Month: May 2006

Today, AMD?announced their socket AM2 processor, two weeks ahead of schedule.

I think the early announcement was a positive move by AMD, especially with the upcoming Intel Core Duo price cuts on May 28.

What does this announcement mean for you. Don’t buy any AMD socket 754 CPU’s, especially if you want to upgrade in the future. Why? Socket 754 CPU’s will be obsolete by the end of the year.  Socket 939 CPU’s will follow suit shortly thereafter (second half of next year).

What’s new in the socket AM2 CPU. Geek speak: an integrated DDR2, memory controller and AMD Virtualization.  In Layman’s terms: faster memory access and the ability for a PC to act as multiple virtual machines (eg. run multiple operating systems and share a pool of resources).

Don’t expect any performance miracles by moving from socket 939 to socket AM2, yet. Give it some time.

Yes, you heard right. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the minimum requirements for its upcoming operating system.

To summarize: you need an 800 MHz CPU, with 512 MB of RAM, at least 15 GB of hard drive space and a video card that supports DirectX 9. That means my state-of-the-art Pentium III 1 GHz Linux box is capable of running Vista. Not bad. Would I want to? No. Ever try running Windows XP on a similar configuration? It’s as slow as molasses.

So, that brings me to the next point — the premium requirements. 1 GHz CPU. 1 GB RAM. 128 MB dedicated graphics memory for the Aero experience. 15 GB of free space. Ooooh, I’m impressed Microsoft. 15 GB of free space?!? Interesting. The reality is that you will need to double each of the premium requirements for the ultimate Vista experience.

Hardware manufacturers: rejoice.

Update:

According to Jim Allchin (Co-President, Platforms & Services Division), Vista will run on machines with less than 512 MB of RAM, but performance will increase with more RAM:

“Our performance analysis today says that on low-memory machines, XP beats Vista, and the more memory you give it, Vista beats XP…”