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More details are out on the initial 45nm lineup. It looks like they haven’t been successful in cranking it up to 3.3ghz yet. Since the top chip is only 3.0ghz, it looks very tempting to just go with the 2.83ghz model which is just 5% slower but costs about half the price. Of course that chip isn’t going to ship until two months later so depending on how my budget looks I might not have the patience.

Engadge has a piece on progress in the technology of white LEDs. I’m really looking forward to this- I tried to get some white LEDs for some of the lighting in my house last year and the results really sucked. The colors were wrong and made everything look slightly green and sickly. I’m amazed it has taken so long for this technology to make progress…

Some of the first real X38 chipset reviews are coming out. The news looks pretty disappointing. Most of the new boards are DDR2 since DDR3 memory is just too expensive to buy. And compared head to head against a P35 chipset board they offer no performance advantages today. All things being equal if things don’t change in a major way I’ll just buy another Asus P5K for my workstation and equip it with 4GB of relatively inexpensive high-speed (1066mhz) DDR2 memory. That stuff costs about $270 for 4gb right now so all things considered its very affordable.

There are a couple of advantages that the X38 is supposed to have, but none of them are really useful yet at least for me. The X38 has better support for over-clocking but I don’t really care about that. Its supposed to have slightly better support for DDR3 memory but the P35 supports DDR3 also and as mentioned its starting to look like it doesn’t matter since DDR3 is just not realistic in the short term.

The other big advantages are that it supports two full x16 PCI-e channels whereas the P35 supports one at x16, and one at x4. So if you do dual video on a P35 the second one is somewhat bandwidth limited, although I haven’t seen any reviews that really show how big that impact is. I’m not planning on buying a second video card in the short run anyway. Also the x16 PCI-e channels support PCI-e 2.0. But no video cards do yet. Any idea when PCI-e 2.0 cards are coming out? With this winter’s refresh or much later?

In any case its starting to look like its going to make sense to just stick with the P35. Considering that the x38 boards cost at least $100 more right now worst case I can upgrade the motherboard next year once it matters. Although to be realistic, by that time its usually not worth upgrading the motherboard without upgrading all the other components too…

I just noticed they had an older Radiohead Knives Out Download (3 songs) for $1.87. For a single where you aren’t going to see them lower than $5.97 in physical format this is extra-great.

or Radiohead Knives Out Download ($1.87)

I was just checking out the Amazon MP3 Downloads service and so far its two thumbs up. You get high bit-rate MP3s (256-320kbps) with no DRM protection and prices that range from $.79 to $.99 a song. Even better they often discounts if you download a whole album. EMusic is still less expensive, but Amazon expands the mix quite a bit by carrying major label artists.

I thought I’d share a few interesting notes on the progress of my Speakeasy DSL upgrade. First, Speakeasy is doing an impressive thing where every day they send me an email with the current status of my order. This email has a set of checked off steps, but it also have the complete details of every communication between Speakeasy (ISP), Covad (DSL line provider), and Qwest (line infrastructure). Its an interesting way to approach the issue of having three vendors that don’t always see eye to eye. Speakeasy is still the main touch point with the customer, so even if they can’t always control their vendors, they can at least provide full visibility of what is going on. I’m impressed.

Also, they emailed me today to double check on the install date to make sure that I’ll be home. It turns out I need to take care of some aircraft maintenance that day so I asked to reschedule. They said that the next install date was 2 weeks out, but hey, can you do this Friday? Again, very impressive, both that they made sure they were in touch, and also that they did it through email (which is by far my preferred mode of communication).

A bit later I was wondering if they were going to have time to ship me the DSL-modem. I was about to email the guy back when I got my daily status update and I see from the notes in it that they realized the issue and are going to make sure that the guy who comes out Friday brings one with him. So far today Speakeasy is 3 for 3…

Several sites reported last week that Intel plans to ship Penryn, the 45nm technology CPUs November 12th. Initially they will ship the high end chips and some of the server ones which should be fine for me. Hopefully I’ll be building my new workstation just about for Thanksgiving although there is one potential glitch. My assumption is that I’m going to hold out for DDR3 memory which should add about 10-20% to system performance once you get the faster DDR3 parts. The problem is that right now it is astronomically expensive- close to $200/gb (compared to $70/gb for decent DDR2 memory). Since I want 4GB I really don’t want to pay $800 for the memory.

My hope is that the prices are so bad right now since there are only one or two motherboards that can actually take it. Once the X38 chipsets ship in a week or two there should be a lot more DDR3 capable boards on the market and I’m hoping the prices will be down to $100-$120/gb by the time I’m ready to buy.

Two new albums have come out recently that I’m really enjoying. The first is from Black Francis who apparently has gone back to his Pixies era name along with quite a bit of its sound on his new album Bluefinger. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the Pixies. Its not the same as any of the specific Pixies albums, but if you like them you will probably like it.

The other one is the self-titled debut album from A Place to Bury Strangers. Tons of noise and feedback and it certainly gets compared to the Jesus and Mary Chain for good reasons. Also reminds me of some of the Raveonettes stuff. But pretty cool and nice high energy. It can be an interesting trick to prevent the sound from becoming washed out with all that feedback but they manage it.

LucasArts announced a Wii Lightsaber Game. This could easily push me over the edge to purchase a Wii. The bad news is that Amazon is still out of stock- seems like I better get moving now to get one before the Christmas rush will have them really sold out.

Another stupid mistake I just made. I’ve been developing some 64-bit .NET code and was trying to call gacutil to register some DLLs. I kept getting the error message-

“Failure adding assembly to the cache: Strong name signature could not be verified. Was the assembly built delay-signed?”

It turns out I was trying to run a 32-bit version of GacUtil on a 64-bit assembly. The error message was unhelpful, but switching to the 64-bit Gacutil solved the problem right away.