Intel’s $7.7 billion purchase of security company McAfee makes plenty of financial sense, but it’s a head-scratcher from a technology standpoint.
The deal seemed to come out of the blue: Intel is the world’s largest chipmaker, so a security software company wouldn’t seem to be a good fit for the hardware-focused vendor. Intel has previously stated that security is one of its top priorities as it tries to get its processors into every type of connected device. But existing relationships with security companies, including McAfee, appeared to many analysts to be sufficient for Intel to execute on its technology goals.
“I’m not quite sure why they bought this company,” said Steve Kleynhans, microprocessors analyst at Gartner. “The purchase plays to all of Intel’s initiatives, but the question remains: Did it have to buy a company to do that?”
A call between Intel executives and investors Thursday morning did little to answer that question. Intel’s leaders went buzzword crazy in describing the deal, saying over and over that the McAfee purchase offered “deeper collaboration and integration between hardware and software,” “substantial differentiation for our products and platforms,” and “enhanced security products.”
But Intel CEO Paul Otellini offered up one buzz phrase that actually means something to the company right now: “Value for Intel shareholders.“
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Nvidia’s acquisition of Ageia in 2008 was a strategic move to boost the marketability of its GPU offerings. With the discontinuation of the dedicated PhyX boards, the acceleration moved to the GeForce GPU as a differentiation factor that set it apart from AMD’s ATI cards.
If a PhysX game detected the presence of an Nvidia GPU, it would move the hardware physics to the video card. Without an Nvidia board, the physics would hit the CPU, which in all cases is slower than what a GPU can do.
It’s expected that Nvidia would like to do everything it can to distance itself from the CPU and the GPUs of its competitors, but closer looks at the PhysX software implementation have shown that there could be some shadiness going on.
An excellent investigation by David Kanter at Real World Technologies found that Nvidia’s PhysX software implementation for use by CPUs still uses x87 code, which has been deprecated by Intel in 2005 and now has been fully replaced by SSE. Intel supported SSE since 2000, and AMD implemented it in 2003.
The x87 code is slow, ugly, and remains supported on today’s modern CPU solely for legacy reasons. In short, there is no technical reason for Nvidia to continue running PhysX on CPUs using such terrible software when moving to SSE would speed things considerably – unless that would make the GeForce GPGPU look less mighty compared to the CPU.
What’s in your computer? If you’re like most of us, you can probably name the processor (Intel or AMD, Celeron or Pentium), maybe how much RAM it has, and maybe how big the hard drive is.
When you go to a computer store and see all the bright shiny PCs laid out next to each other, most will have tags or stickers indicating the:
- Processor brand and model
- Hard drive size and speed
- Amount of memory (RAM)
- Graphics card
- Operating system
Two or three years later, when it comes time to upgrade your computer, that tag or sticker may be long gone. Speccy was designed as a free electronic “what’s inside” sticker for your PC.
Please note this is a beta version of Speccy and should only be used by advanced users on test machines. We recommend you wait for a final release version before downloading.
Western Digital is beginning to use a new hard disk drive format that opens up between 7% and 11% more capacity on hard disk drives, meaning a 1TB drive could gain more than 100GB in capacity.
The disk expansion technique, known as Advanced Format, takes advantage of industry changes in drive sector sizes to consolidate overhead information and free up that additional space for data storage. Advanced Format is also being adopted by other drive manufacturers to wring more capacity out of existing hard drive technology.
There are 3 basic methods for increasing capacity on a hard drive: increase the bit density; increase the number of tracks per inch; or increase the number of surfaces (i.e. disk platters). WD chose to boost bit density because it takes advantage of additional space already available on every track of a hard disk drive platter, the company said in a document posted on its Web site.
Hard disk tracks are currently composed of 512-byte sectors. But for efficiency reasons, the industry as a whole is moving to larger sectors that store 4,096 bytes of data. Each sector on a drive has a natural gap that contains Sync/DAM (lead-in) and error correction code information (ECC). Multiple blocks of ECC require a lot of overhead.
The Advanced Format removes Sync/DAM blocks that handle data addressing, inter-sector gaps and 8 separate blocks of ECC, and consolidates that overhead into one block on the drive, gaining the extra disk space when compared to traditional formatting, the company said.
WD said Advanced Format also increases data integrity by providing a more efficient error correction scheme by using longer ECC code words, improving error correction by 50%, according to WD.
In the future, everyone will have their own Jeopardy-style video walls. Or at least that’s the future AMD envisions.
In addition to new notebook chipsets, AMD today introduced Eyefinity, a new technology that allows for up to six displays to be driven off of one video card.
Eyefinity will make its way into upcoming DirectX 11-based ATI Radeon graphics cards, the company has announced. With Eyefinity, you’ll be able to arrange up to six displays per graphics card in any configuration, using either landscape or portrait mode.
How insane can this get, you ask? At a media event aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda, CA, AMD demonstrated 24 monitors hooked up to a single PC, driven by four Eyefinitiy-based cards. The four GPUs–each driving six 24-inch Dell LCD monitors–powered a 3D flight simulator across all 24 screens.
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That’s a new technology in Windows 7 that lets applications tap the power of graphics processors to accelerate performance, giving the system processor a boost. It sounds really promising, but so did ReadyBoost for Vista and it never seemed to take off.
Nvidia today announced that it’s the first manufacturer of graphics processing units to get Microsoft’s DirectCompute driver certification. People running Windows 7 with a GeForce GPU can download the driver (Version 190.62) from Nvidia later today.
Netgear on Monday announced the availability of its ProSafe 8-Port VPN Firewall (model FVS318G). It’s priced at $139.
The device is intended for small businesses that need remote access and Internet access for employees with secure connections. It provides Virtual Private Networking (VPN) access using the Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) standard, and sports eight Gigabit Ethernet ports, one Gigabit Wide Area Network (WAN) port and up to 25 megabit per second broadband throughput.
The new firewall also employs a software-configurable hardware DMZ port to help facilitate a server connection or another connection for a device on the network that remote users need to access.
Other features include Network Address Translation (NAT) routing and “classical” routing, support for up to five simultaneous IPsec VPN tunnels, Denial of Service (DoS) attack protection and multiple VPN passthroughs. It integrates with network monitoring software and products using SNMP, features IKE authentication, e-mail reporting and more.
The ProSafe Control Center configuration screen and install assistant is Web-based, and the device is compatible with Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems.
Today, NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce GTX 275 mid-range video card, the latest addition to its performance GPU lineup. With the goal of being the best bang for your buck graphics card on the market, the GTX 275 offers a combination of performance, physics, and GPU computing power for budget conscious consumers. Interested? Check out a few highlights:
* 633 MHz GPU Clock
* 1404 MHz Shader Clock
* 1134 MHz Memory Clock
* 240 Processor Cores
* 80 Texture Processing Units
* 448-bit Memory Interface
* 896 MB GDDR3 memory