A shift has occurred since electing a liberal congress and president… will that effect policy or just the next election? (or nothing at all)
“Changes among political independents appear to be the main reason the percentage of conservatives has increased nationally over the past year: the 35% of independents describing their views as conservative in 2009 is up from 29% in 2008.” – Gallup
So Intel released some new CULV chips this week. Awesome! You can even order them today from Dell and others… but how do they stack up in comparison to the Atom chips and other CULV chips?
Intel already has some CULV chips out and about like the Dell 11z’s Celeron™ 723 (1.2GHz/800MHz FSB/1MB cache) that frankly is only marginally better than the standard Atom. Their new chips however are based on the Core 2 Duo which potentially should be a much stronger work horse. But how much stronger?
Sadly even with all the new devices announce, there is not a single review of even a pre-production unit to give us an idea of how these new chips will stack up. So we are forced to turn to our old pal: Math. ;)
We took the known processing power of the older Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.20GHz (2MB cache 533MHz FSB) of the Sony Vaio TZ and the more recent Core 2 Duo SL9400 @ 1.86GHz (6M cache 1066 MHz FSB) of the HP EliteBook 2530p to determine the horsepower per clock. The new chips sit between these reference chips in terms of cache and bus speed so we averaged their prime calcs per cycle. Don’t worry, we won’t bore you with the math – here’s the estimated wPrime 32M times for the new chips:
Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3ghz 800 MHz, 3 MB cache – wPrime: 64.2 sec
Core 2 Duo SU9400 1.4ghz 800 MHz, 3 MB cache – wPrime: 59.6 sec
For comparison: Intel Atom N280 @ 1.66GHz – wPrime: 114.7 sec
For comparison: Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 @ 2.53GHz – wPrime: 30.9 sec
So even at the relatively slow 1.3 Ghz in the upcoming 11″-12″ almost-netbooks, the Core 2 Duo CULVs should be a huge improvement over the Atom in processing power. And with a TDP of only 10W instead of the the normal 25-35W for notebook Core 2 Duos – the new chips should easily carve out a new niche between netbooks and notebooks.
UPDATE: I was reminded that you don’t even need FRAPs as you can simply pull down the console (tab) and type “stat fps” to display the frames per second in the corner and even keeps a running average for you. How easy is that!
What kind of gaming can you expect from a netbook? Many people talk about playing older games at low settings but what does that mean? And how does it compare to similarly priced older ultraportable notebooks?
For our testing we chose the mainstream game Unreal Tournament 2004 as I played UR quite a bit back in the day. We originally thought older… but URT03 didn’t list XP and it’s demo wasn’t readily available. A demo is nice for anyone wanting to compare their own ‘puter to these performance marks. Also you can easily slap these onto a test computer from a flash drive. We like things simple here. (Side Note: other older greats like Starcraft or Diablo II are playable on netbooks because they only fake a 3D perspective without using actual 3D acceleration)
If you don’t already have them snag the Free FPS utility Fraps and the URT04 Demo from CNET:
We tested the ASUS 1000HA & Sony SR240 a typical netbook and an aging ultraportable from 2006. The test was simple play DeathMatch at 800×600 with all the settings on “low” (no shadows and checkboxes left alone). Use Fraps to give us a real world estimate of the performance you could expect playing an older 3D Game on low settings.
Asus 1000HA (10″ Netbook)
1.6ghz N270 Atom
1 Gig RAM
Intel Integrated GMA950
Win XP
Range: 10-30 FPS
Normal: 12-15 FPS if a bot was visible
Tweaks: Reducing settings to “lowest” when available and using the asus overclock utility raised the FPS to high teens but the game would still sometimes dip to 10 FPS.
Sony SZ240 (13″ Notebook)
2.0ghz T2500 Core Duo (not C2D)
1 Gig RAM
GeForce 7400M
Win 7
Range: 55-110 FPS
Normal: 60-85 FPS if a bot was visible
Tweaks: Increasing the resolution to the native 1280×800 and raising the settings to “Normal” still maintained a very playable 45-65 FPS.
Sony SZ240 (13″ Notebook)
2.0ghz T2500 Core Duo (not C2D)
1 Gig RAM
Intel Integrated 945 (hybrid discrete graphics off)
Win 7
Range: 30-55 FPS
Normal: 32-45 FPS if a bot was visible
So we see that a netbook could really use about twice the oomph in CPU or GPU to make 3D gaming reasonable. Meanwhile an older ultraportable with integrated graphics is already at that level thanks to a more powerful CPU. Grab an ultraportable with discrete graphics – even an older one – and you are at another level of gaming. No Crysis here, but the list of titles you can’t play drops considerably.
Tired of hearing instructions on how to use voicemail? Do the world a favor and turn that “feature” off on your phone…
Sprint
1. Call your voicemail
2. At the menu, press 3 for personal options
3. Press 2 for greeting
4. Press 1 to change the greeting
5. To enable / disable the instructions, press 3
AT&T
1. Call your voicemail
2. Go to personal options
3. Go to administrative options
4. Select “cut through paging”
5. Select off
Verizon
1. Personal options
2. Administrative options
3. General options
4. Then you will have these three options:
* Auto Play On or Off
* Call Back Number Prompt On or Off
* Rapid Prompt or Standard Prompt
Thanks Engaget
The first time the group Genesis saw a big-hair televangelist program they thought it was an SNL skit. After about 10 minutes, they realized it was for real. This inspired both the song and video: Jesus He Knows Me.
This came out long before there was a YouTube so we post it here for posterity.