The Everun is a compact 5 inches UMPC. One of the best replacement for a Pocket PC in the market. The inclusion on it of a HSDPA option is a very big plus in this always connected world. I would like to see Raon Digital exploring solutions with other more powerful processors than the AMD Geode but at the same time I admire the good work done by Raon Digital achieving the highest possible performance in the Everun. The machine is clean, no crapware of any kind installed. You can start using it right out of the box, you don’t have to spend hours cleaning or uninstalling trials. There are two kinds of UMPC users, those who use the UMPC as their main PC and the other group that uses the UMPC as a companion PC. I would recommend this machine to anyone in the second group of users.

I had a play with the Everun while I was in Hong Kong a couple weeks ago. I was impressed with the quality of the unit, but at the time when it didn’t seem to balance against a OQO2, Q1U or P1010/810. Also in HK it is not a common unit, so the standard street price is above what you can get it at Dynamism. Given I was getting a TyTN II, I decided against the purchase.

This review strongly puts the unit into context for me: a Pocket PC replacement. The battery life is good enough, the XP Home aspect is non-important, and the solid system software integration a bonus. If I was needing to get an OQO2 to try for travel computing testing or replace my desktop, I’d probably consider getting one to replace my aging hx4700.

This means that we have to subtract about 13% of the performance figures if we want to keep the TDP the same, and in that case some of the “compelling gains” are no longer really tangible. So we can conclude that CRM, Financial analysis, ERP and Java applications are the best applications for our Clovertown Xeon. For rendering, transaction processing, and especially structural simulation (LS Dyna) and flow modeling (fluent) the picture is a lot less clear.

 …

To the financial analysts, CRM, ERP and Java server people, the new quad core Xeon E53xx is close to irresistible. You can get four cores for the price of two, or up to eight (!) cores in a relatively cheap dual socket server. We observed at least a 40% performance increase compared to probably the best dual core CPU of today: the Xeon 5160.

For the people looking for a 3D rendering workstation, your usage model will determine whether the Xeon 5160 or the Xeon E5345 is the best solution. You get better animation and 3D manipulation performance (mostly single threaded) and better rendering performance at resolutions lower than High Definition with the Xeon 5160. 3D render servers are better off with the Quad Xeon E53xx but only if they have to render at 720p or full HD (1080p) resolutions.

The past 6 months have been excellent for Intel: after regaining the performance crown in the dual socket server market, there is also now a very viable and lowly priced alternative for the more expensive quad Opteron based systems. However, it is not all bad news for AMD. The current quad core might be good for Intel’s yields, time to market, and production costs, but it does have a weakness. The quad core Xeon scaling is very mediocre, and this despite a high performance chipset. The current 5000p chipset has a large 16MB snoop filter, reads speculatively to decrease memory latency, and has a whole other bag of clever tricks to get more performance out of the platform. Despite all this and a 2x4MB L2 cache setup, the quad core Xeon scales worse than the relatively old quad Opteron platform.

Technorati Tags: hardware, intel, opteron, review

1. Typo3 – complex and powerful. Installation process on Debian takes a bit to figure but is straightforward once understood. A lot of documentation, but it lacks some organisation. However, there are some walkthrus for simple sites. I’d guessimate at least one-two weeks to figure out the basics and get something useful going. Each user would need their hands held.
2. Plone – complex and powerful. Apt-get plone, although sarge is a bit behind as usual. Free book. However, doesn’t seem to be any clear “walkthrus” for build a small site. Seems like a very good platform for intranet or extranet applications. Plone vs Typo3 comparison.
3. Drupal – simple and powerful. apt-get drupal. Documentation is messy, more like a lot of tips that something organised. Walkthu, but nothing really explaining how to get it do what I want. Seems better for a basic geek news site than for business site.
4. MODx – simple, smart and brilliant. Drop in /var/www, chown then good install interface; upgrades look easy as well. Documentation is organised, clear and detailed in areas. No need for walkthru. Discovered via Peter Cooper. You can try it at Opensource CMS. For a simple business site MODx seems to be the best option. I figure I can convert the current html site in a day or two. Both designer and then content editors should be able to use system without much hand holding.

Technorati Tags: cms, typo3, plone, drupal, modx, review

Result: Opteron server is 1.6x faster then Xeon server. Turning additional cores on and Opteron server is 2.62x faster then Xeon server.

My new v20z is sitting at the warehouse today. I’ll probably have to find my ear plugs while I’m building it up, but I’m looking forward to seeing how well the Opteron is going to perform.

At the moment I’ve been reviewing the purchase of a new 1U machine and trying to decide between a Sun Fire v20z or a Intel SR1400 Server Chasis. Basically the using an Opteron 248 2.2 GHz or a Xeon Irwindale 3.2 GHz 2 MB L2 800 MHz FSB.

One of my issues is this current colo machine is a single processor 2.8GHz IBM x335. Unfortunately as this machine is now EOL adding a second processor will cost me $4400. Almost the cost of a new machine. So I’m planning to push the old machine into fileserver duty at the backend, with the main operation of the new machine as a NX thin client desktop server. Something I’ve have been planning to do for a long while. Using Xen I’ll also be running other applications.

Considering the two CPUs and even at the lower clock-rate the Opteron is definitely the faster processor. The FPU performances almost beats the G5 PowerPC. In main tests the Opterons smashes the Xeons.

The Opteron 248 setup managed to outperform Intel’s fastest, largest cache Xeon MP by a whopping 45%. Boasting 141 ms request times, the Opteron 248 system was 12% faster than the Opteron 244 setup, indicating very good scaling with clock speed — a 50% increase in performance for every 100% increase in clock speed.

Of more interest to me is the FSB Impact on Performance:

In the case of a 4-way Xeon MP system with a 400MHz FSB, each processor can be offered a maximum of 800MB/s of bandwidth to the North Bridge. If you try running a single processor Pentium 4 3.0GHz with a 400MHz FSB you’ll note a significant performance decrease and that’s while still giving the processor a full 3.2GB/s of FSB bandwidth; now if you cut that down to 800MB/s the performance of the processor would suffer tremendously.

Each Opteron CPU features three point-to-point Hyper Transport links, delivering 3.2GB/s of bandwidth in each direction (6.4GB/s full duplex). The advantage is clear: as you scale the number of CPUs in an Opteron server there are no FSB bottlenecks to worry about. Scalability on the Opteron is king, which is the result of designing the platform first and foremost for enterprise level server applications.

Overall because of this the Opteron has lower latency, which can be see in low-level system benchmarks, like process creation, IPC and signal handling.

Other features are also compelling.

Although the IMPI is an Intel product, Sun is better documented . Of great interest is console access via SSH with SOL . Being able to ssh spipaddr -l spuser platform console will likely save much heartache and airplane time if I happen to be overseas when a kernel upgrade goes sour.

On the cost side, factoring in the self-support costs, the SR1400 works out at about 20% cheaper than the v20z. In further comparison the nearest comparable IBM xServer, a x336 3.2GHz, system is about 5% cheaper than the v20z.

Even with the large price difference, overall I think the v20z is the best machine.

Turns out, working together or only working together, was the main issue I keep hitting into. OSX is just not flexible. Mac keyboard and mouse, just don’t work well in any form with X11, Linux consoles or much else other than OSX. After about three weeks of progressively moving applications from the thin client desktop back to the fat OSX client, dealing with Fink, struggling with being forced to copying files back and forth over the network and not wanting to face figuring out how to change all the local OSX uids to match my Linux uids for decent NFS without reinstalling OSX and setting up NIS, I gave up.

So I started using the spare R40 WinXP laptop I had which was in-between jobs. Within days I was back up to speed. OpenOffice 2, firefox and mutt. No problems. Everything just worked again. Plus with Ubuntu install the desktop and applications became a breeze, apt-get just works. This month at least. With the advent of klik on ubuntu, sanding boxing bleeding edge software just became easier.

The MiniMac is sitting there somewhat lonely now. Mainly being used for playing iTunes and doing the odd Photoshop job. As much as I want to like OSX, it is just not flexible enough for a good business desktop. Too much under the hood that is not quite Unix and requires an Apple degree. Now my desktop focus is firmly on thin client technology. I’ll planning to have move primary work environment into a colo. Then combined with openvpn I’ll be able to securely access it transparently. The network truly does become my machine.

That said, I still like OSX very much. Its the perfect companion for the non-tech family member. Web, mail and iTunes. That pretty much covers 90% of primary usage. There are many SIP softphone clients and Skype works very well. I’ll probably continue to evolve usage patterns for myself on the MiniMac. Mostly these will be play things, and not works.

So the short term plan is a new T52 Thinkpad. 2.0GHz P-M with up to 9 hours of battery life and a 15″ screen. For the same price as a iBook.

Of course next year, when Apple release a x86 based Powerbook, I’ll probably rethink the above. Dual booting OSX, WinXP and Ubuntu will allow me to have the best of all worlds any time. Plus the P-M based tech will improve the Powerbook battery life sufficiently and making it into a decent mobile workstation and some not glorified portable desktop.

With HT enabled, I can run two copies of the job, but they each take 3 CPU hours (and the two finish in 3 wall clock hours).

So, in a day, I can run 12 jobs without hyper-threading, or 16 jobs with hyper-threading. My Opterons do about 13 per day per CPU. (3.6 GHz/1MiB Xeon, 2.6GHz Opteron)

Is it slower with HT – by one measure, yes. Is it faster with HT – by a different measure, yes.

Anyway, I had a remote NX desktop running on his machine to my colo Xen machine about 256kbps (50ms) DSL away and on mine I had the local NX desktop which I’ve been using as a test install for the past two weeks. Compression was set at modem speeds for the remote and LAN speeds for the local desktops. I decided I need a test to show off NX off to him and figured a quick look at my gallery would be good. And it was. It surprised even myself.

The remote desktop loaded this page faster than the local desktop. There was a definitely noticeable difference in page display speed in Firefox. The quality of the remote desktop on the two screens was hardily different. The thumbnails on the remote were slightly blurry, but not by much.

The remote machine is sitting next (Xen-wise) to the gallery web server and obviously my local desktop load the thumbnails over the DSL link. So this is a certain testament to NX’s performance given that same page and images were rendered and presented faster from the remote location.

Although Broken Angels is not as good as the first book it is still a very good read. Altered Carbon introduced some very interesting ideas and quite apart from being an excellent story is worth reading purely for the exploration of the interesting idea of sleeving and what a society like this would be like. Broken Angels however fall squared into the second book category. We find the character of Takeshi Kovacs is fleshed up, but the story line lacks the punch of the first book.

Market Forces is a completely different story with definite quality and imagine, a good sign that Richard Morgan is not a one shot author. Set in a near future world were only the corporate elite can afford cars a new breed of business has arisen. The corporate gladiator, a sharp-suited, hard-driving gunslingers who operate armoured vehicles and follow a pseudo Samurai code. Our main character an anti-hero, at the start of the novel begins work for Conflict Investments at Shorn Associates, where in the superheated global village of the near future, big money is made by finding the right little war and supporting one side against the other–in exchange for a share of the spoils.