What is Moore's Law?

Most modern processors, microchips and small electronic components are made up of tiny transistors. In the 1970's, the term Moore's Law was popularized. The law was named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Moore's Law describes the rapid advancement in the increase of the number of transistors that can be fit into the same space in a die. It predicted that number of transistors that can be crammed into a processor will practically double every 2 years. A die is the raw material from which processor is made from. This is where the transistors are carved out of in very very tiny detail. Now I am using the processor as a specific example because it is the subject of most discussion about Moore's Law. Also it is in the manufacturing of processor that technologies in miniaturization are first proven. After these 'fabrication' technologies have proven cost effective enough are they snapped up by other industries for manufacturing other electronics.

 Although mostly refered to when talking about processors, Moore's Law also affects advancements in other electronic components that similarly benefit from high transistor density in small packages. Things like the digital camera sensors, computer memory (RAM) and solid-state drives are all fashioned after dies etched with transistors. Even the microchips that make it possible for your LCD TV to process images, or your Blu-Ray player to play those movies.

Moore's Law was originally just a forecast of a trend, but as technologies in manufacturing have advanced, it has become a self-fulfilled prophecy. Think about it. Every 2 years or so, there's a huge increase in the mega-pixels a digital camera will have for the same amount of money. Same goes for computer memory. I remember when I assembled my first computer some 8 years back that 512 MB of memory was a lot. Now, you'll see current computers selling with at least 4GB of memory. Just think back to a few years ago when laptops cost over a thousand dollars each. Now, we have laptops that work just as fast and can be had for half that. All of these advances are the effect of miniaturization and the cost savings that goes with it.

Moore's Law is good for both manufacturers and consumers. It allows manufacturers to do more with less material and cost. It gives us consumers more bang for our hard-earned buck. So you could say both sides get more for what they pay for. The next time you overhear a geek mention Moore's Law, you won't be clueless and you'll be more appreciative about what they're talking about.

Intel Cougar Point Recall, Burns Early Adopters

Intel announced January 31 a design flaw in the P67 and H67 Cougar Point chipsets for its Sandy Bridge platform. In its press release Intel disclosed, "As part of ongoing quality assurance, Intel Corporation has discovered a design issue in a recently released support chip, the Intel 6 Series, code-named Cougar Point, and has implemented a silicon fix. In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives... Intel has stopped shipment of the affected support chip from its factories. Intel has corrected the design issue, and has begun manufacturing a new version of the support chip which will resolve the issue."

In the wake of the announcement, several manufacturers have either announced recalls or promised fixes in the next few months. Dell was one of the first to post an update in it's blog Direct2Dell, "Customers experiencing issues will be supported under the warranty and service terms. Once we have new chipsets from Intel in early April, we will provide a motherboard replacement that corrects the design issue at no cost to our customers. Replacements will be provided at the customers’ location and convenience via authorized Dell service providers. Affected customers may also take advantage of the applicable return policy, which may vary by region."

Lenovo also took it's turn to assure it's customer that, "Following Intel's announcement confirming a design issue in their recently released support chip, the Intel 6 Series, Lenovo will be putting in place a special service program that will enable customers who purchased affected PCs to receive a system board replacement free-of-charge, as soon as those parts become available."

MSI made public a somewhat similar announcement for it's products, assuring it's customers that, "MSI takes the quality of our products very serious, so at this moment we are investigating product batches that may be affected and, meanwhile, have stopped all shipments to our distributors and resellers."

HP, Acer, Toshiba and Samsung have reportedly made announcements about recalls and release delays for their own products.  The recall is supposed to cost Intel $300 million in lost revenue and $700 million in repairs and replacements.

If there ever was a perfect time not to be an early adopter, this would be one of them. I count myself as one conservative upgrader. This time around, that actually worked to my advantage. And I'm thinking it's about time everyone give AMD a second and well-deserved look.

Cheaper Ultra-Thin Notebooks on the Horizon

Intel announced new Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage (CULV) processors for its latest generation i-Series processor line-up. This is a significant move for Intel in that it also announced that the pricing for these consumer processors will be lower as compared to previous generations of ULV's.


The shift is seen by tech journalists to be in-line with recent trends in the market reeling from the popularity of netbooks. Though netbooks are seen as under-powered when compared to mainstream notebooks, the low price point has induced tremendous growth in adoption by consumers. It has also caused notebook manufacturers to rethink how they market ultra-thin notebooks, formerly known as ultra-portables, because of the close similarities in form factor.


Think about it. Five years ago ultra-thin notebooks were considered premium notebooks, priced well above mainstream notebooks. Just take a look at PC World or PC Magazine for reviews of ultra-portables released around 5 years ago and you'll see what I mean. With the creation of a new niche for netbooks, with screen size ranging from 7-11", ultra-thin notebooks with 12-13" LCD's were on the verge of gathering dust in store shelves and stock rooms. To a prospective buyer, they'd rather have a smaller screen if it means they can tote it around and not pay a premium for it. They would have fewer qualms about it being slower if it's a whole lot cheaper.


Because of that, manufacturers have of late been repositioning the ultra-thin notebooks in a performance and price niche slightly above netbooks but with less power than mainstream notebooks. Their main selling points have been maintained though - low-power consumption that extends battery life and small form factor that makes it light and very portable. Screen sizes are still 12-13", which snugly fits the niche between netbooks and mainstream laptops. To give you a sense of what your money can fetch for you, you can get an Intel CULV-powered MSI x400 for $390 now. An AMD Neo-powered MSI U210 sells for about $407. Both definitely have more powerful processors than the Atom on netbooks. Both have lithe frames, slightly better video and slightly larger LCD's than netbooks. Battery performance is better on netbooks with smaller screens, but CULV laptops still have it better than mainstream notebooks. If you've got the money, you can go a more powerful Core 2 Duo SU7300 CULV processor like the one they packed on the MSI X350. It costs $890, still in the mainstream notebook price range, but as portable as any 13" laptop you'll find. There's also the 11" Alienware m11x for those who cannot do without World of Warcraft on the road. The Alienware m11x will set you back $799 for the base model.


Intel's announcement of cheaper, more power-efficient CULV processors to beef up it latest generation will make for cheaper ultra-thin notebooks. There are also several laptops powered by the latest generation of AMD Neo processor (take for example MSI's U230) that will compete with Intel's CULV offerings. This will make for more products choices should you want to get something with a little more processing heft than a netbook. Bottom line, more choice is always better for us consumers.

SSD's - Speed vs Cost

The speed of your computer depends a lot on the parts that you put into it. Most focus on the processor, video card and RAM. True, these components do improve performance dramatically should you choose to buy the fastest of the lot. But often the hard drive is taken for granted. A performance boost can definitely be had when upgrading to your hard drive the fastest available in the market. Right now, the fastest are the Solid-State Drives (SSD).

SSD's offer speeds at par with your system memory or RAM. To give you a sense of how fast that is in practical terms, say you installed Windows on an SSD. If you click on an icon to launch your browser, it will launch in 1-2 seconds. Compare that to 3-5 seconds when your Windows is installed on a regular spindle drive. That's one heck of a performance boost, wouldn't you say? It also consumes less power, owing to the fact that it does not have any moving parts. That makes it ideal for stretching battery life in between charges in notebooks.

SSD's are not without cons. Owing to the process of how the data is made persistent in SSD's (remember, RAM looses the data when the computer's turned off, SSD don't), they actually wear out with repeated use. That's why it was necessary to incorporate technology to level out the wear. Data on SSD's aren't written in the same manner as spindle drives. An extra chip on SSD's monitors how many times a certain bit is written to and assigns new data to other parts to spread the wear out to different bits. In traditional spindle drives, data is written in sequence. When data is deleted, that skipped over portion (because it used to have data) is written over with new data. That's why you need to defragment spindle drives to re-arrange related data nearer to each other.

SSD's are also expensive at this time. Take for example the Intel X25-V is priced at US$125, or US$3.12 per GB. The OCZ Onyx, touted as one of the first sub-$100 SSD, is currently priced at US$90 for a 32GB model. That's roughly US$3 per GB. Kingston's SSD Now V Series, touted as an X25-V with a different controller by Anandtech, costs US$90 for a 32GB model and US$115 for a 40GB model. The cheapest still goes for about US$3 per GB, roughly Php126 and change per GB. At that price point, the money you'll shell out for a 40GB SSD will fetch you a 1.5 TB desktop drive in comparison. The prices have been coming down in the last few months as manufacturing costs are brought down by new advancements. However, don't expect them to be as affordable as spindle drives any time soon.

I've been mulling over buying one for the past months. I have an Atom desktop that I chose to build precisely because of it's thrifty use of power. Adding an SSD to my rig would increase the power savings and lower the temperature inside the case. Using an SSD as a boot drive, the Seagate 500GB drive I currently have would make a great secondary drive for data. For these tough times though, value for money is still the priority. Speed will have to wait, at least for now.

Machine Revival - Part I

Yesterday, I went out with my wife and bought a computer table. I had been planning to revive an old Dell Dimension XPS T500 I had laying around and repurposing it to be an all-around computer for the kids. My son has simple needs. He has great fun playing the games included in Child's Play and Gcompris. Well the wife and I ended up buying a cheap computer table from Saver's Mall in Balibago.

After I got home, I immediately started working on the machine. I installed an 80GB Maxtor IDE drive I bought used a few months back. I also removed a non-working network card, and stuck a more recent PCI LAN Card i had lying around in one of my desk drawers. I also installed a PCI USB card.  The  Dimension XPS T500 had slow USB 1.1 and the card would at least bring it up to USB 2.0 speeds. I then closed up the side panel and expected the thing to boot. But it didn't! Beeps ensued and the Diagnostic LED's on the machine's back lit up with a pattern. So I went to find an online manual, praying one was still online at all. This machine has a date stamp of November 1999 after all. 

As luck would have it I found one (if your interested, it's here: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dkub/) . Following the clues as to what was going wrong, I reseated the video card and tried booting it. It booted up but the color on the display was yellowish. I reseated it again and powered it up once more. It beeped with a memory error. I unplugged the DIMMs, moved 'em to other slots and gave it a try. It POSTed! But then it was showing a PCI error. I forgot I left a PCI dial-up modem installed and decided to chuck it. The thing booted fine afterwards.

After I got it working I tried Fedora 12 Games, but it was just too slow to be usable. I was just hoping, but I knew the machine was too slow to use Fedora 12 Games. Anyway, I went off and tried another live distro, Linux Mint 8. This time it booted a lot more faster than Fedora, but it was still quite a good 8-10 minutes before I saw the desktop. I could just imagine my son jumping in anticipation only to get tired before the machine had fully booted. He's a little hyper over waiting time and jumps excitedly at times. While that was happening, I was waiting for my DreamLinux 3.5 download to finish. I've used DreamLinux 3.1 before on this same machine and it worked okay. And so I went with the reliable option and went ahead and installed  DreamLinux 3.5. After rebooting though, the machine wouldn't boot into it. It looked like the drive was having problems. So I tried disconnecting it and checking if the cables and connectors were okay, then booted it up again to try and install DreamLinux 3.5 again. Then I noticed the drive size was only 74.++ GB when it should be a little over 76 GB. Something wasn't right about the capacity. While thinking about it I decided to think it over. 

So today, after I got home and after thinking about it the whole day while at work, I gave the drive a go with DBAN. It's still running, actually. I don't expect it to finish any time soon. Maybe tomorrow morning. So I'll post an update if i get this to work. It would be a waste if I didn't get to play Tux Racer on this old machine now, would it?

Via And NVidia Launch Mini-ITX 2.0

As was previously announced, Via and Nvidia officially came out and formally presented their partnership to produce the most affordable Vista-capaable platform. PC Perspective ran a story with in-depth information on the expected performance of the upcoming platform. They even posted a picture of a sample board, with an 8600GT strapped on to the PCI Express slot. Digitimes also ran a story on the announcement, highlighting the two's support of Mini-ITX 2.0. Intel's entry to the Mini-ITX niche has been observed as "limiting", having a very basic graphics subsystem and no provisions for upgrades. Seeting up an official spec for Mini-ITX 2.0 is seen by analysts as Via's play to keep its dominance over it's Mini-ITX turf while attracting more of the mainstream market.

Mini-ITX 2.0 seeks to up the ante by allowing consumers more mainstream expansion choices while maintaining the 17 x 17 cm form factor. In more detail, 2.0 will require the following feature set on boards:

• Processor: High-performance, power efficient x86 processor, such as the VIA Nano processor;
• Memory: Support for minimum 2GB DDR2 SDRAM;
• Graphics: DirectX 9.0 integrated (IGP); DirectX 10 through an add-in card;
• Display: 1 VGA port for LCD display; 1 HDMI port on add-in card;
• HD Audio: 3 Audio jacks for up to 6-channel surround sound;
• Broadband Connectivity: 1 Gigabit Enthernet port;
• Storage: 2 Serial ATA II slots + 1 IDE (PATA) slot;
• Peripheral Connectivity: Minimum 4 USB2.0 ports;
• Expansion: 1 PCI Express 16-lane slot;
• Size: 17cm x 17cm;
• O/S Support: Microsoft Windows Vista; Microsoft Windows Vista Premium (through an add-in graphics card); Microsoft Windows XP, and major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Suse Linux and gOS;

When compared to the current Mini-ITX offerings of Intel, these specifications are a boon for anyone seeking a low-cost solution for multimedia and gaming on the Vista platform. Clearly this strategy can open up a niche for Via in the mainstream market, opposite Intel's pushing the Atom platform (and their other Mini-ITX offerings) in the low-power niche that Via traditionally dominated. Now, only the market will say who's strategy will eventually pay off. Who gains more is will eventually be dictated by the consumers. I'm hedging my bets on Via gaining a bit on the mainstream market.

Intel Atom on the Desktop

Word spread of the desktop implementation of the Atom platform when Engadget broke the news about the D945GCLF. It was followed by a post on Ars Technica and a blog post about the board being available in the UK. This will be the first desktop motherboard to support the Intel Atom. As I had posted a few months back, I knew that an Atom-based solution for desktops was very possible. Intel positioned itself well in the ultra-low power PC segment with it's introduction of the Intel D201GLY late last year and the Intel 201GLY2A earlier this year. It was only natural that it would tout its initial success with another low-power solution based off its newer technology.

The D945GCLF is already available for sale from TranquilPC for US$82. Complete systems based on the board can also be purchased from Tranquil PC and range from the US$358 T7 to the US$558 T2e.

Below are 3 videos that'll get you acquainted with the D945GCLF :









Update: The boards are starting to show up for sale online. Saw a listing on eBay for one. This one is being sold for $79.95

MSI Wind Pricing Pits it Against HP Mini-Note

It may seem a little late to link to this post on Laptop Mag about the MSI Wind. But hey, I happen to think that this is an exciting product that deserves a place on this blog. Laptop Mag shares details of its interview with Andy Tung, MSI’s Director of US Sales. Tung shares some of his insight on how the Wind will compete in a market currently dominated by the Asus Eee PC.

I think they actually recognize the lead that Asus has, impacting MSI's decision to launch only the 10-inch version of the Wind in the US. I'm also of the opinion that it doesn't compete with the ASUS Eee PC 20G (8.9" Screen, 900 MHz Intel Mobile CPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB Solid State Drive) directly, but rather with pricier HP Mini-Note. The specs tell the story, and Laptop Mag supplies the MSI Winds specs on this page.

The Wind has a zippier 1.6 GHz Atom processor than the ASUS Eee PC's 900 MHz Celeron. It also supplies an 80GB hard drive that's plenty when compared to the ASUS' 20GB. So it really does aim to shoot at the HP Mini-Note. Versus the HP Mini-Note, the Wind trades you a faster Intel processor for less storage (the HP Mini-Note has a 120GB drive). MSI also knocked a few dollars off by bundling Suse Linux' enterprise version with the unit.

In the Philippines, the MSI Wind lists for price of Php 21,999.00 on one local shop's online pricelist. I'm actully waiting for an unboxing event from @adelgabot any day now.