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Sunday, August 14, 2011

Techradar

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Techradar

Opinion: It's time to ditch silly processor branding

Posted: 13 Aug 2011 05:00 AM PDT

Take a moment to peruse Intel's current processor price list and you'll find that it contains no fewer than 70 products for desktop PCs.

That excludes mobile and server chips, which would bring the total number of available chips to well over 200. What's more, Intel sells many models that don't appear in the official price list.

As for AMD, its desktop processor list is admittedly a little shorter, but like Intel, it has plenty of extra chips that don't appear in the official lineup, but are sold to system builders.

Factor in some pretty baffling naming conventions for these chips, particularly from Intel, along with a buying public with little understanding of and even less interest in the technical details, and you have a pretty bizarre situation.

It looks even odder when you consider that PC sales are actually in gradual decline. Part of the reason for that, conventional wisdom dictates, is the rise of alternative computing devices such as tablets and smartphones.

And therein lies the rub, because when it comes to those disruptive computing platforms, the tendency is towards simplified, streamlined hardware. When you're buying an Apple iPad, for instance, you needn't worry about the processor specification. It's only available with a single model known simply as the A5.

In denial

Funnily enough, the absence of 17 different processor options hasn't hurt iPad sales. The PC industry, I therefore conclude, is in denial.

In the past, it no doubt made sense for companies to chop the market up into ever smaller slivers, the better to encourage upsales to more expensive and profitable processors. But these days, the buzz isn't about MHz and MB, it's about apps and services and interfaces. Meanwhile, the Intel and AMD processor price lists are becoming ever more complex and irrelevant.

In fairness, you could argue that the real problem with current PC processors is that they're too good and have been for several years. There's very little today in terms of desktop computing tasks and applications that a quad-core processor from a few years ago can't handle with effortless aplomb.

The cycle of constant upgrades that kept the industry growing looks increasingly broken. Instead of obsolescence inside 18 months, a decent PC bought today will still be good enough for almost any computing task for at least five years.

In that context, you might think it doesn't matter what Intel and AMD call chips or how they're marketed, but I don't buy into that. In fact, I'm not convinced that PC sales should be shrinking.

For starters, few of the new devices that have appeared in recent years are replacements for PCs. Without exception, everyone I know who owns a tablet computer also owns a powerful desktop or portable PC. Usually, they own several.

So, the first thing I reckon both Intel and AMD should do is aspire to greater transparency. Quite why Intel, for instance, goes out of its way to obscure the key features in its processor lineup, I have no idea.

Take a typical chip like the Core i5-2400. There's absolutely nothing in the naming that tells you how many cores it has, how fast it is, or frankly anything that most buyers might be interested in. At least AMD uses X2, X4 and so on, helping buyers understand how many cores they re getting for their cash.

Disabled features

In a similar vein, I think it's about time we saw an end to the unnecessary disabling of features in PC processors. While I appreciate that higher prices need to be charged for larger and more complex chips, I also believe it's no longer acceptable to sell physically identical products at different prices because you've turned certain features on or off.

Admittedly, most buyers aren't well enough schooled in the intricacies of processor design to understand that an i7-2600 is in fact the same chip as an i5-2300 with a 100 per cent mark up. But I also reckon the market eventually snuffs out rip offs. At this stage in the life cycle of the PC, obfuscatory branding only serves to slow sales.

The final part of the puzzle is one that the broader PC industry has to address together. Personal computers are preposterously cheap and that means the benefits of more machines per household are now more accessible than ever. A decade ago, a decent PC might have cost £1,500. Today, that buys you a pair of powerful desktops and a cheap portable.

No more family fights over PC access or kids messing with their parent's files. Everyone can have their own PC. It's time to ditch silly branding and processor upselling and make buying PCs as easy and friendly as possible.

Review: LAST Stylus cleaner

Posted: 13 Aug 2011 03:30 AM PDT

It's usually painfully obvious if the stylus on your LP player is dirty – the sound distorts at climaxes and generally sounds grainy.

In fact, the situation is even worse than that: mistracking due to dirt on the stylus or the disc tends to cause permanent disc damage, because the ultra-hard diamond is now no longer smoothly tracing the groove but is bashing into it periodically, potentially knocking tiny bits of vinyl out of the groove-wall surface and indeed even damaging the stylus itself due to increased local heating.

Cleanliness is therefore essential if precious discs are to be maintained in good condition.

As always, anything is better than nothing, but with the stylus and cantilever assembly being so very fragile, some improvised methods of cleaning can be downright dangerous. A very soft brush with a few drops of suitable solvent has always been an excellent tool for the job and that's what you get here.

You can't just use any old solvent, though, as some have been accused of attacking the flexible suspension that retains the cantilever and this one has been specially formulated to have no such effect.

At the same time, it is sufficiently potent to shift deposits from the stylus and using a powerful magnifier we were able to see that it leaves the diamond clean after just a quick wipe. The bottle of fluid is tiny, but the amount used in each application is really minimal.

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Review: Caig Audio-Video Survival kit

Posted: 13 Aug 2011 03:00 AM PDT

It's generally appreciated that dirty contacts can cause intermittent sound or crackles, but even before things get to that dire stage there can be subtle degradations in sound caused by slightly corroded electrical contacts.

Caig has long been a trusted name in contact treatment and we wouldn't be without a can of DeoxIT D5 spray, which has served on all kinds of contacts from audio to bicycle lights.

This kit includes the product in both aerosol and dropper-tube version, plus DeoxIT Gold and DeoxIT FaderLube, both similarly packaged. FaderLube is for the insides of volume controls etc. and may require some dismantling to be useful, so it's less applicable for most home audiophiles, but the others are a great boon.

Various applicators as provided, as well as polishing-off cloths and even some pre-moistened wipes, which are easily replaced by a bit of kitchen towel and a brief burst of spray.

One criticism is that the instructions don't make it entirely clear what's best for what, but basically DeoxIT removes corrosion, while DeoxIT Gold protects against further contamination.

Mini-jack plugs seem particularly prone to failure due to contamination and many a time DeoxIT has got connections to portable audio kit reestablished. It's not strictly cost-effective, compared with full-size cans, but this kit will last for years.

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In Depth: 3D's role in science and engineering

Posted: 13 Aug 2011 03:00 AM PDT

Giving engineers, scientists and architects the ability to see the objects they're making in 3D brings amazing benefits. Computer aided design might be more down-to-earth than a Pixar film, but it's no less magical.

We spoke to John Hutchinson, Senior Rendering Architect at Autodesk, to find out why. We started by asking just how realistic artificial 3D environments can become. John contrasts Autodesk's approach of physically-based rendering with the needs of games and films.

"In [our] approach, we limit ourselves to algorithms and scene descriptions that are consistent with the physical behaviour of light," he explained. "This is a stark contrast to games and film, where realism is but one of many results desired from the rendering system. In physically-based rendering, we embrace the limitations of strict reality and our task becomes the accurate simulation of light transport. This way, we can create images that are very realistic."

What are CAD manufacturers doing to produce ever more realistic looking models? John explains that there are several initiatives at Autodesk. "Project Neon is a pilot offering that gives designers access to massively parallel, physically correct rendering in the cloud," he says.

"This allows designers to offload compute-intensive rendering and simulation jobs to Autodesk-sponsored compute farms. Coupled with core services for design storage and collaboration, this offering promises to put extreme reality in the hands of every designer. Future versions will evolve from still images to real-time rendering with progressively refined images delivered as compressed video."

Historically, a major bottleneck to realistic rendering has been the authoring of material shaders. "For design visualisation, this amounted to countless hours of tweaking arcane parameters until a plausible result was achieved," John says. "In a physically correct renderer, this can potentially be eliminated by directly measuring the reflectance properties of the material of interest."

Reflectance is measured using an instrument called a spectrophotometer, and commercial devices can already capture these properties for some classes of materials. Future generations of devices will allow the capture of spatially varying materials, as well as materials with subsurface reflectance properties.

"We imagine a future where users will rarely be faced with authoring materials: their CAD products will be cloud-aware, with access to vast repositories of accurate visualisation data," John adds.

3D printing

When we talk about 3D printing, we don't mean holograms or anaglyphs - we're talking about solid objects. To find out where this tech is headed, we spoke to Ian Adkins, Chief Technical Officer of Bits From Bytes, which makes the RapMan 3.1 3D printer.

"The machine takes filament off a reel and pushes it through a heated chamber like a hot glue gun", Ian explains. "According to the x, y, z co-ordinates of the print file, the thread is applied layer by layer until the item is complete."

Will we ever have Star Trek-style replicators in our homes? "Of course", says Ian. "Not that they will look anything like they do now. The machines will be consumer-oriented and print materials beyond the plastics available today. Instead of buying a replacement part, you'll download the 3D file and make it for a fraction of the cost."

3D fractals

The two-dimensional Mandelbrot Set brought fractal geometry to the masses.

As a fractal, this astonishing figure has no end of detail - however much you zoom into it, you see ever more detail despite the shape being based on a simple mathematical process. Every time you magnify it you see similar spirals, swirls, lakes and starbursts, but you'll never come across exactly the same thing twice.

After years of searching, a 3D fractal has been found that has all the appeal of the original 2D Mandelbrot Set. Called the Mandelbulb, it exhibits fractal detail in all three dimensions and has been likened to various objects, including the unusual Romanesco variety of broccoli (also known as Roman cauliflower) and extra-terrestrial landscapes.

Mandelbulb

To see it for yourself, take a look at our step-by-step guide below. We'll show you how to explore the Mandelbulb using Visions of Chaos. You don't need any knowledge of maths to use it, and you can download a trial version from http://softology.com.au/voc.htm.

3D visualisation

While we develop ever more ways of gathering data, the workload faced by scientists also grows. Without some way of visualising the mountains of data we can now produce, important patterns could remain hidden, and this is where 3D visualisation comes to the fore.

Oil exploration is notorious for producing vast volumes of data. We spoke to Jonathan Henderson, Managing Director of ffA - a company that develops 3D seismic image analysis software for the oil and gas industries. He told us how 3D visualisation has been used in the Argyll field to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

As the first oil field to come online in the North Sea, the Argyll field was abandoned several years ago as uneconomical. Some experts now think that modern technology could make it viable again, but before any company would consider going to the vast expense of drilling wells, it would be necessary to confirm that there truly are untapped reserves down there.

With this in mind, a seismic survey covering an area of 400km2 to a depth of 3-4km below the seabed was used to examine the geology of the area. This exercise generated huge volumes of data - tens of gigabytes - yet interpreting seismic data remains a task that relies heavily on expert knowledge.

Poring over two-dimensional visualisations would have been a thankless task, and a largely ineffective one at that, but with 3D visualisation it becomes possible to see the data in its proper context.

Oil is found trapped within porous rock, so the job of finding potential reserves in the Argyll field involved detecting pockets of such rock, known as sandstone intervals.

"3D visualisation allows geologists to isolate parts of the seismic signal that they think might represent sandstone and display it so that they can judge that what they are seeing is geologically feasible", Jonathan explains.

This might involve, for example, seeing the possible sandstone pockets draped on something called a horizon, which is a surface representing a particular geological age that can be thought of as the seabed as it was several million years ago. According to Jonathan, this visualisation helps geologists judge whether the features were deposited at the same time - a further indicator that there may be oil-bearing strata in the area.

Striking oil

In the 3D visualisation, two planes of raw seismic data are shown in the background and the coloured areas are possible sandstone. Colour coding is used to indicate which pockets are interconnected - an important factor to consider when deciding if any oil could be in sufficient quantities to make it an economically viable reservoir.

To cut a long story short, the outcome was that this area has "significant potential" for exploitation in the future. Of course the acid test will come only when an oil company puts up the cash to sink a well but 3D visualisation has proved itself by coming to a favourable conclusion where doing the same by invasive prospecting techniques would have cost a small fortune.

How to make your 3D own fractals

1. Start the Choas

Step 1

Start Visions of Chaos, then select 'Hypercomplex fractals | 'Mandelbulb' from the Mode menu. Select 'Generate' from the Image menu.

The 'Mandelbulb options' dialog box will appear, but for now you can just accept all the default values and click 'Render' to get your first glimpse of the entire Mandelbulb.

2. Open the Mandelbulb

Step 2

Access the 'Mandelbulb Options' dialog box (click 'Image | Generate' again to access it), and use the camera controls at the top-right to zoom and pan around the Mandelbulb. The preview will update automatically each time you click on the controls. When you're happy with the preview, click 'Render' to see a high resolution image.

3. Explore the Mandelbulb

Step 3

Finding exciting parts of the Mandelbulb this way could be time consuming - starting with one of the canned images is much quicker.

Open the 'Mandelbulb options' dialog box, click 'Load' and then select a Mandelbulb Parameter file with a name that starts 'mandelbulb sin power 8'. You can now zoom and pan to find interesting areas.

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Review: Dynamique Audio Tempest and Cyclone cables

Posted: 13 Aug 2011 02:30 AM PDT

Dynamique is a new name in British cables. Handmade on the Sussex coast, the company caught our eye due to its insistence on carefully specifying its cables and constructing them all by hand. The range is sizeable and silver seems to be the favourite conductor material, with Teflon (PTFE) the dielectric (insulator) of choice.

If the budget doesn't stretch to silver, as in the case of the Cyclone speaker cable tested here, then silver-plated copper will suffice.

Our other test subject, the Tempest interconnect, has an interesting feature: of its four conductors (two each 'hot' and 'cold'), two are pure silver and two silver-plated copper. It's not obvious what this might achieve, but the use of four conductors is sensible enough, giving a 'star-quad' geometry which is notably immune to hum pickup and provides a degree of screening (there's no screen as such).

Banana plugs

Both cables feature a resonance damper, claimed to damp mechanical vibrations in the cable which could, says Dynamique, affect sound. It has to be said that likely effects in practice would be many dB below normal signal level and we're unconvinced in principle. That doesn't mean, however, that it has no contribution to make!

Terminations on both cables are well done, with gold-plated Furukawa banana plugs on the speaker cable and Eichmann Bullet plugs on the interconnect.

Cable character

We tried these cables in various situations: running the Tempest between a phono stage and line preamp; downstream of a couple of CD players and then from preamp to power amp. The Cyclone drove our habitual ATC and Bowers & Wilkins speakers from various amps.

Despite this plethora of demanding partnering equipment, we didn't find much evidence of real character for either cable; they are both rather characterless; that is, they don't impose themselves on the music. Unless you are of the mindset that likes to regard cables as tuning devices, that's very much a point in their favour; neutrality being a hi-fi Holy Grail.

Near faultless

There are certain observations which are legitimate to make about these cables. First, they are near-faultlessly neutral in the midband. We found the Tempest interconnect just a touch more assured in the bass then the Cyclone; the latter seeming ever-so-slightly self-effacing in the lowest octave and lacking a little impact and precision.

In the treble, by contrast, the Cyclone seemed the more detailed, while the Tempest didn't quite give the sort of insight we've heard from favourite interconnects.

Dynamic Dynamique!

Both cables present precise and stable images, with very good depth definition, which is often a particular weakness of cables. And with the brand's name in mind, we were delighted to hear excellent dynamics on offer; swinging from loud to soft effortlessly without compression or exaggeration.

The only reservation we ended up with concerns value. Handmade cables aren't the cheapest and we can think of established models in each category which compete strongly at the price. All the same, they are both well worth an audition.

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