by Grigoriy Gubankov
05/11/2003 | 06:27 PM
Transistor is the main building block for all today's electronics, including CPUs, GPUs and all the other PC chips. Shockley, Bardin and Brattain from Bell Labs invented it in 1948, already in 1956 they received the Nobel Prize for that invention, which, as we know today, dramatically changed the world. But have you ever wondered how a transistor works? If yes, you should read this editorial from Hardware analysis, called "Semiconductor Physics, Part 3". Parts 1 and 2 can be read here and here.
<%BANNER[article]%>Have you ever heard about "leaking" capacitors on mainboards? I think, you definitely have. And I also think that many of you have not seen these capacitors by your own eyes. Now you have the chance to see a lot of photos showing various views of swelled, leaked or even meltdowned(!) mainboard capacitors as well as consequences of such meltdowns (dreadful pictures). See it all here.
Ace's Hardware have done a nice job comparing SPECint2000 results, achieved on AMD Opterons, working on 1.40, 1.60 and 1.80GHz clock-speeds with Intel 7.0 Compiler and GCC (32 and 64-bit versions). They concluded that the former is significantly better, while the latter was unable to match the result achieved with Intel compiler even in 64-bit mode. Also there are some comparisons of the frequency scalability in SPECCPU2000 between Opteron and Xeon processors. Read all the details here.
Icrontic has posted a review of Matrox Millenium P750 graphics card (see this news-story for more information). Guys focused their review not only on various 3D-benchmarks and scores since P750 is not intended to use as a gaming graphics card, but on describing work process in professional applications like Adobe After Effects or Photoshop and how end-users may benefit from using two or even three monitors with these applications. They also launched some 3D games, though, performance of Matrox Millennium P750 was even lower compared than that of SiS Xabre 400. So, if you are interested in graphics card with exceptional multi-monitor support, but massacre in 3D, you should read that review.