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AMD’s Trinity tested with OpenCL, does really well

For those of you who read my overview on AMD’s Trinity that launched two days ago, you might be interested in how OpenCL benefits you even if you’re not on the new platform with the “Devastator” GPU. Gaming aside, AMD’s biggest flaw is single-thread performance and an overall lack of computing muscle compared to Intel’s last-generation part, Sandy Bridge.

OpenCL looks to give customers heterogeneous computing abilities no matter the platform, allowing applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration together with your CPU to make short work of things like video encoding, photo editing and animation, to name a few workloads and AMD’s Bulldozer cores currently suck at. With Trinity, AMD has pushed forward their agenda to open the OpenCL standard to all applications that could use it and Anandtech showed the world how it could help Intel users, too.

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Posted by Wesley May 17, 2012
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EVGA announces a recall for the GTX670, offers upgrade

For those of you who already bought a GTX670 Superclock from EVGA (not likely, since you’d have to do it from the US as stocks are limited now), you mght want to check out your board’s batch number to see if you’re part of the unnumbered users who have a defective card. While there’s no information from EVGA about what the problem actually is or how to find it, the company has issued a recall for customers who bought their Superclocked series.

If you bought a GTX670 Superclock with the batch product number 02G-P3-2672-KR, you might want to stress out your card for a while and see if anything happens. It might be something, it might be nothing at all discernable to your eye. You might not even know you had a problem and you could go for years without knowing it was there until one day it smacks you in the face with a spade. Maybe you’re losing a few frames and your settings are at stock or the fan is too loud. At this point, if you’re desperate, you really could make up anything you want until you hit on the right fault. 

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Posted by Wesley May 17, 2012
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USS Enterprise will take $1 trillion, 20 years to build

I love being a geek. I’m allowed to indulge in my fantasies about high-end hardware, living in a universe dominated by Pokemon or being able tell people that crediting Thomas Edison for the creation of the lightbulb is a farce. It’s thanks to many geeks and deep thinkers that we have the Internet, computers and wonderful games like Diablo III to whittle away our free time with. But this geek takes it to new levels.

Wanna see me? Buy a telescope!

An anonymous electrical and systems engineer who calls himself “Dan”, nicknamed by the Internet as “Scotty”, has uploaded plans and details of how we could build a full-scale version of the starship USS Enterprise that takes us to the Red Planet in ninety days. And all with technology currently available to us.

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Posted by Wesley May 17, 2012
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Court finds Wi-Fi network owner not guilty of pirating

Over in Finland there’s been a scuffle in court with the government and a Finnish woman that’s been going on since July 2010. The Finnish Anti-Piracy Centre monitors connections on al the ISPs in the country and found that there was some illegal filesharing happening on the lady owner’s network. Since the FAPC doesn’t like people sharing files illegally, it decided to sue her for an obscene amount of money, hoping to win the case and allow them to pursue more people who share files that are either protected IP or content deemed illegal by the government. That’s generally the same M.O. of the US-based RIAA – they take filesharers to court and sue them for thousands or millions of dollars in damage. And win, quite often.

The Finnish Anti-Piracy Centre (FAPC) wanted to claim €6000 from the woman (approximately R64,000) for some piracy that took place over a twelve-minute period. What was actually shared has never been mentioned outside the courts, but recently the case came to a head and the judge rules that the woman was not guilty. But what this means for other cases all around the planet is a bit unclear. 

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Posted by Wesley May 17, 2012
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AMD’s Trinity launched yesterday, does reasonably well

I say reasonably well because AMD’s Llano and Bulldozer chips have been underwhelming performers thus far. The company decided to design a new architecture that focuses on conserving resources, improving power efficiency and reducing heat generation. Its a good idea on paper compared to Intel’s approach of continuing the growth of Moore’s law using 3D-layered transistors, but in reality it strangles single-thread performance and requires higher clock speeds to match anything from Intel’s stable. In addition, there’s not a lot to differentiate CPUs from the same family. In gaming benchmarks, AMD’s FX-4100 performs similarly to the FX-8120, with some margin of improved frame rates in certain games thanks to the higher clock speeds of the quad-core chip.

Left to Right: Llano, Trinity and Phenom, three distant cousins

Yes, despite that some people say AMD’s FX-8120 is a octo-core chip, its really four Bulldozer modules with two single-core chips per module, squashed together and forced to share cache, floating point units and bandwidth. Likewise for the quad-core chip, which has two modules and really can’t contend with even Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based Pentiums. For laptops and desktops, AMD promised that Trinity would improve performance by 15% overall and prove a worthy upgrade from the Llano chips of old. Lets see how they’ve delivered.

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Posted by Wesley May 16, 2012
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Apple asks Kaspersky to help improve OS X Security

In the same fashion that many Linux distributions aren’t targeted by viruses and malware, Apple’s proprietary  Mac OS X platform was never much of a good target for hackers to begin with. The platform has only gained a lot of traction in the past four years and is a more recognised name globally, synonymous for some with extreme quality and ease of use. But for others, OS X has become a viable target for malware and information or identity theft.

Just last year, in August, Apple was alerted to a botnet building up among their customer’s computers, at its height claiming over five hundred thousand desktops under its control in under two months. By the third, another hundred thousand desktops and laptops were under hacker’s control and there wasn’t any word immediately from the Cupertino company about how they were going to fix it. Oracle’s Java was the source of the vulnerability and it was patched by the company four months later in February – but Apple never pushed out the update immediately, choosing o rather wait and teat it out before pushing to their servers last week. 

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Posted by Wesley May 15, 2012
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Laptop Buyer’s Guide: May R9000 to R15000

Now for those of you who need something a little beefier than what I showed you in my previous Laptop Buyer’s Guide, here’s where you need to be sitting with your morning cup of coffee and reading up on.  You’re looking for a laptop that perhaps needs to be a road-warrior workhorse, able to keep you going out of the office when you’re working from home or on a luxury yacht somewhere. Perhaps you’d just like a system that isn’t as anemic when it comes to graphics performance as what I showed you last week and that’s certainly the case if you’re a gamer.

Some of you may also need something that falls between the two for photographers and professionals who need some monstrous computing power to enable to you do your work while you’re moving, because you’re always moving. Today I’ll be looking at Ultrabooks, Ultrabook alternatives and laptops up to R15,000 and I’ll try to cover all the bases as to what you, dear reader, have been looking for.

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Posted by Wesley May 15, 2012
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Doctor Who Theme Song Performed by Floppy Drives

Admittedly, I’m a geek. I’m a bigger geek than most people I know. I love the Doctor Who series and I’ve been watching it in between writing columns. For those of you who know the theme tune, however, you might want to look at this.

Yes, the video above shows a set of eight floppy drives performing the tune of the opening of the show. There are many examples of people using these old floppy drives for music. There’s one for Skyrim’s opening done by the same guy, as well as other popular hit songs and video game soundtracks. Give MrSolidSnake745′s page a visit, won’t you? Its the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

Posted by Wesley May 14, 2012
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Kepler cards in your chassis, stealing your watts and monies

For those of you who’ve been saving up for Nvidia’s new graphics cards, you’ll no doubt be waiting for some sign that they’re available in retail stores for you to pick up. Some of you might have already auto-subscribed to stock level notifications, but for those of you who haven’t, here’s where you can find something to power your games for the next two years.

I had a quick look online and through the major retailers that I usually rely on for prices. Other retailers might have stock as well and you might be lucky if your brick-and-mortar local shop has them in stock. Price levels of the GTX680 have dropped a bit and general availability is improving. The GTX690 is a bit of a rarity and is still very hard to find. Impresively, the GTX670 has finally reached our shores, astounding considering the card only launched four days ago. Nvidia is trying very hard to regain market and mind share and that effort is very noticeable in the amount of cards available online today. Have a look for yourself. 

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Posted by Wesley May 14, 2012
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Nvidia GTX690 Analysis: Should you buy one?

So Nvidia’s been on a paper launch roll since the release of Kepler with the flagship, the GTX680. It was a mind-bogglingly good card with astounding value for money for the month that it was the sole one available. Those of you who have one already and are reading this are no doubt smiling – it probably gives you that same fizzing sensation James May keeps admitting that builds up in his crotch behind his penis (for reference, yours is called a nerdgasm). Yes, you too get the same feeling that Citroen DS4 Racing owners will get when you roll up in a French car people actually like.

Cue those "Winter is Coming" puns. Yes, I know you want to.

So now for those of you who don’t want to toy with a wanna-be flagship for the gaming graphics card industry, there’s the GTX690 to consider. Go on, click that “More” button! You’re going to want to know what’s inside this analysis…

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Posted by Wesley May 14, 2012
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