Wireless Internet is Great

So I'm sitting in a class that is a waste of time, but I have to be here to get the one piece of information that is useful I need for a future assignment. Thankfully the proliferation of 802.11b wireless access points has made it possible to talk about something more interesting to myself and hopefully all of you (unless you'd really like to hear babble about the Engineering Design Process).

I've received a lot of emails and comments asking about the status of the Raptor review I was working on a while ago, so I figured I'd provide a bit of an update. BAPCo has released SYSMark 2004, which is looking like it will be a much more valid benchmark than its predecessor. Unfortunately, just like SYSMark 2002, the benchmark takes about an hour to run on the fastest hardware and about the same amount of time to install. I put off the review in order to include results from the latest benchmark, but I'm hoping that the end result will be a much more thorough analysis of desktop hard drive performance.

Derek is hoping to be done with the testing for his video card roundup by this coming Tuesday, for publication by the end of next week. We're trying to get it out as soon as possible so those dates are fairly firm unless something goes horribly wrong.

I got a lot of great response to my impromptu AMD Roadmap article and a lot of requests for similar pieces for ATI, Intel and NVIDIA. I'm planning on doing a similar article for Intel but I have to be a bit more careful as I'm officially under NDA for a lot of the releases this quarter, but I may be able to finesse an article focusing on the 2nd half of 2004 if that's any consolation. Doing similar articles for ATI and NVIDIA is a bit more difficult, as leaked information from ATI is basically non-existant.

I've read the latest rumors on FP32 support in R420, but I don't see how that's any major news. As far as I know, the DirectX 9.1 spec (with pixel shader 3.0 support) calls for full precision to be 32-bit floating point, so if ATI wants to be DX9.1 compliant they will have fp32 support.

The move to PCI Express is going to complicate things a little bit, as both ATI and NVIDIA will have to produce their fastest GPUs in both PCIe and AGP versions. Intel seems to be pushing for an aggressive switch over to PCIe as their current motherboard roadmap shows that all Grantsdale and Alderwood motherboards featuring only a x16 PCIe slot and no AGP slot. I have yet to hear from the Taiwanese companies as to whether or not they will be producing Intel chipset designs with AGP support, but I'm fairly certain that their SiS and VIA solutions will have AGP support. We told you not to spend $500 on an AGP graphics card :)

Another thing I'm working on is playing around with the latest beta of Windows XP 64-bit Edition. If you guys want, I can do a current state of affairs article on the OS and some of the technical details on how the OS works and how 32-bit compatibility is handled. Benchmarks would obviously be included, but I can tell you now that if you are a gamer you'll want to stay away from running the beta. Gaming performance is absolutely horrid right now and I'm not certain if it is the video drivers or an OS issue; when I get back from class I plan on emailing NVIDIA and ATI to figure out what's going on. Let me know if there's any interest in pursuing XP-64 as a quick preview article.

I'm flying up to Hartford tonight and then taking a rental down to New Haven to see Vinney over the long weekend. I've heard about how cold it is up there, and believe me I will feel the pain of all you NEs out there in a matter of hours. I need to start looking for a place to live up there, after I graduate I plan on heading up there for the next 2 years until she's done with Law school and then we're both planning on moving back down to Raleigh. I asked in the past for any recommendations about places to live around New Haven and I appreciate the response I've gotten in the past, but I've got another request: does anyone know of any decent apartments/condos/townhomes with garage parking (preferrably attached) within a small radius of New Haven? I've been looking at places in North and East Haven, both of which are around 10 miles from Yale which isn't bad at all for the commute that she will have to make, but I haven't found anything partiularly great. Any help would be appreciated :)

In about 30 minutes my first week back at State will be over, only about 14 weeks to go :)

Take care and have a wonderful weekend.