Agreed, I find that our ancient IDE slot seems to be more useful than PCI. Quite a number of us who took care of our HDD still have a couple of IDE HDD, DVD-RW sitting around.

My P67 board have PCI, but do not have IDE.

Any PCI cards are less useful now, as the onboard sound chip beat them all mostly. PCI network cards are replace by onboard too. I dont need to spend a cent on it.

It is the ODD drive that matters. I got like 4 IDE ODD drive end up have to use USB now. Not that I would bother but having to use as external drive sucks. It just means u have buy external IDE to USB cable or buy the SATA/IDE converter.

This post has been edited by billytong: Jun 23 2011, 09:40 PM

I wonder when these companies actually can make a laptop that last a month without recharge.

exactly back then regular Pentium 1/AMD k6 need just a small HSF to cool down, then we reach to Athlon Thunderbird, like everyone is complaining about its high 60-70w TDP.

From practical point of view, I think a laptop with AMD E350+ with a standard size 12 cell battery ultra long battery life is a lot better. I really like to go long travel with my laptops without cables..

And then none of the laptop companies have make the power adapter build-into the laptop casing. How many time u end up carrying the heavy adapter with long thick cables around u when u carry ur laptop?

This post has been edited by billytong: Jun 29 2011, 08:31 PM

and carrying a separate adapter is call portable?

I say it is a lot more troublesome to carry a separate adapter around. Laptop battery life isnt long enough to let us leave the recharging cable in home while we carrying our laptop around. So the extra weight of the adapter here wouldnt matter, because 90% of the time we will end up carrying it around. You dont call compact and portable when u have to carry adapter around.

I keep seeing the AMD roadmap are offering bobcat isnt really "power efficient". 18w is no way near to be considered low power so are 9w bobcat, it is knowonder the long hours ARM base smart phones & the tablet PC taking up the portable market share.

As for the power consumption desktop, lets just be glad that both Intel and AMD finally cap the TDP @ 125w.

GPU on the other hand is diff story.

This post has been edited by billytong: Jun 30 2011, 12:45 AM

I still think that 10hours of battery life isnt gonna let u leave ur power brick at home. it isnt long enough for one to do that. I would really prefer them to put the power brick inside the casing, as one would not need to carry 2 things all the time.

Bobcat is a good start for low power computing but the rate of we progressing it gonna took us probaly 2 decades. As far as I know you could easily run a 2GHz p4 system just for facebook/web surfing. I keep wondering why there is no x86 platform in the roadmap that geared for at least 3-4 days of battery life.

it is not asking the impossible, I am just saying the industy seems to be focus on delivering more performance than improving TDP when addressing this portion of the market, wheres we know that at certain speed we are fast enough for basic websurfing/word document.
I dont think it is unreasonable to ask for 3-4days idling usage time. It is not full time I am asking.

This post has been edited by billytong: Jun 30 2011, 03:40 PM

playing games on my lappy probably not. Especially when u are dealing with work related things.

quite honestly I am not freaking care about bulldozer at all. To me Fusion is about all Bobcat core. That platform is just a perfect masterpiece for HTPC. thats about just RM300-500 over a standard Media player and perform better, Internet function, word processing & no future AV format compatibility issue. I really dont see any reason to buy a Media player anymore, the high performance media player is even out of question.

I heard the next gen 28nm ones are quad core.

Software developer gonna hate this rapid core increase pace hehe, just getting the multi-treading support alone is already tricky, now they have deal with 10 cores.

Well not sure if u are aware or not, our single threaded or each core performance hasnt been improving much since the introduction of dual core CPU.

Just for that alone i will probably much prefer Intel since their their performance for each core is faster.

Perhaps I suggest u should take a read on the scheduling thing on x86 multi-core b4 u ask silly question like this. Multi core on x86 vs GPU is quite different. You can take a new generation GPU with thousands of cores/stream processor and run on an old game on all cores without a patch, but u wont get an old single threaded software use all ur new 6core/12thread CPU.

The reason why CPU manufacturer going multicore is because they are hitting the wall on GHz race. Software company have to rewrite codes differently for every new "more cores" CPU comes out. While they do not like todo this, but it is inevitable.

This post has been edited by billytong: Jul 27 2011, 01:53 PM

thats like telling me I will butthurt now if I buy E350.

Do you know that many of us still use old software to run on the fastest CPU we can got? if you check this article u'll know that since Athlon64/Core 2 duo our single threaded performance has not increase much. That means that if u running on an Old software back in 2006 that only use 2 core, but it lag heavily because its high CPU req, you will still wont see huge improvement now even with Sandy bridge 2600K.Unless u overclock, which to some non-technical people they do not know how.

As for the software to take advantages of new cores, dma0991 has explained it well enough. It gets more difficult as the core count increase, unless they start using API like OpenCL. AMD/Nvidia has been pushing parallel processing, but CUDA/GPGPU has been around for many years, it is only now we start seeing common consumer product start benefit from it. It order to get most software support this it is gonna take even longer.

I am quite curious why AMD Llano did not release a desktop 35w TDP version yet. Everybody know that Bobcat platform is great for HTPC, but itsnt great enough to be called perfect. no Blu-Ray 3D support

Intel SB 2100T is here already, all we need is a AMD LLano + better ATI driver to complete this.

This post has been edited by billytong: Jul 28 2011, 06:55 PM

Dont forget that Intel SB can run on stock volt @ 4GHz-4.2GHz easily. That means Intel can come out faster model up to 3.6-3.8GHz.

Just got my Zacate MSI E350IA-E45 machine as a HTPC. Spent like only 450 bucks. Full HD 1080p playback is decent, though it is not perfect probably 90%, all these are due to the driver issue. When I play 1080p I pretty much have no resources room for anything else. but at least it can play 1080p without problems, despite with all that I still happy to spend extra RM200 than buying a stupid media player These come with 3yrs warranty + internet + torrent, compared to media player 1 yr warranty. It is worth it.

Sad thing is the 35w Llano is still limited to Laptop only. Oh well I already jumped ship to Zacate. Its not perfect but better than waiting AMD to come out. I guess there are reason AMD do not come out desktop version of 35W Llano, as it would kill Zacate too.

Lol can watch Japan Tsunami random footage clearer now.

Why the E2 on the desktop part is still 65w? AMD really need a killer HTPC platform. bobcat isnt good enough to be call flawless.