Friday, August 25, 2006

Choosing the Best AM2 Platform. AM2 Mainboards Roundup

3:35 am | Yaroslav Lyssenko

The AM2 infrastructure designed for AMD Athlon microprocessors was introduces several months ago. The main feature of this infrastructure is its support of DDR2 memory models, which is a new type of memory for processors designed by AMD to work with. While both ATI and Nvidia announced availability of their chipsets supporting the new infrastructure, it was still hard to spot mainboards built around ATI core-logic.

In order to gear up for the back-to-school season, manufacturers started to roll out mainbords base not only on Nvidia nForce500 family of chipset, but several ATI RD580 chipset based products appear in retail. AnandTech has taken a look at ECS KA3 MVP Extreme and MSI K9A Platinum mainboards build around ATI’s latest RD580 chipset designed for Socket AM2 infrastructure microprocessors and compared them to the competitive solutions based on Nvidia nForce 570 SLI and nForce 590 SLI.

“RD580 is similar in feature set to the top-line NVIDIA 590SLI chipset. Both support dual X16 GPUs - NVIDIA with SLI and ATI with CrossFire. Both also represent the top-line chipset for each respective manufacturer. Physically the chips differ in ATI RD580 being a low-power single-chip North Bridge and NVIDIA 590SLI using two different chips to each provide an X16 PCIe slot to the architecture. NVIDIA 590SLI provides I/O off the chips that also support the dual X16 PCIe slots. ATI uses a more traditional South Bridge with the RD580 to provide I/O. The South Bridge has been the weak link in past ATI chipset designs. Best performance was provided by ULi South Bridge chips while ATI's own SB450 only supported SATA1 and was plagued by slow UBS 2.0 performance. Beginning with RD580, ATI can now provide a complete and up-to-date chipset by combining RD580 with their new SB600 South Bridge. This came none too soon, as NVIDIA bought ULi in early 2006 and found themselves in the position of supplying their major chipset competitor with the South Bridge chips that made the ATI chipset competitive. With SB600 now in the market, ATI (and AMD) can now provide a complete single source chipset to motherboard manufacturers. This also means ATI is no longer dependent on their major competitor to provide a complete and competitive chipset for the A64/AM2 platform,” explains the author.

“AnandTech presents the Gold Editors Choice for Best AM2 Motherboard to the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe. The innovative 8-phase design with completely passive cooling works very well. The end result is an exceptionally stable motherboard and the best overclocker among the eight tested AM2 motherboards. ASUS clearly listened to the computer enthusiast when they were designing the M2N32-SLI. ASUS should be applauded for including very fine voltage increments in their BIOS adjustments. Most overclockers are finding these finer adjustments very useful for getting the most from lower voltage boards while presenting less risk of damage,” writes AnandTech web-site.

• AnandTech: AM2 Motherboards-Part 4: ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200.

The Safest Way to Store Data in the Internet. Securing Data by Scattering the Pieces

3:34 am | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Internet maybe a common thing nowadays but it is still constantly developing. New opportunities and new technologies are introduced and implemented on the global Web every day. While data storage on the Internet is not something unseen before, Chris Gladwin, a software designer and businessman in Chicago, believes he has found the safest and most secure way of storing data yet.

Gladwin developed a set of software routines Cleversafe that would copy the data stored on his PC into a large number of fragments, or slices, reports Cnet News.com. The math1ematics of his solution had an additional benefit: the original data could be reconstructed from a majority of the slices. The design made it possible to retrieve a complete set of his original data even if some of the disks that held portions of the data failed or went offline.

“The current design of such services generally involves making as many as five or more complete copies of the original data and storing them at multiple locations to ensure that information is not lost through a drive failure or other catastrophe. The Cleversafe design will cut the amount of storage space needed for secure backup by more than half,” writes Cnet News.com.

The experimental Cleversafe research grid is located at 11 storage sites around the world, but Gladwin is hoping that a commercial network will evolve, composed of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of storage sites that will be accessible at low cost.

“Today most distributed storage systems work by making multiple copies of data at multiple locations and then using various mechanisms to keep the copies synchronized. Examples include distributed file systems from Microsoft and Google as well as a system designed by software developers at Stanford known as Lockss - Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe - that is used to preserve the digital versions of academic journals. The Cleversafe project uses a different approach based on dispersing data in encrypted slices rather than copying it. That approach shares some design similarities with a Berkeley research project known as OceanStore, which is also intended to create a globally distributed computer storage system,” continues the report.

“They’re not making a commercially implemented solution. Our focus is something that people can use,” Gladwin said of the Berkeley project.

• Cnet News.com: Securing Data by Scattering the Pieces.

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