General Gaming Article

Old School Monday: Operation Kill the Pentium
Nearly One In Four Notebooks To Contain ARM Processors By 2015
Borders Throws in the Towel, All Remaining Stores to be Liquidated
Google Buys G.co Domain for Easy Links to Web Services
ARMed and Dangerous: ARM vs. x86 - Which Will Win the Computing War?
Chrome Web App of the Week: KIDO'Z TV
Zalman CNPS11X Review
NAND: The Newest Threat To DRAM Manufacturers?
Microsoft Offers HUGE Bounty For Information On Rustock Botnet Owners
Dell Considers Letting Support Techs Hangout In Google+

Old School Monday: Operation Kill the Pentium

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 05:09 PM PDT

Apparently, we have quite a knack for timely posts - our ARM vs X86 feature went up literally hours before it was announced that a current projection shows that 25% of notebooks will contain ARM by 2015. (Damn, we're good). It is then, in the spirit of ARM, advancing processing power, and the rapid progress of technology that we take a look back on the battle for Socket 7 dominance, Cyrix chips and Intel's MMX.

Nearly One In Four Notebooks To Contain ARM Processors By 2015

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 04:12 PM PDT

Remember that old Johnny Carson bit where he pretended to be the swami and guessed the contents of an envelope he held over his forehead? Maybe some of those psychic powers transferred over to us here at Maximum PC. No, we're not saying we can pick tomorrow's lotto numbers, but damn we have a knack for timely scheduling. Hot on the heels of our ARM vs. x86 feature – you've checked it out, right? – comes the news that ARM processors are projected to be the driving force behind nearly a quarter of all notebook PCs by 2015.

ARM processors currently reside in just 3 percent of all notebook PCs; IHS iSuppli, a market research firm, expects that number to soar to 22.9 percent by 2015. The same group projects the total number of ARM-powered notebooks to jump to 74 million in the same time span, a tenfold increase over current levels.

Why the leap in adoption? One word: Windows. Microsoft announced earlier this year that the upcoming Windows 8 will be able to run on ARM-based SoCs, and IHS expects ARM to claw out the majority of its market share with value notebooks running the new operating system.

"Value notebook buyers are looking for basic systems that balance an affordable price with reasonable performance," said Matthew Wilkins, a principal analyst at IHS, in the firm's press release. "ARM processors deliver acceptable performance at a very low cost, along with unrivaled power efficiency."

Of course, it's all in how you look at things. An alternate headline for this article could have been "Intel x86 Still Dominates In 2015," but where's the fun in that?

Edited to correct goof about Windows' history of processor support.

Borders Throws in the Towel, All Remaining Stores to be Liquidated

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 02:38 PM PDT

borders Is that the sound of Tap being played off in the distance? It appears that despite seeking debt restructuring and filing for bankruptcy was not enough to save Borders from its fate. The chain is closing up shop, taking all its remaining 399 stores with it. 11,000 employees are expected to be out of work.

Rumors of new bids for the faltering chain yesterday apparently all came to naught. Borders has already closed 200 of its stores in the wake of its February bankruptcy. In the end, liquidation firms Hilco and Gordon Brothers were the only ones willing to offer up any money for the rest of the chain.

The eBook revolution just passed Borders by. Competitor Barnes and Noble managed to get into the market and carve out a space, but there just wasn't another nook for late-comer Borders. Borders is going ahead with the Chapter 11 filings and expects to be done with liquidation by the end of September. You will inevitably be seeing some signs around promising great deals, but remember, liquidations are not always the lowest prices, and all sales are final.

Google Buys G.co Domain for Easy Links to Web Services

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 02:23 PM PDT

gco URL shortening is pretty hot these days. All the big wigs do it. Twitter has T.co, Amazon has A.co, and Overstock has O.co. Now perhaps the biggest of the big, Google, is getting in on the fun. Google has purchased the G.co domain in order to create shortcuts to their various web services like Docs and Gmail.

Google has promised that the new domains will be operational sometime today. You will be able to have confidence that going to a G.co domain will lead you to the service you seek. That piece of mind won't come cheap for Google. The .Co domain, the TLD for Colombia, is a hot property popular with startups.

The .Co domains were only launched to the public a year ago, but have hit 1 million registered domains. Note that this new feature is separate from the public-facing goo.gl URL shortener. Do you think G.co domains will help Google to promote services, or did they just need to balance out their tower of money?

ARMed and Dangerous: ARM vs. x86 - Which Will Win the Computing War?

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 01:28 PM PDT

ARM-based mobile devices have reached a golden age of development. Do they threaten the survival of our beloved desktops? Maximum PC investigates

The desktop computer as we know it could be in danger! Our hobby is doomed!

Let's face it. We're all going to be reading these words a trillion times during the next 12 months. So we decided to head this one off at the pass. Is the onset of ARM a real threat to desktop computing, or is it more of an evolutionary force?

Over the past several years, the demand for desktop computers in the home has been steadily shrinking, displaced by notebooks and all-in-one systems. In fact, 69 percent of PCs sold last quarter were notebooks, compared to the falling 22 percent that were desktops. This has been the trend ever since notebook sales caught up to desktop sales back in 2008. (Hey, it could be worse.) These days, all-in-one systems and notebooks are capable of offering near-desktop performance (so long as you don't mind giving up the ability to play modern games and upgrade in an affordable, modular fashion).

Something a bit more worrisome is the recent explosion of ultra-mobile products, specifically smartphones and tablets. In just a few years, smartphones and tablets have made stupendous jumps in performance. Formerly pokey computing devices have become pocketable powerhouses capable of many of the same basic functions as an ordinary desktop. The kingpin behind all of this development? ARM, a versatile processor microarchitecture that emphasizes power efficiency, yet is surprisingly high in performance.

What's the impact of these ARM devices' ascendancy over PC desktop and desktop component sales? It's not 100 percent clear, but it's theoretically possible that ARM could migrate up to the desktop level. Principal analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group agrees, noting, "If current trends hold, there should be at least one credible ARM player in the [desktop] space in five years." One thing is clear, however—other mobile devices such as laptops and netbooks are suffering. Notebook sales have already fallen 11 percent compared to last year.

But how likely is it that ARM's success will exact blood from traditional desktops? We're going to take a long, hard look at all the facts to try to settle the question once and for all.

A (Very) Brief History of ARM

In the beginning, the ARM architecture was specifically developed for use in a PC—the Acorn Archimedes to be precise. In 1987, the Archimedes hit the market, powered by the ARM2 processor with up to 4MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive. With only 30,000 transistors (less than half of the Motorola 68000's 68,000), the ARM2 was one of the simplest 32-bit processors of its time. This lower transistor count, paired with the efficient reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, allowed ARM2 to outperform Intel's 80286 while consuming less electricity.

ARM's inherent power efficiency and embedded-system approach made it ideal for mobile devices. Toward the end of the 1980s, ARM Ltd. partnered with Apple, and the result was the ARM6 architecture, which, in the form of the ARM 610, powered the world's first PDA, the Apple Newton.

ARM also licensed the ARM6 architecture to DEC, which led to the development of StrongARM in the mid-1990s. Its purpose was to provide a faster ARM processor for high-end, low-power embedded systems, such as set-top boxes and PDAs. In 1996, the first StrongARM processor, the SA-110, was released. Capable of speeds up to 200MHz and performing at about 1.0 DMIPS/MHz, it was the fastest available processor for portable devices throughout the entire year (until the StrongARM SA-1100 came out). StrongARM became so overwhelmingly popular in mobile devices that Microsoft eventually dropped support for all other architectures in its Pocket PC software. Shortly thereafter, Intel was able to purchase intellectual rights to StrongARM and developed the XScale architecture, which still exists today in many Marvell products.

This initial licensing contract with DEC pushed ARM Ltd. to continue licensing the ARM architecture on a much larger scale, resulting in the widespread proliferation of ARM applications we see today, from routers and NAS devices to smartphones and MP3 players.

You know the rest of the story. Advancements in ARM processors, such as dedicated graphics chips, multimedia instruction sets, and embedded flash memory, have allowed smartphones to evolve into the high-end multimedia devices they are today.

Where Does ARM Go from Here?

Modern desktops and laptops still hold a hefty lead over smartphones in performance as well as functionality, with features that make them suitable for server operation, home theater use, and high-end gaming. But for the mainstream user, who only uses his computer to get online, send emails, and watch the occasional YouTube video, a lot of that functionality is overkill. Herein lies the potential threat; these are all things that smartphones can already do; the biggest limitation is the awkwardly cramped interface. But even this is starting to change as new interfacing options enter the market.

Earlier this year, AT&T launched the Atrix 4G. The smartphone uses one of the most powerful ARM processors to date, Nvidia's dual-core Tegra 2, and comes with a plethora of accessories. One accessory, the Laptop Dock, literally turns the Atrix into a netbook-caliber laptop, complete with an 11.6-inch display and full keyboard. Another, the Media Dock, allows you to connect an HDTV or monitor and several USB devices (such as a mouse and keyboard), effectively turning the Atrix 4G into a super mobile desktop.

We found that while snappy in a smartphone, Tegra 2 struggled a little bit in powering a netbook platform. This fall, however, Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 (code-name "Kal-El") will up the ante with performance estimated to be close to that of an Xbox 360. That includes graphics. It's easy to speculate that, within a year or two, we'll see many Atrix-like devices on the market. It's also not hard to imagine that the sales of these systems will negatively impact desktop sales.

Motorola's Atrix in the 11.6-inch laptop dock.

The truth is that neither Intel nor AMD have anything that can quite match this combination of mobility and performance. Not yet, at least. In the meantime, ARM appears ready to take the battle to Intel and AMD by penetrating the desktop and laptop market.

Intel, AMD, and the Ultra-Mobile Market

ARM isn't the only company plotting to mobilize the world and liberate people from their desks. Intel has plans to enter the smartphone and tablet market with its latest version of the Atom processor. The Z6xx series is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design that takes the Atom's processing core and combines it with the system's memory, memory controller, and graphics processor.

Intel's Z6xx series processor puts it on more equal footing with ARM.

Early results indicate that this, combined with newly designed processor components may allow the Atom Z6xx to compete with, and even outperform most current ARM offerings, all while consuming significantly less power than previous versions of the Atom. Intel is predicting a peak TDP below 3W, which is still significantly higher power consumption than competing ARM processors. The Z6xx also has the added benefit of x86 compatibility, making it possible to run more advanced applications and even full-fledged versions of Windows on tablets and smartphones featuring the Z6xx processor.

While Intel's intentions in the ultraportable field are clear, AMD is still on the fence. It wants (perhaps even needs) a share of the smartphone and tablet market, but to do so, it needs viable chips, and soon. According to both Rob Enderle and industry analyst Tom Halfhill, AMD has two options: license the ARM architecture and develop its own ARM chips (like Nvidia's Tegra line) or follow Intel's lead and scale down its current x86 architecture. AMD has publically stated that it intends to develop its own APUs, much like Intel's Z6xx processors. It's a risky move, considering Intel's deeper pockets, but AMD's previous acquisition of ATI could prove useful here. Nvidia's Tegra platform utilizes an advanced graphics core, while Intel benefits from x86 compatibility. AMD's unique situation allows it to combine both of these traits. We should see the end results with the company's rumored "Desna" APU.

Is an ARM Desktop Still a Desktop?

Rumors are swirling that by the second half of 2013, Apple will switch to ARM in its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, and possibly even its desktops. As Enderle puts it, "This would follow Apple's strategy to own the technology they use." Assuming price/power/performance ratios work out, it's easy to imagine other PC manufacturers following suit for their lower-end systems, such as all-in-ones and net-tops. Appearing to confirm this migration, research firm IDC's quarterly forecast in May 2011 predicted that ARM will hold a 13 percent share of the PC market by 2015.

The A5 is a powerful dual-core SoC that powers the Apple iPad.

The ARM PandaBoard is a TI OMAP 4330–powered prototyping and development board.

Obviously, this will be an uphill battle. And how to measure success? Maximum PC CPU columnist Tom Halfhill, who is also a senior analyst with The Linley Group and senior editor of Microprocessor Report, says, "Intel will do everything it can to keep x86 processors in Macs, but Apple has a history of switching CPU architectures when it's advantageous to do so. Each time, critics predicted doom. Each time, Mac sales went up. But the professional graphics market is still important to Apple, so high-end Macs won't switch to something less powerful than the x86. It's possible that low-end Macs—especially notebooks—will switch to ARM in the future."

Will Windows Pave the Way?

Since ARM processors are RISC based and don't feature full x86 or x64 instruction sets, there's no chance of getting any current versions of Windows to run properly on an ARM platform. This will change when Microsoft releases Windows 8. Microsoft plans to include ARM support with the release of its next OS, expected to launch in 2012. At CES this year, Microsoft had a rough, but working version of Windows running atop ARM processors.

Microsoft shows off Windows running on ARM hardware at CES 2011.

Given the dominance of Windows in home and corporate settings, it's likely that the presence of Windows tablets—Microsoft is even rumored to be working on its own proprietary model—will send sales figures rocketing. But just like Apple's transition to ARM, this doesn't come without some headaches (and conflict). According to Halfhill, "Legacy Windows apps simply won't run on an ARM processor without emulation. Apple has proven—twice—that software emulation can ease the difficult transition to a new CPU architecture. But each time, the new processors were more powerful than the old processors, making software emulation practical. That probably won't be the case with an ARM-based Windows PC. At best," he says, "the ARM processors will be equally powerful."

Enderle agrees, expecting legacy application compatibility to be "pretty poor" and goes on to say that "the ARM version [of Windows] is likely not where you'd want to run [legacy applications] anyway."

The Desktop is Too Strong to Die

The million-dollar question is this: Will Microsoft's involvement with ARM benefit the desktop crowd? It's a mixed bag. While the downwards migration of Windows will certainly cannibalize some of the desktop market, it won't eat into the high-end market share Maximum PC users care about. The other way of looking at it is that this migration could result in a proliferation of purpose-specific ARM-based PCs.

U.S. market projections suggest that desktops will be hit hardest by the entry of tablets into the mainstream market.
(Source: Forrester Research)

In reality, ARM may seem like a threat, but it still has a long way to go before it will be a suitable desktop platform. And even then, it won't be capable of meeting the graphics demands of gamers, the processing demands of video and graphic specialists, and the flexibility demands of programmers.

Should the day come that ARM (or Intel or AMD) manages to create a mobile platform that can match the performance of desktop computers of the time, people will welcome it with open arms, but the transition won't happen overnight. Despite the inroads laptops have made, desktops are still more powerful than their notebook counterparts.

How could something as awesome as Thermaltake's Level 10 chassis possibly go extinct?

"The lines between ARM and x86 will blur in the middle ground," Rob Enderle says. "But ARM will sustain smartphones, and x86 will have high-performance PCs and workstations." For the short- and mid-term, ARM appears to be an additive dimension of computing rather than a substitute.

ARM's Processor Roadmap

If ARM plans on providing an adequate platform for devices like Apple's MacBook line, it has a few performance gaps to fill. Currently in the works is the Cortex-A15 core, which, clock-for-clock, is up to 40 percent faster than the Cortex-A9 found in the latest smartphones and tablets. That alone isn't enough of a boost to compete with Intel in notebooks; however, the Cortex-A15 can house up to eight cores, sharing a total of 8MB of L2 cache, and can even be clocked up to 2.5GHz.

Although the specifications call for a maximum of eight cores (four cores per cluster, two clusters per chip), a specialized AMBA4 interconnector can be used to connect two chips together, potentially running 16 cores together, at the full 2.5GHz.

Unlike ARM's other cores, the Cortex-A15 is tuned for performance, rather than power-efficiency, though it will still achieve a healthy balance of both, suggesting that ARM intends it to be used in more than just handheld devices. Cortex-A15 chips are expected to reach the consumer market by the end of 2012. This syncs up nicely with Apple's predicted switch to ARM by 2013, but as of yet, there is no evidence that Apple has licensed this new core.

Thus far, Texas Instruments, ST-Ericsson, and Nvidia are among the licensees, and TI actually already has a chip in the works: the OMAP 5430. As just a dual-core chip, the OMAP 5430 doesn't appear to push the limits of the Cortex-A15's potential, but at 2GHz, it does boast a 3x performance boost over TI's previous OMAP 4330. If anything, Nvidia will be the one to watch for high-performance, desktop-potential Cortex-A15 chips.

Chrome Web App of the Week: KIDO'Z TV

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 11:58 AM PDT

Summer, with its seemingly endless hours of daylight and fun to be had, can be a great time for young children. No matter how someone might love their child, however, sooner or later, summer becomes a lousy time to be a parent. When your kid has no one to play with, you've taken the last day trip to the petting zoo that your budget can afford, and nothing you suggest turns their crank, the insanity begins. When thrown a little bit of boredom, those you once thought of as your little darlings can quickly become a rambunctious pack of hell spawn, gleefully dancing on your last nerve in an effort to entertain themselves. Fortunately, back-up has arrived in the form of our Chrome App of the Week.

KIDO'Z TV is a free Chrome app that offers up child-friendly video content via an easy to navigate pictorial interface which requires no reading skills to use. For kids that are still too young to read, but old enough to feel empowered by being able to choose what they want to watch, it's a perfect storm of awesome.

To use KIDO'Z TV, parents are required to sign up, providing an email address, password and a bit of information on their child. KIDO'Z TV uses this information to provide your child with age and gender appropriate content. The web app makes it easy for parents to monitor and control their children's viewing habits, thanks to a simple to use suite of parental controls.

Be sure to check back every Monday for another edition of Maximum PC's Chrome Web App of the Week.

Zalman CNPS11X Review

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 11:41 AM PDT

Flying V: Great guitar. Gimmicky hockey maneuver. Underwhelming cooling configuration

Just five months ago, we reviewed Zalman's superb CNPS9900Max, which marked a return to the circle-of-fins look that has marked the big Z's best-performing CPU coolers of the past half-decade or so. The CNPS9900Max resuscitated our faith in Zalman's heatsinks, which had dwindled in the wake of skyscraper-style coolers and Zalman's disappointing CNPS10X Extreme, a cooler that was larger and more expensive than its more effective competitors. Now Zalman gives us the CNPS11X, with yet another new cooling-fin configuration.

The CNPS11X is a skyscraper-style cooler, 6.3 inches high by 5.25 inches wide by 3.75 inches deep, with five nickel-plated heat pipes rising into two sets of aluminum heat-dissipation fins. The fin stacks are arranged in a V formation, with a 12cm blue LED fan across the top of the V, forming a triangle with the fan as the hypotenuse. The top and bottom of the fin stacks are covered with black plastic covers, to keep air flowing from the fan through the fins. The result is a cooler that takes up a lot of room but also has a lot of wasted space in the center that could otherwise contain cooling fins.

Sometimes looks matter more than performance. Not in a CPU cooler, however.

Zalman continues to use the universal backplate design it's been using since at least the CNPS9900Max—the one that requires four nuts (either silver-colored or gold-colored, depending on socket), four sliding plastic retainers, and a special angled 2.5mm hex wrench. You can use a standard 2.5mm head, but the tool Zalman includes can be used from an angle—necessary, given the placement of the fan. The CNPS11X also ships with a resistor cable to slow the 12cm fan and reduce noise.

On our test bed, with an ambient lab temperature of 22.8 C (73 F), the CNPS11X cooled our overclocked Core i5-750 to 65.75 C at full burn. This is better than our baseline cooler, the $30 Cooler Master Hyper 212+, but 5 C hotter than the Prolimatech Armageddon, our favorite air cooler. Zalman's CNPS9900Max, by contrast, performs slightly better than the Armageddon. (We prefer the Armageddon's installation process, which is why it's still our favorite.) The CNPS11X is also noticeably louder than either the Armageddon or CNPS990Max. Using the included resistor cable drops the noise to tolerable levels but raises CPU temperatures a degree or two.

The CNPS11X is not a bad cooler, but it's not a great cooler, either. The CNPS11X retails for $90. For $4 more, you can get a Prolimatech Armageddon with two 14cm fans, which has an easier install, a more robust mounting bracket, and better performance. Or, for $10 less, you can get the Zalman CNPS9900Max, which kicks as much ass as the Armageddon, costs less, and has that radial-fan look that Zalman does so well. Maybe you dig the V-shaped fin stacks and don't mind that this is a louder, more expensive, and less effective cooler than the CNPS9900Max. But if the design doesn't speak to you, the performance won't hook you either.

$90, www.zalmanusa.com

NAND: The Newest Threat To DRAM Manufacturers?

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 11:15 AM PDT

Like Jennifer's Lopez's marriage, DRAM manufacturers are going through a bit of a rough patch. DRAM insiders were popping Cristal when the industry saw a 77 percent surge in revenues between 2009 and 2010, but thanks to a dramatic death-spiral in DRAM prices, those same executives could soon be snuggling up to Wall Street bankers and MD 20/20 in the gutter. Today, a report surfaced that indicates that things could get worse before they get better for DRAM manufacturers; some experts theorize that PC owners may shift away from DRAM into the open arms of NAND flash memory.

Market research group Objective Analysis examined a wide assortment of memory configurations and PC benchmarks, Computerworld reports, and they've concluded that adding a "dollar's worth of NAND flash improves PC performance more than adding a dollar's worth of DRAM." That's bad news for DRAM manufacturers, who are already considering cutting back production to artificially inflate prices. On the other hand, the cost of NAND memory continues to drop, and the industry expects to see a 79 percent increase in worldwide supply in 2011.

"An appropriate balance of NAND, DRAM, and an HDD yields superior performance per dollar to a simple DRAM/HDD system," Jim Handy, the author of Objective Analysis' report, told Computerworld. "A well-designed NAND/DRAM combination brings SSD-like performance to a system at little or no price increase over a standard system based on the conventional DRAM-plus-HDD platform."

Microsoft Offers HUGE Bounty For Information On Rustock Botnet Owners

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 10:41 AM PDT

The owners of the Rustock botnet used to run one of the biggest spam operations in the world, capable of sending out over 30 billion spam messages each and every day. They also violated some of Microsoft's trademarks in those emails. Microsoft obviously didn't like that. The company teamed up with federal prosecutors and gave Rustock a virtual butt-whupping that brought the network to its knees. Now, Microsoft wants info on the botnet's handlers, and they'll give you tons of money if you supply them with names.

How much money? Enough money to send your kids to college, buy a house, or supply you with dollar burgers for every meal for the rest of your life. $250,000, to be exact. And they're posting the bounty online and offering the reward to anybody in the world who can help Microsoft wrangle up the Rustock owners.

"Today, we take our pursuit a step further," Richard Boscovich, the senior attorney in Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit said on the company's blog. "After publishing notices in two Russian newspapers last month to notify the Rustock operators of the civil lawsuit, we decided to augment our civil discovery efforts to identify those responsible for controlling the notorious Rustock botnet by issuing a monetary reward in the amount of $250,000 for new information that results in the identification, arrest and criminal conviction of such individual(s)."

For that kind of dough, we wouldn't be surprised if Rustock's owners turned themselves in to claim the reward!

Dell Considers Letting Support Techs Hangout In Google+

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 10:09 AM PDT

As geeks, lots of us would rather wiggle wires and alter configuration settings ourselves than call the dreaded tech support hotlines. We've got it lucky; normies (i.e., non-tech types) consider the occasional call center buzz a necessary evil of owning a computer. Dell, the second-largest PC manufacturer, is toying with the idea of using an interesting new way to connect frustrated computer owners with the company's support techs; the group video-chat power of Google+ Hangouts.

GigaOm reports that Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell asked the Google+ crowd what they thought of the idea in a Stream post on Sunday: "I am thinking about hangouts for business. Would you like to be able to connect with your Dell service and sale teams via video directly from Dell.com?" Oh, heck yeah, the collective consciousness replied.

Using video chat might make tech support seem more human by giving a face to the anonymous voice on the other end of the line. If nothing, it would let you literally spell out your problem to the more clueless support techs if you keep pen and paper nearby. Don't expect to see Hangouts support calls to be rolled out anytime soon, though. Google+ is still in its invite-only beginning stages, so the majority of Dell customers wouldn't even be able to take advantage of Hangout support – yet.

MMORPG Blog: Online Games MMO