Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Another year, another trip to the great Coachella music festival. Kat and I rented a place again but unfortunately many of the usual crowd didn’t show up so it was just the two of us going to the shows (although some friends did come out to enjoy the sun).

When we got to the place I cut my foot open running to turn off the alarm- there is this strange raised area in the kitchen area made of metal and I was wearing my Chacos. For a bit I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to walk and go to the shows at all but Kelly was able to patch me up enough to limp around.

This year they added a third day and between how tired we have been from work lately, how overwhelming a 3-day thing starts to feel and maybe just becoming a bit jaded we didn’t get to the first day until fairly late. Also there was my foot thing although its amazing how much faster I managed to move as we were getting close to the shows. I was a little disappointed that we missed the first half of the Jesus and Mary Chain set but the second half was really good and it was cool to see Just Like Honey and Reverence live, loud and with the appropriate piercing feedback.

After that we saw Jarvis Cocker. Jarvis is the Austin Powers of Britpop. He was funny, dramatic, and shook his butt at the audience. Overall a really fun set, and while it was slightly disappointing that he didn’t do anything from Pulp, his new material is really good.

Finally we saw some of Interpol. I thought they were good last year at Pitchfork but here on the mainstage I thought they were pretty boring. The stage was all black, there wasn’t much going on and the songs just seemed to drone. With two more days to go we headed out on the long hike back to the car.

Engadget covers some presentations from Samsung on the next few years of SSD progress that suggests that SSD prices will be dropping to about $1.5/gb by 2010. They lament that it won’t really pass hard-drive pricing but to me this really isn’t that big a deal. This is yet another turn of the process described in the book “The Innovators Dilemma” which maps the progress of hard-drive technologies all the way back to 8″ disks and the old-school platters. Each new generation is slower and more expensive than the previous one but expands out into new market segments and takes over eventually with efficiencies of scale.

Except that this time the new technology isn’t slower. Storage capacities have improved amazingly, faster that Moore’s law for decades, yet the drives are barely faster than they were 20 years ago (relatively speaking). This has a lot to do with basic physics- you can only spin a platter of atoms so fast. This time the new flash-based technology has the potential to be faster (at least on certain dimensions like access time) right out of the gate.

For more than a year now people have been talking about the upcoming hybrid hard-drives that combine a normal hard-drive with some flash used as an extra cache. Vista has some special support for these that can take advantage of the flash to put commonly used information that is needed for startup to make boot/resume and application launches much faster than before.

But it occurs to me that flash memory comes in different speeds too. I’ve been looking into this for my upcoming new camera since for shooting HD video I think I’m going to need the faster version of the SD card. But with true SSD drives you could do the same thing as the hybrid hard-drive, and combine some fast-flash (used for those commonly accessed bits) with a bunch of slower storage for documents, music, media, stuff you don’t access as often and where the slower speeds are fine. Given how small the chips are compared to a 2.5″ hard-drive you should be able to cram a ton of memory into a laptop soon once the prices become reasonable.

Another thing that I’m unclear about is the power-usage. I’m hoping that these SSDs will be much lower power than a spinning hard-drive. Just because they are solid-state doesn’t mean that they are low-power. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM manage to use lots of power all the time. But I’m hoping that given that flash can store information with the power off that the power-usage is just proportional to the amount of reading and writing going on, not the amount stored. This lets you add as much extra storage to your machine as you can fit with no extra power consumption.

All in all it looks reasonable to expect that fully SSD-based laptops will be a speciality item in 2007 (Dell just introduced two models this week), common in 2010, and by 2012-2013 I wouldn’t be surprised if it will be rare to have spinning disks in a laptop/portable computer.

This week Microsoft has reached new highs and lows in their advertising. Earlier in the week Joe Wilcox posted a Microsoft developer ad with a picture of a young Bill Gates. This ad is great on so many levels- it personalizes Bill, it shows opportunity and inspiration, and it shows that Microsoft is a company with its roots deeply in a developer culture.

Then just last night Kat pointed out the worst ad ever, even worse than the dinosaurs ad a few years ago where Microsoft basically called their customers stupid. I’m not sure if its a coincidence that both of these ads are for Office but if you go to www.msn.com the top of the creen is taken over by something that attempts to show you how wonderful the new Office 2007 UI is. The result is the most cluttered mess I’ve ever seen- I wonder if the folks putting this ad together ever bothered to try it out in a real browser with the real MSN UI? Initially it looks like its supposed to be part of the MSN UI since it blends in the with the color scheme, but you get this strange collision of the browser UI with its toolbars, the Office “strip” and the MSN set of cluttered links.

On one level the concept seems like it should be a good one (show off how their new UI is cool), but the execution is just a disaster.

With the IDF (Intel Developer Forum) going on this week there are a bunch of new reports about the upcoming Intel CPUs. The performance numbers for the new Penryn chips look like they are nice, but just a little bit better at the same clock speeds. More troubling, while it seemed from earlier reports that the chips would be out this summer, the recent reports all say either “end of this year” or “H1 2008″, both of which feel like they are way off.

So why do I care about waiting for the die shrink? When the transistors shrink, they can run from lower voltages and (given constant clock speed and features) consume much less power. They also let Intel come out with higher clocked parts, but even buying the same clock speed you can today you get a much more efficient chip, and hopefully prices also come down quite a bit since Intel can make more of them on a wafer. By waiting for this next generation you get (a) chips that are 10-20% faster at the same clock speeds, (b) chips that use 40% less power at the same clock speeds, (c) the option to increase the clock speeds by 20%.

All of this suggests that if I’ve got to wait I’m likely upgrading the video card in my existing media center box relatively soon (with that nice Gigabyte silent 8600GTS or possibly something from ATI/AMD if they come out with something even better) and holding off on the bigger upgrades until “the end of the year”, whenever that turns out to be.

Given the industry’s reluctance to ship something during the middle of the holiday season I’m hoping that “the end of the year” is actually no later than October. And sure, by the time Penryn comes out, there will be another generation on the way with even better stuff.

I haven’t seen any news from IDF yet about improvements in Intel virtualization technology. This is going to be a cornerstone for next generation computing experiences so I’d be shocked if Intel isn’t going to say something about it.

It looks like Gigabyte has a GeForce 8600GTS that has good enough cooling without a fan. It requires an extra slot of space but this could be a great option for media-center machines.

This is just too cool. Whistler is putting in a Gondola between Whistler and Blackcomb peaks. This should make it way easier to get around, ski one mountain but meet people for lunch on the other one, plus it seems like an awesome view. 1.8 miles of unsupported cable, 1300 feet above the creek at one point. Hopefully opening in December 2008.

I do hope at the same time they continue to work on some smaller improvements to make it easier to get around. They have added new terrain like Symphony Bowl that make the slopes fairly uncrowded even with hordes of people but there are still bottle-necks in uplift in the morning and it can be really difficult to get around between various parts of the mountains.

There is one confusing point in some of the write-ups on the 8600. One of the key features in the new cards is the improved media playback performance, but its not clear if the 8800 also has this capability. If not, its a pretty serious mistake for NVidia to have your top-of-the-line parts missing something key that the lower-end parts support. One key marketing strategy is that if you have a “best of everything” model, people will pay a big premium for it-Microsoft got this right with Vista Ultimate after screwing it up with XP. Sure, some people complain about how much Ultimate costs, but I doubt Microsoft ever intended to sell a high percentage of it. Still, they make a lot more money with that one to the same peope buying the $600 video cards or the people who would buy a Mac Pro with Apple’s signifigant mark-up. Still NVidia is going to have a problem one their hands if their $600 video-card can’t play HD movies as well as their $200 one can.

Another interesting alternative might be the 8500- apparently its about $100. Apparently its going to suck for high-end 3d games, but if it can do great media-playback (and it should be good enough for Vista Aero Glass) and can get by with passive cooling (which apparently the 8500 can) it could be a great choice. Often getting a quiet fan on your video card can be tough and they are the loudest parts in a modern computer often so this could be a very good thing.

NVidia launched the 8600 graphics boards today (as well as some lower models). These are priced in the $150-$230 range and should provide plenty of performance for the media center machine (I’m pretty sure I’m going to want an 8800-class card for the workstation machine). To me one of the key aspects of the 8-series of cards is they provide full decoding for high-definition video.

I’m a little disappointed that the AnandTech write-up did not include media-benchmarks or noise level measurements. I guess I’ll have to wait for the real boards to hit the market for that info.

I’m tempted to get one of these to upgrade my existing Media Center- it should run fine in the existing machine and then I can move it to the new one once I build it. I’ll probably wait for the new ATI (AMD) series to come out and then make a decision.

Also- PLEASE REVIEW THE DRIVER STABILITY. The only thing I could figure out on that was that its a total mess on the NVidia side with different drivers for XP vs. Vista and different drivers to download for each different board.

Also- Tom’s Hardware reviews the Hitachi 1TB hard-drive. The interesting bit here is that the read performance is very good and is creaping closer to the Raptor. Especially on Vista (where its smarter about moving stuff around for sequential reads) this should help with boot and application start times, although the seek times are still slow (which hurts performance for compilers and databases). Still given advances in RAM caching and memory sizes I bet a compiler is mostly working from RAM now for reads so this isn’t the factor for a developer workstation that it used to be.

My only other concern is that this drive runs very hot- the hottest they have tested yet. The Hitachi drive has 5 platters which is a lot to cram into the 2.5″ form-factor and is probably related to the temperature. The recent research suggests that the temperature doesn’t hurt drive life that much for the first 2 years, but does impact it quite a bit in year 3, just as the Hitachi warranty expires. Seagate has a 1TB drive coming out shortly that should hopefully have a 5-year warranty and that uses 4 platters which should run cooler and in theory might even get better read performance (due to higher density).

This weekend we headed off to Leavenworth, WA for the first rafting trip of the season. This is not Leavenworth the prison in Kansas, its a fake Bavarian village in the Cascade Mountains just a bit east of Stevens Pass over highway 2. I have to admit I was pretty horrified by Leavenworth’s lame fake Bavarian theme, but while the fake Bavarian stuff isn’t done well, its a nice place for a base for local outdoor activities and the mountains there are amazingly beautiful.

It was great to get back on the river on Sunday. We got really lucky with the weather- it was very sunny, and the winds even died down for a great day this early in the season. Kat let me guide the raft for about 2/3rds of the river. It was pretty fun guiding but while I think its good for me to get some practice so I’ll know what to do if I’m stuck in the raft, in general I think I’m happy to let Kat do the rafting while I enjoy sitting in the sun. As the guide you just have to be paying attention constantly looking out for how to deal with the next bend or avoid some rocks. I’m happy to be the pilot in the airplane and relax a bit more on the river (not that I mind the exciting whitewater or some nice hard digging in to get through some big waves).

Today we hiked up Icicle ridge in the Alpine lakes region of Washington state right near Leavenworth, WA. Icicle canyon is a great area with tons of different hikes but many of them start out at higher elevations and are still fairly snow-bound this early in the year. However it is possible to start at the base of the ridge and that area is already mostly snow-free.

You start up a set of switchbacks. These looked a bit daunting on the map, but turned out to be less steep than Tiger Mountain or Mount Si. The trail was quite nice going in between some wooded areas and more open areas with good views. The whole thing would be about 9 miles and 4000ft gain to the next intersection but we only made it about 1/3 of the way in.