Friday, June 29, 2007

Bugs on Core 2 Duo

OpenBSD founder, Theo de Raadt posted a rant in a mailing list that alleged Intel's Core 2 processors were plagued with many "serious bugs".

Various developers are busy implementing workarounds for serious bugs in Intel's Core 2 CPU.

These processors are buggy as hell, and some of these bugs don't just cause development/debugging problems, but will *ASSUREDLY* be exploitable from userland code.
As is typical, BIOS vendors will be very late providing workarounds/fixes for these processors bugs. Some bugs are unfixable and cannot be worked around. Intel only provides detailed fixes to BIOS vendors and large operating system groups. Open Source operating systems are largely left in the cold.

An easier summary document for some people to read: HERE

See also: Tech Report

The guys at ExtremeTech have asked Intel to comment, but the company would not confirm or deny Raadt's assessment or discuss any plans for a respin or recall of Core 2 chips. Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer appeared to downplay the allegations.

Toshiba Begins to Sell AMD-Based Notebooks

Toshiba’s U.S. division on Tuesday (06/26) announced its first two laptops powered by processors by Advanced Micro Devices along with graphics cores by ATI, graphics product group of AMD, in years. The move not only brings some additional revenues to struggling AMD, but also emphasizes the trend among computer makers to have at least two suppliers of core PC components.

The new laptops from Toshiba are Satellite A215-S4767 and A215-S4757, which are mostly aimed at price-conscious buyers, but they still carry some advanced technology, such as dual-core microprocessors, large hard disk drives, plenty of memory, DVD burner, advanced displays and so on. The Satellite A215 is Toshiba’s first AMD-based notebook computers since 2000.

Click HERE for more...

New AMD Model Number Scheme

AMD will be using a different scheme for classifying and naming its processors. The new model number scheme will consist of 2 letters and 4 digit numbers (example: AB-0000)

The FIRST LETTER will be the class/position of the product at the market:
G = Premium/High-end
B = Mainstream
L = Value

The SECOND LETTER will reveal the TDP of the processor:
P = above 65W
S = around 65W
E = under 65W

The 4-digit number indicates the relative performance of processors within the class.

The FIRST DIGIT indicates family of the product:
1000 = Single core Athlon and Sempron
2000 = Dual core Athlon
6000 = Dual core Phenom
7000 = Quad core Phenom

The SECOND DIGIT indicates relative clock speed within the product family.

The two remaining digits will be used for the future update functions.

Right now, AMD has two processors already using this scheme, the Athlon X2 BE-2300 and BE-2350. From the name, you should be able to tell that this is an energy-efficient mainstream part and that the latter is "better" than the former. In fact these are Athlon X2 processors with a 45W TDP and 2x512KB L2 cache with the latter clocked at 2.1GHz and the former at 1.9GHz.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

The First Post


Today I created a blog for Vic Computer.
Hari ini kami mulai membuat blog ini.
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