It was just a matter of time, that ARM would announce a 64-bit architecture. ARM has made it official that a 64-bit architecture is coming, and the focus is on servers, but also retail where performance is in demand. ARM has been discussing implemented 64-bit support with its processors, but for several years nothing have been made official, until now. ARM says it is coming and that the new high-performance Cortex-A processor will be announced in 2012. The current architecture is code-named ARMv7 and sports technologies like TrustZone, virtualization and NEON SIMD. ARMv8 will support 64-bit (AArch64) instructions that will be fully compatible with 32-bit code (AArch32) and ARMv7. ARM is holding the details surrounding ARMv8, besides that it will run 64-bit code and target businesses and servers. ARM license partners already has access to the new architecture, and will start building up an eco system for it before it reaches the market. It will take some time before ARMv8 appeas though. Prototypes are slated for 2014, so it's not likely we will see system processors based on ARMv8 until 2016. ARM's plans have been well received by partners like Microsoft and NVIDIA, and the stock value was up 9.13% to 30.25 dollar after the announcement. We have no doubt that exciting times are before us as ARM improves performance and seriously starts to compete with the dominating x86 architecture in performance.

Hewlett-Packard will keep its personal computer division rather than spin it off to shareholders, as its then chief executive, Léo Apotheker, had proposed before he was ousted last month.

Mr Apotheker’s successor as chief executive, Meg Whitman, said on Thursday that the biggest PC maker by revenue had studied the issue and found that the benefits of separation were outweighed by factors including the price advantages HP enjoys as a large buyer of computer components.

“This was first and foremost a math exercise, and a very revealing one,” Ms Whitman told the Financial Times. “I also took into account the distraction that a spin-off would be. We need to focus on excellence now.”

She said she had heard from customers who wanted HP to retain the division, which turns a modest profit on more than $40bn in sales. Ms Whitman had hinted that she and the HP board were likely to come to that conclusion. On Thursday, she said the decision was hers but that the board, which has been badly divided on many issues for years, gave unanimous approval.

Ms Whitman also said she was not considering whether to reverse another controversial decision by Mr Apotheker, to stop producing tablets and smartphones using HP’s webOS touch-based operating system.

Instead, she said her next big decision involved what else to do with that software. She and Todd Bradley, PC division chief, said the possibilities included using it in other HP hardware, selling it off or licensing it to outside manufacturers. “Todd and I are committed to alternative devices, such as tablets and ultra-thin notebooks,” Ms Whitman said.

HP intends to have an alternative technology to flash on the market in eighteen months, an alternative to DRAM in three to four years and, following DRAM, a replacement for SRAM, Stan Williams, Senior Fellow at HP, told the IEF2011 meeting in Seville this morning.

"We’re planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half," said Williams, "and we also intend to have an SSD replacement available in a year and a half."

"In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we’ll replace SRAM."

"Flash is a done deal," said Williams, "now we’re going after DRAM, and we think we can do two orders of magnitude improvement in terms of switching energy per bit."

HP’s technology allows the memory layers to be put directly on top of the processor layer making for very fast systems on chip.

"We put the non-volatile memory right on top of the processor chip, and, because you’re not shipping data off-chip, that means we get the equivalent of 20 years of Moore’s Law performance improvement," said Williams.

"We’re running hundreds of wafers through the fab," said Williams, we’re way ahead of where we thought we would be at this moment in time."

HP’s approach is memristor, thin film technology which it allows it to stack an "arbitrary number of layers," said Williams, with 500 bn memristors per layer at 5nm.

Asked if HP was going back into the components business, Williams replied: "We’re the world’s largest purchaser of DRAM and the second largest buyer of flash and we’re trying to disrupt and re-arrange our supply chain. The plan is to license this technology to anyone who wants it, and we’ll teach them how to make it. But you’ll have to stand in line, we have a bunch of people queued for it. We’re doing this because, frankly, we didn’t see a hell of a lot of innovation happening out there."

Asked about the competition, Williams said: "Samsung has an even larger group working on this than we do."

Williams was appointed by David Packard to get HP into nanotechnology. HP has supported his efforts ever since. "I’ve been through seven CEOs and never had a glitch or a downturn," said Williams.

The bets are off, it looks like Intel is in for a price-performance shock with AMD's Bulldozer, after all. In the press deck of AMD FX Processor series leaked by DonanimHaber ahead of its launch, AMD claims huge performance leads over Intel. To sum it up, AMD claims that its AMD FX 8150 processor is looking Intel's Core i7-980X in the eye in game tests, even edging past it in some DirectX 11 titles.

It is performing on par with the Core i7-2600K in several popular CPU benchmarks such as WinRAR 4, X.264 pass 2, Handbrake, 7Zip, POV Ray 3.7, ABBYY OCR, wPrime 32M, and Bibble 5.0. AMD FX 8150 is claimed to be genuinely benefiting from the FMA4 instruction set that Sandy Bridge lacks, in the OCL Performance Mandelbrot test, the FX 8150 outperforms the i7-2600K by as much as 70%. Lastly, the pricing of the FX 8150 is confirmed to be around the $250 mark. Given this, and the fact that the Core i7-2600K is priced about $70 higher, Intel is in for a price-performance shock.

A slip-up by Intel revealed its next high-performance socket LGA1155 processor, the Core i7-2700K. The box part product code of the new chip was disclosed in the latest material deceleration datasheet (MDS) document, as BX80623I72700K, carrying the spec code SR0DG. From the given product code, one can deduce the SKU as Core i7-2700K. No other specifications were given out, but given that Core i5 2000 and Core i7 2000 quad-core models are spaced out in steps of 100 MHz, one can only guess that the i7-2700K carries a clock speed of 3.50 GHz, with 3.90 GHz Turbo Boost. In all likelihood, the release of this new chip could be timed to coincide with AMD FX 8150, displacing the Core i7-2600K from its existing price-point, and making the 2600K compete with the FX-8150 at a more competitive price.

The unnamed 28nm chip (found on the red PCB) was installed on a test or reference board and ran Codemasters' DirectX 11-capable Dirt 3 racing game. Unfortunately we can't see any performance numbers but the idea of this is to show the world that AMD is closer than say Nvidia to delivering 28nm GPUs.

Why FPS fails
As you no doubt know, nearly all video game benchmarks are based on a single unit of measure, the ubiquitous FPS, or frames per second. FPS is a nice instant summary of performance, expressed in terms that are relatively easy to understand. After all, your average geek tends to know that movies happen at 24 FPS and television at 30 FPS, and any PC gamer who has done any tuning probably has a sense of how different frame rates "feel" in action.
Of course, there are always debates over benchmarking methods, and the usual average FPS score has come under fire repeatedly over the years for being too broad a measure. We've been persuaded by those arguments, so for quite a while now, we have provided average and low FPS rates from our benchmarking runs and, when possible, graphs of frame rates over time. We think that information gives folks a better sense of gaming performance than just an average FPS number.
Still, even that approach has some obvious weaknesses. We've noticed them at times when results from our FRAPS-based testing didn't seem to square with our seat-of-the-pants experience. The fundamental problem is that, in terms of both computer time and human visual perception, one second is a very long time. Averaging results over a single second can obscure some big and important performance differences between systems.

We didn't set out to hunt down multi-GPU micro-stuttering. We just wanted to try some new methods of measuring performance, but those methods helped us identify an interesting problem. I think that means we're on the right track, but the micro-stuttering issue complicates our task quite a bit.

In fact, in a bit of a shocking revelation, Petersen told us Nvidia has "lots of hardware" in its GPUs aimed at trying to fix multi-GPU stuttering. The basic technology, known as frame metering, dynamically tracks the average interval between frames. Those frames that show up "early" are delayed slightly—in other words, the GPU doesn't flip to a new buffer immediately—in order to ensure a more even pace of frames presented for display. The lengths of those delays are adapted depending on the frame rate at any particular time. Petersen told us this frame-metering capability has been present in Nvidia's GPUs since at least the G80 generation, if not earlier. (He offered to find out exactly when it was added, but we haven't heard back yet.)

The Intel Developer Forum kicked off this morning and when it comes to desktop hardware all the focus is on the companies upcoming X79 chipset and the new LGA 2011 socket that will debut along with it. When the platform launches it will usher in the first Sandy Bridge-E processors and we know these high-performance will suck down some power. We heard rumors months ago that the TDP of these processors would be 130W and that Intel would be shipping many of their retail boxed processors without CPU coolers as they would be offering an optional CPU water coolers for overclockers and enthusiasts.

It appears that those rumors were true as we just were introduced to the Intel Thermal Solution RTS2011LC for Intel LGA2011 and also LGA1366/1155/1156 sockets. The retail packaging is already done and the CPU Cooler is said to be in production and Intel had numerous of these liquid coolers running in their demo systems at IDF.

You'll have to buy it separate from a processor and we would guess that it will retail in the $100-$125 price range. The Intel Thermal Solution RTS2011LC will also be backed by a three year warranty.

While out at an event in AMD’s Austin offices a couple of weeks back, we got a chance to get up close and personal with the company’s upcoming Bulldozer-based FX-line of processors. Many of the details disclosed at the event are still under embargo, but AMD is allowing a bit of a sneak peek with today’s Guinness World Record announcement.

One of the demos at AMD’s HQ consisted of an array of overclocked FX processors, using various cooling methods, including air, water, and phase-change hardware. But the real star of the event was a liquid-nitrogen / liquid-helium setup that allowed AMD’s overclocking team to push a pre-release AMD FX-8150 processor to well over 8GHz, setting a world record for modern processor frequency in the process.

In anticipation of the release of Bulldozer AMD flew a select few press down to Austin Texas for an editor’s or tech day to witness Bulldozer in action and watch them attempt to break the previous world record for highest frequency CPU.

Yesterday AMD announced that it had begun revenue shipments of the first Bulldozer processors for servers.

AMD mentioned that it will be shipping Zambezi processors before the end of September and is "tracking to an expected Q4 launch and availability for those parts".

REDMOND, Wash. – June 1, 2011 – Today, at the D9 Conference, we demonstrated the next generation of Windows, internally code-named “Windows 8,” for the first time. Windows 8 is a reimagining of Windows, from the chip to the interface. A Windows 8-based PC is really a new kind of device, one that scales from touch-only small screens through to large screens, with or without a keyboard and mouse.

The demo showed some of the ways we’ve reimagined the interface for a new generation of touch-centric hardware. Fast, fluid and dynamic, the experience has been transformed while keeping the power, flexibility and connectivity of Windows intact.

Here are a few aspects of the new interface we showed today:
• Fast launching of apps from a tile-based Start screen, which replaces the Windows Start menu with a customizable, scalable full-screen view of apps.
• Live tiles with notifications, showing always up-to-date information from your apps.
• Fluid, natural switching between running apps.
• Convenient ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen, so you can really multitask using the capabilities of Windows.
• Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.
• Fully touch-optimized browsing, with all the power of hardware-accelerated Internet Explorer 10.

We also showed effortless movement between existing Windows programs and new Windows 8 apps. The full capabilities of Windows continue to be available to you, including the Windows Explorer and Desktop, as does compatibility with all Windows 7 logo PCs, software and peripherals.

Although the new user interface is designed and optimized for touch, it works equally well with a mouse and keyboard. Our approach means no compromises — you get to use whatever kind of device you prefer, with peripherals you choose, to run the apps you love. This is sure to inspire a new generation of hardware and software development, improving the experience for PC users around the world.

Today, we also talked a bit about how developers will build apps for the new system. Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML to deliver new kinds of experiences. These new Windows 8 apps are full-screen and touch-optimized, and they easily integrate with the capabilities of the new Windows user interface. There’s much more to the platform, capabilities and tools than we showed today.

We are excited to bring an innovative new platform and tools to developers and see how their creativity jumpstarts a new generation of apps. Windows 8 apps can use a broad set of new libraries and controls, designed for fluid interaction and seamless connectivity. Apps can add new capabilities to Windows and to other apps, connecting with one another through the new interface. For example, we showed today how a developer can extend the file picker control to enable picking from their own app content or from within another Windows 8 app, in addition to the local file system and the network. We’re just getting started.

And this isn’t just about touch PCs. The new Windows experience will ultimately be powered by application and device developers around the world — one experience across a tremendous variety of PCs. The user interface and new apps will work with or without a keyboard and mouse on a broad range of screen sizes and pixel densities, from small slates to laptops, desktops, all-in-ones, and even classroom-sized displays. Hundreds of millions of PCs will run the new Windows 8 user interface. This breadth of hardware choice is unique to Windows and central to how we see Windows evolving.

The video below introduces a few of the basic elements of the new user interface. Although we have much more to reveal at our developer event, BUILD (Sept. 13 - 16 in Anaheim, Calif.), we’re excited to share our progress with you.
Video

There's a lot happening in the SSD space right now. All of the high end manufacturers have put forward their next-generation controllers. With all of the cards on the table it's clear that SandForce is the performance winner once again this round. So far nothing has been able to beat the SF-2200, although some came close—particularly if you're still using a 3Gbps SATA controller.

All isn't lost for competing drives however. While SandForce may be the unequivocal performance leader, compatibility and reliability are both unknowns. SandForce is still a very small company with limited resources. Although validation has apparently improved tremendously since the SF-1200 last year, it takes a while to develop a proven track record. As a result, some users and corporations feel more comfortable buying from non-SF based competitors—although the SF-2200 may do a lot to change some minds once it starts shipping.

The balance of price, performance and reliability is what keeps this market interesting. Do you potentially sacrifice reliability for performance? Or give up some performance for reliability? Or give up one for price? It's even tougher to decide when you take into account that all of the players involved have had major firmware bugs. Even though Intel appears to have the lowest return rate out of all of the drives it's not excluded from the reliability/compatibility debate.
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The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.
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If there's one thing Crucial focused on with the m4 it's random write speeds. The 256GB m4 is our new king of the hill when it comes to random write performance. It's actually faster than a Vertex 3 when writing highly compressible data. It doesn't matter if I run our random write test for 3 minutes or an hour, the performance over 6Gbps is still over 200MB/s.
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Sequential read speed is definitely down from the C300, despite Crucial's claim that random read performance was sacrificed to improve sequential read performance. The m4 so far appears to have better write performance at the sacrifice of read speed.
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My remaining concerns with the m4 are really not that different from those I had with the C300. Crucial's very late garbage collection allows the possibility for some very poor write speeds over time. If you're running in a configuration without TRIM support, I'd say this is enough to rule out the m4. Sure performance should recover with sequential write passes, however if your workload isn't sufficiently sequential then this could pose a problem. If you do have a TRIM enabled OS I'm not entirely sure how the m4 will behave over time. TRIM should keep things running smoothly but that will largely depend on workload. Again, I think that for most desktop/notebook users the m4 will do just fine but it's tough to say for sure without months of testing under my belt. In other words, like any other brand new SSD—approach with caution.

Intel 320 Series SSDs available in capacities up to 600GB

Intel threw us for a loop when it announced its 510 Series 6Gbps SSDs exactly a month ago. The SSDs didn't use an Intel controller, and instead used a Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 6Gbps controller. Despite the use of a non-Intel controller, performance for the SSDs was nonetheless impressive with read speeds of up to 500MB/sec and write speeds of up to 315MB/sec.

Today, Intel announced its third generation "in-house" 310 Series SSDs which now take advantage of 25nm NAND flash memory. Unfortunately, according to AnandTech, these SSDs are around six months late meaning they still use a SATA II interface. Performance is also not quite up to par with the 510 Series, with maximum read speeds of 270MB/sec and maximum write speeds of 220MB/sec.

The big news is the use of 25nm memory that Intel says allows a 30 percent price reduction compared to the second generation X25-M SSDs.

"Intel designed new quality and reliability features into our SSDs to take advantage of the latest 25nm silicon, so we could deliver cost advantages to our customers," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group. "Intel's third generation of SSDs adds enhanced data security features, power-loss management and innovative data redundancy features to once again advance SSD technology. Whether it's a consumer or corporate IT looking to upgrade from a hard disk drive, or an enterprise seeking to deploy SSDs in their data centers, the new Intel SSD 320 Series will continue to build on our reputation of high quality and dependability ovesr the life of the SSD."

The Intel 320 Series SSDs will be available in 40GB, 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 300GB, an 600GB capacities at prices of $89, $159, $209, $289, $529, and $1,069 respectively.

A problem requiring a "silicon fix" is bad news in the chipset business, and sadly that's what Intel is announcing. Its new Intel 6 Series chipset, Cougar Point, has been found to have a flaw, something to do with the SATA controller. Intel is indicating that the ports can "degrade over time," leading to poor i/o performance down the road. All shipments have been stopped and a fix has been implemented for new deliveries, but it sounds like recalls will be starting soon for those with this ticking time bomb silicon within. It isn't a critical problem right now, though, so if you own a Sandy Bridge Core i5 or Core i7 system keep computing with confidence while looking for a recall notice, but it is bad news for Intel's bottom line: the company is advising a $300 million hit to revenue.