St. Patrick’s Day amongst other things
Celebrations started over the weekend, with Paddy parades and all things green. It was fantastically glorious, weather wise, so it was nice to be able to enjoy the rays. Unfortunately, for me, I had many chores waiting for me and studying with new course materials so I was stuck indoors. However, during my tidy up, I found my old AMD FX55 CPU and ASUS motherboard.
A trusty chip, AMD really provided a viable alternative to Intel in those days. Now, well what can I say? They have started releasing their 45nm chip, but is it all too little too late? I got my Intel QX9650 quad core about a year ago, which uses the 45nm process, and AMD only just got round to theirs? What’s going on… I’m not going to incite fanboyism, because I did like AMD a lot since K6 and beyond. But, you can see why Intel is the strongest right now, less heat, more efficient, and with each iteration the processing power gets better and better. I just hope their little kerfuffle with Intel doesn’t derail their plans even further, but I suppose getting rid of one’s main competitor is an instinctual thing for a large corporation. So right now, unless AMD pull something spectacular out of their hat, I am sticking with Intel… and their latest i7 “Nehalem” chip is simply delicious.
Now here is a cool thing, someone decided to mod the Apple logo on a Macbook lid to make a fully functional LCD display. I don’t own any Apple products myself, but this is very impressive indeed and makes you wonder why they didn’t think of this before. The possibilities are out there. I particularly like the music visualisations and webcam function.
And finally… it was gadgets ahoy a couple of weeks ago at CeBIT 2009 held in Hanover, Germany. I have to say, I didn’t see much coverage about it but still I do like my gadgets so I was keen to see what they had in store for us this year. Over at CPU3D they did a nice coverage of it, the main draw for me was the ASUS booth. The graphics cards they had on show had “buy me” written all over it, I like my existing dual-card SLi setup but the cards they had was just wow. One card had Tri-Fansink for cooling, are the fans 80mm or dare I say 120mm in size?! I’m finding it hard to fathom how that is going to fit inside a normal ATX case. Also, being a hardware engineer junkie, the liquid cooling server rack by Supermicro was just jaw-droppingly desirable. Our cooling problems at work would be completely eradicated with that thing, one can only dream. There were also some nice mobile devices from Blackerry, Nokia et al. If I had my way, I would buy Alcatraz and have the entire island set up as a massive server farm for LAN gaming, with OC12 internet capability and all the CeBIT kit inside.
Now back to reality, I got to hit the books, sigh. But hope everyone has a happy St. Patrick’s Day! Don’t forget, drink sensibly (or try to).
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