Toshiba's HD-DVD player is a PC!

Actually, Toshiba's first HD-DVD player is actually a .... PC! Isuppli tore down a player, and the secret's out!

http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189600999

It's an Intel PC with 1GB memory and tons of other subsidiary chips.

This is why I say, this year, the HTPC is really gonna boom! Even Toshiba has bowed to the power and flexibility of a PC.

When are you gonna get a HTPC? Abit can supply you a HDMI motherboard real soon for the new Conroe chips. I'll probably build a expandable, customizable ultra high quality HTPC as soon as Conroe ships.

Conroe - the new King?

Yesterday, I was invited to the Intel Channel Conference held at The Legend at Fort Canning Park, as one of the small-time speakers.

The most interesting thing at that event, was that Intel commissioned Terence from VR-Zone to build 2 systems based on the $1600 AMD FX62 and the top end Intel Core2Duo (at around the same price). No other constraints, according to Terence. He tried his best for both, and the sysconfig only differed from the motherboard chipset and CPU. The AMD system used a nForce5 chipset and the Intel system used a 975 chipset, all other things equal. No overclocking was allowed, everything ran at stock speed. Various benchmarks were prepared, but 2 were used - MPEG encoding and a Half Life Timedemo.

In both the tests, the Conroe system beat the FX62 by a margin of about 40%.

Seems now that it is indisputable that the Conroe is king for now. Until next year, that is.

Intel Woodcrest Benchmarks Claimed WRONG!

I spent the entire half of today in the Intel seminar launching the Bensley platform, a new platform with allegedly great improvements over their old stuff. The Platform Manager himself showed us some `recently available' benchmarks showing that Intel had finally caught up with AMD and will NO LONGER PLAY CATCH UP.

I thought, Wow. Opterons had so much lead over the Intels, and nothing much has changed except for the CPU, what must have changed, I thought, was that the new 0.65nm process gave the Woodcrest processors so much more lead. I even asked the platform manager WHEN he was about to integrate their memory controller unit into their CPU, and he told me that this is not necessarily yet (in view of the benchmarks) and in a few years they'd do it.

Imagine my surprise, when I came back, I found this thread in my Instant Messaging:

Intel Woodcrest performance claim a fraud

In summary, the blogpost content includes:
1) Intel based their results on the tpc.org results, but Intel claimed that the AMD Opteron machine was using 64bit software like the Intel machine, but at the tpc.org website, the Opteron machine was loaded with 32bit software.
2) The AMD machine was using different, smaller hard disk storage compared to the Intel machine

Anyway, let these guys clarify this first. Intel Server Platform Group has been informed of this blogpost, and he'll respond.