Category: CPU & memory
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Intel: (Upcoming) giant price cut
Today, in an unusual announcement, Intel told observers that they prepare to cut the prices of their Quad-core CPU line. Usually, Santa Clara tells about the near future price cuts, but here they extended it to Q3 forecasts: The 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPUs will go down 70% from $851 to $266 in the…
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Hard gamers choice: Athlon64 X2 5200+ vs. Core 2 Duo E6400
Steven Walton, of LegionHardware, has been doing a very interesting comparison. He’s interested in getting the best possible CPU for a gamer willing to pay around $220 for his CPU. This is a nice price point because it seems to be around what most gamers are ready to pay to have a fast machine, and…
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PC intensive care
I am currently in the middle of a string of problems quite annoying on one of my home PCs. Apparently randomly, and more and more often, it stops, locks down or reboots without warning. If I don’t use the PC, it may take a long time; But when I am trying to work (with OpenOffice,…
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The world’s leading source for pure technical x86 processor information
Sometimes, you really need to have plenty of detailed technical information about the x86 Intel family of processors or some of the compatible models from AMD, Nexgen, Cyrix, Centaur or Transmeta. And it is not easy to find. So, I recommend SandPile.org: Implementation details, technical documentation, and even discussion forums.
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Vista: Time for 64 bits
While Vista will soon be available in a 64-bit version (and that GNU/Linux went down this path several months ago), it is time to ponder the following question: “Do we need to go 64 bits?” And the answer is surprisingly simple if you look at it. Currently, PC are more and more often equiped with…
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Public-Key cryptography ready to shatter?
Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure…
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Choosing an AMD AM2 motherboard
Currently, the wonder kid of AMD microprocessor sockets is the AM2. But, up to now, it was a bit difficult to find comparaisons between the available motherboards. This is what Tom’s Hardware corrects nicely with its “Socket AM2 Motherboard Summer Slam“. There is no winner (only good motherboards), but with a lot of different feature…
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Next comes the QuadCore
For a few months already, we had dual-core CPUs. Try forecasting the next marketing step for Intel and AMD. Any idea? Right! They are rushing to prepare CPUs hosting four cores in the same package (usually dubbed QuadCore). AMD goes to a solution on its socket F: Three versions clocked at 2.6GHz, 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz.…