was a pre-production prototype, beat the 7KXA by lengths using an almost identical configuration.

Check de review voor meer info.

Betanews schrijft dat de onlangs uitgekomen en inmiddels erg hippe movie codec DivX een mogelijk gevaar vormt voor DVD. Dankzij DivX kan ongeveer 100 minuten film van goede kwaliteit op een CD'tje geplaatst worden. In combinatie met DeCSS wordt het op die manier redelijk simpel om een CD rip van een DVD te bouwen en dat is iets waar de filmindustrie niet gelukkig van wordt. DivX wordt daarom nu al de MP3 van de filmindustrie genoemd:

Unrelated to the now defunct DVD rental system, the new DivX codec was released just recently. The encoding process enables users to convert DVD movies to AVI without sacrificing quality or hard drive space. Encoding this new format may be tougher than the usual procedure, but the overall quality is higher than current movie types and is bound to upset the industry.

[...] An experienced encoder on IRC who wished to remain anonymous told BetaNews, "If you encode it properly, approximately 100 minutes of good DivX playback will fit on one CD. A normal MPEG rip, at a much lower quality, would take up about twice as much." Another user stated DivX was “the MP3 of the movie industry.”

Reverend kreeg van 3dfx drie exclusieve Sin screenshots toegestuurd die het kwaliteitsverschil tussen 4xFSAA, 2xFSAA en geen anti-aliasing demonstreren:

Geen Anti-Aliasing

Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (2 sub samples)

Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (4 sub samples)

Ik lees bij MacOS Rumors dat de eerste demo prototypes van de G4e inmiddels bij Motorola van de band rollen. Ten opzichte van de huidige G4 heeft de G4e een diepere pipeline waardoor hogere kloksnelheden mogelijk zijn. Om hierdoor ontstaan snelheidsverlies ruimshoots te compenseren zijn er twee extra integer units en een extra Altivec unit toegevoegd. Verder is er 256KB full-speed L2 cache met een 256-bit brede bus (vergelijkbaar met de Coppermine en Thunderbird) en de mogelijkheid om maximaal 4MB L3 cache aan te leggen. De processors draaien in eerste instantie op kloksnelheden van 650 tot 800MHz en worden vervaardigd op een 0,15micron procédé:

Motorola sources are now reporting that the first fully functional G4e prototypes to be demonstrated outside the company have recently rolled off the production line. Running at 600-700MHz, these processors sport more than double the performance of current G4s with a number of very attractive features:

• Deeper pipelines, allowing for higher clock rates (up to 1.2GHz)
• Initial clock rates ~650MHz-800MHz, with 1GHz projected at approximately five months after release.
• 256K on-chip Level 2 cache running at full processor speed on a 256-bit data bus, offering performance well in excess of current 1MB backside L2 caches.
• Backside Level 3 caches up to 4MB, running at half processor speed
• 64- and 128-bit MaxBus support
• Optimized for multiprocessing with direct processor-to-processor communications capabilities and full-speed cache sharing across CPUs
• Smaller, cooler, faster: .15 and later .13/.10 micron wiring processes
• Two additional Integer units, one additional Altivec unit.

Third party developers (waaronder Apple) zullen waarschijnlijk tot juni moeten wachten voordat zij met de G4e aan de slag kunnen. G4e PowerMacs komen op z'n vroegst deze zomer op de markt.

Thresh's Firingsquad heeft een uitgebreide guide gemaakt waarin wordt uitgelegd hoe monitoren werken:

Without a doubt, you can see just how complicated monitors and TVs are. Once you get a taste for all that is going on inside, you really learn to appreciate just how reliable your monitor is. On top of that, you just might begin to realize how unsurprising it is when a cheap monitor fails on you.

A heavy amount of engineering goes into the construction of a CRT display, and what we have here barely even scratches the surface of that engineering. For the end user, it doesn't really matter, since you'll depend on your eyes to determine whether a given monitor's image quality is "good" or "bad." That determination may vary widely from person to person, and can probably be attributed to not only individual taste, but also due to simple variances in human vision from person to person. Nevertheless, most people should be able to spot a good monitor over a bad monitor any day.

Intel zal volgende week een nieuw paar Celerons met snelheden van 566 en 600MHz op de markt zetten. De verse Selderijtjes zijn in feite gecastreerde Coppermines met een gehalveerd L2 cache en een busspeed die nog steeds beperkt is tot 66MHz. Verder is er net als bij de Pentium III support voor SSE aanwezig. De twee Celerons die komende week gereleased worden zullen in april vergezeld worden van een 633 en 667MHz, gevolgt door een 700MHz exemplaar later dit jaar:

Next week, Intel will unveil two new Celeron processors for inexpensive computers running at 566-MHz and 600-MHz, according to sources. The company will then follow up in late April with two more Celerons running at 633-MHz and 667-MHz. A 700-MHz Celeron, which in February was slated for the second half of the year, may also come out toward the end of the second quarter.

[...] The Intel processors coming next week will represent an evolutionary step forward for Celeron. Not only will the chips contain multimedia extensions, they will be the first chips made on the more advanced 0.18-micron process, which can open the door to a variety of benefits.

As a result, the chips also will contain 256KB of secondary cache, a performance-enhancing feature on the Pentium III, Brookwood said. On the Celerons, however, Intel is disabling half of the cache so the chip can only take advantage of 128KB of the cache.

Hoewel er in dit artikel van News.com niets over gezegd wordt is het te verwachten dat de nieuwe Celerons niet kunnen SMP'en (thanks Tweakotine voor de tip). Bovenstaand plaatje is afkomstig van HardOCP.com.

Ik zag dat ze bij anandtech een review van de senfu watercooler unit on-line hebben gezet. De cooler is vooral heel fijn omdat ie niet zo snel lekt, alleen de herrie die de pomp maakt is een negatief punt vonden ze.

The Senfu watercooler is recommended especially for very ambitious overclockers who would like to experiment with Peltier elements. For the average overclocker who would like to push his CPU just a bit further, good conventional heatsinks are probably the better choice.

Because of it's great compatibility with all CPU types, the Senfu watercooler is a very safe investment. And even if the heat exchanger won't fit future CPUs (that remains to be seen), you can simply upgrade to a new heat exchanger and keep using the radiator and the pump. The quality of the radiator and the heat exchanger is very good; they are perfectly leak-proof and will last many years. The pump, however, was not very convincing - better look out for alternatives.

Even though the Senfu watercooler is quite convincing (except for the pump), there's still room for improvement: The water channels inside the heat exchanger could have a larger diameter. Also, Senfu could come up with a closed-loop cooling solution that would eliminate the need for an extra water reservoir. The water reservoir is the most inconvenient thing about the watercooler; if you have to transport your PC around a lot, it can be especially annoying.

News.com schrijft dat een groepje 'hackers' een hack voor Napster in mekaar hebben geknutseld waarmee het proggie niet alleen gebruikt kan worden voor de uitwisseling van MP3'tjes, maar in feite voor alles dat met nullen en enen aan elkaar vastzit. 'Wrapster', zoals de getransformeerde Napster genoemd wordt, wordt hiermee een volwaardig alternatief voor Gnullsoft's Gnutella:

A program dubbed "Wrapster" was released yesterday that allows any kind of file to be listed and traded over the Napster network, even though the system only recognizes music files. Although Wrapster was not developed by Napster, the company has made no move to block the application.

Wrapster joins a growing list of programs allowing the quick, free and wide distribution of illegally copied files. The trend is bad news for record companies, movie studios and software companies that have fought hard to keep their wares from being pirated online.

[...] The Wrapster program tricks the Napster software into thinking that any file or set of files, including items such as software, videos or games, are MP3 files. [...] Napster said it is aware of the Wrapster program but does not yet see it as a problem.

Thanks Diederik voor de tip.