istartedsomething

This week, Christmas came early in a big black box code-named the “Spider“. It has a (engineering sample) quad-core Phenom 9700 2.4GHz processor, AMD 790FX chipset and an 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics card.

Hector Ruiz could very well be Santa and his PR people, elves.

Needless to say it’s been a pretty tough year for Advanced Micro Devices. Starting from August, chief of sales and marketing officer Henri Richards announced to leave the company. Then came the fourth consecutive quarter net loss of nearly $400 million, total net loss of over $2 billion. More recently, AMD became less valued then what it paid for ATI last year. To the company and its many loyalists, all bets were on Phenom and the next-generation ATI Radeon graphics card.

Shortly after the announcement of Spider and Pheom, benchmarks started trickling out with not-so-good news. At least early-production Phenom review samples suffered problems with stability in what is now known as the TLB errata. If that wasn’t enough, the only workaround resulted in dramatic performance loses. As an outsider at the time, it seemed like quite the tragedy.

Having exhaustively used Spider for two day now, I see no reason why AMD will “fall”, in fact I believe AMD’s on the right path to reclaiming its former Athlon64 glory. It’s not there yet, with Intel’s Core 2 Extreme and Nvidia’s Geforce 8800-series delivering marginally better performance, but there’s room for improvement down the road..

Platform-wise, Spider is actually a great idea. Sure, it’s purely marketing and branding but it’s worked wonders for Intel.

The benchmark is of course, Centrino, Intel’s platform for mobile computing. Soon enough, people were buying exclusively Centrino laptops because there was a standard of quality and compatibility that came with the combination of Intel processors, chipsets and wireless cards. To the average consumer, that meant a better laptop experience without all the cryptic model numbers. Unfortunately Intel could not repeat the magic with Viiv.

For AMD, Spider is a high-performance computing platform which describes the combination of a Phenom 9xxx processor, ATI Radeon 38xx GPU and the AMD 7-series chipset. To average Joe, Spider means the computer will deliver enough horsepower for all the latest blockbuster games and entertainment.

If Joe (and remember Joe doesn’t read 500 RSS feeds) walks into a store and sees one computer with “Spider”, and another with “Intel QX6600, NVIDIA Geforce 8800GT, NVIDIA Nforce 690i”, you can see where AMD has the upper hand.

Performance-wise, Spider is nothing short of a top-tier experience. Again, it’s not number one, but it’s pretty damn close.

I trust Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) to be a pretty good judge of real-world performance and in this case it’s peaked at 5.9, the artificial limit imposed by Microsoft currently.

Currently my system is far from the default factory state, so I won’t post any synthetic benchmark results since they’re a little disconcerting, but there’s plenty of professionally-accredited benchmarks to go around. I believe my Phenom 9700 chip also suffer from the TLB errata which adds at least a 10% performance burden. Fortunately this problem will be fixed in the retail versions shipping next year.

Playing Team Fortress 2 at 1680×1050 with 8xAA and 16xAF around 70fps constant is easily just short of pure bliss. I’ve also been able to finally experience Crysis for the first time which looked fudging-unbelievable under DirectX 10. Remarkably the Radeon HD 38xx series is also the first to support DirectX 10.1. Last but not least, a game which is not receiving as much attention in benchmarks as it should, Solitaire also runs very well.

Windows Vista, since it’s multithreaded, also benefits a great deal from the quad-core processor. For example, I no longer see a “Welcome” screen as it zooms right from the pearl animation to my desktop. Only if I could type four times as fast, I’m sure Word will also benefit from the performance boost.

Another benefit of the Spider platform integration is the AMD OverDrive tool. It is a Windows environment overclocking tool targeted at more amateur enthusiasts who want more bang for their buck. Because it is Windows based, it is inherently less risky than down-and-dirty BIOS overclocks. It has the added benefit of live feedback through the built-in benchmark tool which you could run to see immediate results. Don’t expect to break 3DMark records with this tool, but it’s a nice gesture at the enthusiasts from AMD.

In conclusion, Spider is a meaningful brand and a great desktop platform. For Phenom, a few early adopters suffer the fate of a rather significant design flaw, but hopefully when the Phenom models (re)launch early next year, the problem will have been fixed. For ATI, Radeon HD 38xx is a great high-end GPU that only falls a little short of the more expensive NVIDIA counterparts. But if money is no object, you can’t go wrong with four of them in CrossFire X configuration.

Over the last few days I’ve noticed Digg.com has slowed to a crawl where it would take up to a half a minute to load each page. At first I thought it was Digg, but then I noticed “connecting to ads1.msn.com” in my status bar when apparently nothing would happen. Is there something wrong with Microsoft’s advertising network?

One of the many neat features in Firebug – a web-developer extension for Firefox – allows the monitoring of network traffic when loading a web page. This is extremely useful to track down causes for slow loading websites.

In this case, Microsoft’s ad servers (in particular, ads1.msn.com) is taking around 27 seconds to respond to the request for a simple 5KB Javascript file used to propagate websites with banner advertisements. In contrast, Digg’s server responds on average in less than 100ms.

On another site, Microsoft’s own Live Hotmail, the advertising banners served by ads1.msn.com and takes around 27 seconds as well to load. However unlike Digg, Hotmail’s ads are not placed at the top of the HTML so it does not hinder displaying the rest of the page’s contents.

Whilst this problem does not seem to affect everyone – otherwise Digg users would have already revolted – but at least two other Digg users also experience the same problem and are coming to the same conclusion. Furthermore, this happens more often then not, which means in few cases when it does load normally, it’s fast.

There’s something seriously wrong with Microsoft’s ad servers, whether that is a short-term technical glitch or long-term load capacity problem. In either case, Microsoft needs to fix it fast. If they plan to be second-to-Google, bringing down the internets serving merely Flash banners is not a good start.

Update: Microsoft.com Downloads seems to be affected too.

Following the outpour of unofficial information around many blogs on Dell’s highly anticipated tablet PC, the official Dell blog Direct2Dell has just posted an update confirming many of the specifications published week ago, including some technical differences and previously unannounced pricing information.

Tomorrow, Direct2Dell will also be publishing an extended video looking into the pen and touch capabilities of this device. Unfortunately they are still uncertain on a release date, pending “by the end of year”. Today, you can read about Engadget’s first-thoughts.

On the other hand, over the next few days Dell Australia will also be making an announcement on the availability of this tablet PC for the Australian market. The rumor is that it will be available to order on Wednesday the 19th of December and prices will start at AU$3,500. It will also be offering integrated mobile broadband service from either Vodafone or Telstra Bigpond natively configured at the factory.

With retail prices finally revealed, hopes of a cheaper and more competitive Tablet PC from Dell remains unfulfilled as Dell’s offering is not only more expensive than existing and recently introduced Tablet PCs from Toshiba and Lenovo, but nearly twice as expensive. For example, Toshiba’s power-packed M700 is only US$1,800, $700 cheaper than Dell’s starting price.

It’s unfortunate the Tablet PC remains exclusively a business-oriented device out of the reach of most higher-education students where it can easily revolutionize learning.

A couple of people, dozen at max, have expressed interest in testing out the soon-to-be-public Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate release. There are many ways of installing and testing operating systems and even more so service packs so it can be rather confusing and cumbersome experience for some people out there. Out of all the possibilities, I do myself and recommend everyone to always start fresh, but that doesn’t always mean from the command prompt.

Whilst release candidate will be a very good representation of the final product early next year, it still means you’ll have to forfeit this release sooner or later so it is not recommended you replace your existing Windows installation with it. Especially with all the problems people have been running into uninstalling their service pack betas which itself sounds like a really bad idea anyway, it’s ideal to set up a fresh install. And the most convenient fresh install is on a separate partition on existing disks.

Formerly the process of ‘splitting’ a partition involved third-party software which is time-consuming and sometimes unreliable, however a less-known disk management function in Windows Vista will simplify all that.

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In response to a followup post by Steven Hodson at WinExtra regarding the recent job posting for “Director of Windows Disclosure“, the man the legend Robert Scoble also weighs in his thoughts on Microsoft’s changing attitude towards transparency.

Even though it’s been a while since he was at Microsoft, I think his comment would still be an accurate insight into why things are becoming the way they are.

Plus, the world would stop spinning if I didn’t put Sinofsky under the spotlight when opportunity arises.

This has the fingerprints of Steven Sinofsky all over it. The thing is that lots of Microsofties are jealous of the market success that Apple has gotten in recent years. So, they are working to emulate all pieces of Steve Jobs’ PR machinery — especially the controlling PR part.

Problem is: Microsoft has no clue why Steve Jobs is so successful. So, a silence campaign on Microsoft’s behalf will not provide the same results as it did at Apple. That won’t stop them from trying, though. It’s too bad because Microsoft could use its ability to be open and transparent against Apple. Especially as Apple’s shine starts to tarnish a bit (as it already is among people I hang out with).

One reason that Microsoft won’t be as successful: internal differences. At Apple everything is compartmentalized. At Microsoft my key card worked across the campus. At Apple your keycard will only work for your building. At Microsoft tons of teams share information. At Apple, you aren’t allowed to share information, even if you are working on the same mother board. At Microsoft they have hundreds of OEM partners who need to be briefed on what’s coming (so they will get excited, and also so they’ll work with Microsoft on new drivers and products). At Apple they rarely work with outsiders and, even like with the iPhone, they only work with one and work hard to control what that partner says. Intel, for instance, isn’t allowed to acknowledge that Apple exists as a customer and isn’t allowed to use Apple in its corporate statements in any way.

It is interesting watching Microsoft struggle in the post-Google era, though. And the fact that Apple got more market share with the iPhone in six months than Microsoft did after years of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on its mobile phone efforts demonstrates that Microsoft is being hurt by Apple and Microsoft is really struggling to deal with Apple’s success.

It’s too bad that Microsoft isn’t more creative in using its advantages against Apple. Being quiet just plays into Steve Jobs’ hands.

I still can’t figure out why Sinofsky won’t be my friend on Facebook.

Update: Scoble has posted a comment in which he explains Sinofsky has emailed telling him that this is not his doing. Even though I have no way of verifying if that is indeed Scoble and Sinofsky, but if that’s true, then I apologize in advance for the stereotype.

If animals eating each other or dancing pink bunnies aren’t your thing, rest assured Microsoft also has a Zune V2 promotional video up its sleeve catered towards the more conservative amongst us.

Thanks to a tip from reader Sajith, Seattle’s creative agency Digital Kitchen has worked with Microsoft to create what they call “Raw Deluxe” which they describe as “a product-driven video combining rich still photography and video to personify the raw-deluxe style of the Microsoft Zune”.

As far as I know, this video was not designed for mass-media advertising but instead as a launch promo for Microsoft events. But I’m sure they won’t mind if we took a peek.

One of the things you might notice is how strikingly familiar is the background music and tone of the video to the stunning title sequence of the television series House M.D. But that’s no coincidence. As it turns out the agency and one of its designers, Jake Sargeant, were responsible for both projects. Jake’s portfolio also includes many of HP’s “The computer is personal again” ads, which are considered some of the best in the industry.