Posted

Sep 23rd 2009

Mood

I've been rather excited about various things happening in the tech world recently. Some interesting things I've encountered in the field of solar energy was neat and all, but I'll talk about the more accessibly awesome things I've seen as of late.

First off: ATI Radeon HD5870. It's a video card.

A pretty awesome video card. Currently the fastest single GPU card on the market. Not to mention far more affordable than comparable competition. But that's only for now, as it came out TODAY. I'm sure Nvidia will attempt to overthrow ATI as they usually do. It will be interesting to see.

Notable fact: Two of these in dual configuration known as "Crossfire" can play Crysis on the highest settings with 8x Anti aliasing at an average of 50 fps. very impressive.

Next up is this crazy Microsoft tablet thing. The Courier. dual screen tablet computer.

I bring this up because every time I see a tablet PC like this I wonder how well it would function as a drawing tablet much like the Wacom ones people are familiar with. Based on what I can tell from this prototype here, it'd be like merging two slightly larger Cintiq 12WXs. Course, we know how much the Cintiqs are, but we don't know how much this prototype would ever go for.

Processing power is also a big thing for me. Not like I intend to attempt the likes of Crysis or even HL2 on a tablet pc. But, as the recording engineer I am, boy i would love to have a portable system like this that I could run around and record things, provided proper inputs. Not only that, but if we're going to talk artistic usage we have to wonder how well something like Photoshop CS4 would run on it, of if it even could. as well as the resolution of the screen, for tracking.

Last but most definitely not least is this funky 2TB SSD PCI-e card. link

Now, SSDs, or Solid State Drives, are freaking cool because they remove one of the larger problems with hard drive speed limitation, and that's the physical movement nature of the spinning disk and reader arm. SSDs have no moving parts. They appear to operate alot like RAM does. The end result of this hard drive format is that read and write times are blazing fast. Since the beginning of this technology's release, however, the medium has been plagued with certain issues. Overheating, comparatively small storage space (the largest consumer one I saw before this card was 128gig) and an epic price point (said 128 gig ran for about $600).

Another problem which I never even considered before is the limitation of the SATA port. The currently accepted medium for connecting drives. The numbers for transfer speeds say something like 3 or 4 Gb/s. no, no that's not "GigaBytes" but "gigaBITS". It translates roughtly to about 200 odd mb/s. SATA 3 port is just coming out, which boasts super speeds of up to 600 mb/s. s'all well and good.

But this card doesnt use a SATA port. It uses the PCIe port, usually reserved for things like video cards. The bandwidth of that port is insane. As mentioned by the link above, transfer speeds of 1.5 GB/s. and that IS "GigaBYTES" which far outstrips even the latest SATA interface speeds.

So, it solved the size issue. It's 2 TB, which is on par with the largest Hard Disk ive seen out today. It solved the transfer speed issue. It probably still runs hilariously hot, but tech like that is usually developed to survive that. But, it's still expensive.

try $6000.