Day One Conclusion

That takes care of the major talks of day one. There were other interesting things that we saw on the showroom floor, including working servers running the 1.72 billion transistor Monticeto processors (Itanium 2). We'll try to get some better shots of the setup tomorrow, but suffice it to say the die size is HUGE - even in comparison to the already rather large Smithfield die.



So far, everyone is putting on a good front for the XP-64 launch. We'll try to see how it really stacks up in our own analysis soon. Stay tuned.

Hybrid Hard Drives
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  • PrinceGaz - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    from page 3 "...and with the largest readily available DIMMs currently coming in at 2 GB in size"

    in reply to #5, #6 - Crucial have had 4GB PC2100 DIMMs available for purchase from their website for quite some time. They're certainly not cheap, but they are readily available. If you've got the cash I'm sure they'll sell you a few dozen of them.
  • DerekWilson - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    MS may have needed to restrict 64bit to long longs due to some internal operating system code issues ... If, in fact, linux distros that run on x86-64 impliment 64bit longs this may be the case. Otherwise I'd lean towards a hardware issue.

    At this point I haven't looked into it, but I will be sure to ask around (as this is surely the place to do it).
  • bobsmith1492 - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    Melgross - is that English?? I read it over real quickly and it was like... dude, what's he talking about? It just took a good close look though. :P
  • melgross - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    MS wants to control whatever they can. Control graphics memory and we are another step towards commoditized graphics boards.

    I wonder why MS went the way they did with the 64 bitness of the system. They went to (LL)P64 where just the long longs and the pointers are 64 bit, rather than LP64, where the longs are also 64 bit.

    They are the only ones to do that. It seems like a half measure. A conversion from any Unix distro (or OS X) would need more work than is good, as well as a lessening in it's effectiveness as a 64 bit system. Are the 64 bit extentions of the x86 chips at fault?
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    Okay, the typos are fixed, and those that didn't like the 8-bit PNG graphics should now be happy. Iit was 4:30 AM when we finished, so our judgement was a bit impaired.) Just don't complain about how the PNGs are now five times as large. :)

    My personal opinion is that Windows XP removed most of the problems with the Windows platform. We'll see how Longhorn works out when it gets here, but that's still almost two years off. The graphics effects are nice, but pretty much totally unnecessary. Hopefully, we'll see some true improvements in the overall performance and not just eye candy.
  • Googer - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    Linux on a MAC: Total freedom from with in a confined space.
  • DerekWilson - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    tbh, with the current state of things Linux game performance is not up to par with windows. Even with windows managing graphics memory, windows performance will likely be better.

    And from a workstation perspective, having virtualized graphics memory for free is more of a blessing than a curse.

    I do think it would be better if MS gave graphics developers a choice whether to allow windows to manage graphics memory or not...
  • Son of a N00b - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    dont you dare go screwing up the performance of my vid card ms...if you do im going linux...
  • suryad - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    Agreed. Windows should not be managing graphics ram...unless MS came up with some new techniques...MS seems to be pulling out all the stops though in my opinion. I think the hybrid drive is a good idea but like #12 said...that is quite a concern!
  • Cygni - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    #10's post makes me giggle.

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