You can love it or hate it, but you can´t live without it. AMD is a small company, but the one in charge of driving innovation on the x86 arena. If it wasn´t for AMD, we would be still stuck on Pentium 4. Here is a little resume of what AMD did today:

Scenario 

- AMD is loosing 500 million each quarter aprox.

- His last big launch was in August 2005 with Athlon X2.

- Intel is 18 months ahead on their productive technology

- Intel is 15 months ahead performance wise.

Their answer

- Launching a monolithic quadcore with horrible yields and that doesn´t tolerate frequency called Phenom.

- Doesn´t ship Phenom to hardware review sites and magazines.

- Instead it makes an event at Lake Tahoe, where press can benchmark their product under their supervision, on frequencies they are not currently shipping. What type of people losses 10 million dollar a day, and invites other people to a trip on their wallet, when their whole market capital is just 6.5 BN U$?

- Doesn´t brief anyone else other than Europe and North America.

Possible reasons to act this way

- There are no Phenoms around. No volume just vaporware.

-  Doesn´t want everyone to know their product is clock to clock slower than Intel´s 18 month old product. BTW Wallstreet already knew about it, and their stock was almost 5% down today.

- Doesn´t want to spend more money. Chile a small 16 million people country received eight samples of Radeon HD3800 series. This is something around 1,2k in videocards, a Phenom processors has a MSRP less than 300 bucks.

- There where no motherboards to ship with the CPUs. Phenom runs on AM2 or AM2+, there are plenty of AM2 motherboards around, on the other hand MSI already has it´s AMD 790FX AM2+ motherboard ready and we have a AMD 770 motherboard in our lab.

-  AMD doesn´t believe in written media, they will stick to analphabet countries, which they suppose have lots of money to spend on quadcore CPUs.

Ok, AMD screw it bigtime, know it´s time to see what type of hat trick will they develop to leave out of this mess.

For a while I´ve had a thought in my head, I definitely need a new computer. My laptop is broke and I´m using my test rig as my personal computer, and that´s definitely not the idea. Now here is the deal, my studio is just a door from my room, what I´m planning is building a really small setup for my room, this will be my daily driver. My testing rig, will be left at the studio where I plan to do all the benching and reviews.

I will be building a small computer coupled with a pair of LCD screens. I have already all the parts ready, but I won´t use the Biostar motherboard I´ve been using in the past, I´ll use a microATX motherboard and install it in a small form factor case. ECS will supply me with a G33 based motherboard, that is their newest IGP motherboard they have. I don´t plan using the integrated graphics, so I´ll install a new videocard, that shouldn´t be much of a deal. On the case, I chose the Thermaltake LanBox Lite, as soon as the motherboard arrives (it should arrive this week) I´ll go buy it.

The only thing I still don´t know is what monitors I will buy. I know I want a pair of 19 inch screens, but still not sure if going widescreen or 4:3, I think 4:3 is the way to go on dual screen, what would you choose?

Both PCPerspective and Boot Daily have editorials on the compatibility between new videocards and DirectX10. I wrote mine a days ago, and it seems to cover the same info.

You can check mine here (translated by Google).

Remember my error on the review of the midrange GeForce 8? Well we´ve finally published the article, our reviewer Fito did a quick and excellent job and I helped him writing. The result, a review everybody liked (at least for now).

Hardware review sites seem easy to do nowadays, but writing and testing hardware is not an easy job. Besides, there are hundreds even thousands of hardware reviews sites online. If you are thinking on starting your own, I would suggest to find a niche, maybe review only webcams or keyboards or maybe even write in a language not covered up to now. But attempt to cover it will need an amazing effort, and even after that effort it may be that only few people read you.

We are nowadays starting notebook reviews. Notebooks are quite easy to review for the experienced users. In fact I´m right now reviewing a notebook. What I´m doing is leaving my own portable computer in the closet, and using a lent notebook from HP as a daily driver. This way I can have more hours using it (probably at the end it will be around 50 hours) and this way I can have a final impression of this machine. If you are wondering what computer I´m using right now, it´s the HP Pavillion TX1000 series, a Notebook/Tablet PC. What are my thoughts about it? You will have to wait for it

April is over and just like during March, here you have the stats for this month.

ChileHardware was read by 505062 different people. Is not as much as our all time record achieved during March, but at least I know why. Our international bandwidth sucks, all our alien readers have to share crappy 128kbit access. I also know the solution, and we are looking for a dedicated server in the United States… My mind is on The Planet, but we still have to decide.

TecnoSquad on it´s side broke it´s record once again, with 38552 unique readers. Not bad at all considering April is a short month and Easter Holidays where awful for websites, but again we are having international access problems. The good news is TecnoSquad runs on WordPress and it´s much lighter than ChileHardware, I think we are moving TecnoSquad in the next weeks, ChileHardware will have too wait at least one month.

Joe Darwin, Director of Technical Marketing at EVGA, just sent me an e-mail about a contest they are throwing. Unfortunately I can´t apply because it´s only for people living in Canada or USA.

Link to contest: eVGA

A time ago I corrupted the BIOS of a Biostar P965-T T-Force series motherboard. This usually is not too serious because you can hot flash the BIOS chip, but the problem was the chip itself was not working. So I order a new chip from my friends at Biostar and the motherboard today is working. This motherboard is pretty cheap, it´s price is around U$100, but it´s best attribute is the overclocking skills it has. With not little work I managed 460MHz FSB on a stock cooled Core 2 Duo E6300, I also tried a Core 2 Duo E4300 with the same type of cooling but I only made it to 330MHz FSB. I´ll be trying with better cooling during the next days

Today we didn´t publish a GeForce 8600 or 8500 review, and we should have. Why didn´t we? Well quite easy, we are too busy finishing some pending articles, and we thought that all spanish hardware review sites would have an article on it. So we thought it wouldn´t be a real exclusive review and the fast and hard work wouldn´t compensate.

For my surprise, there are no spanish Geforce 8600 reviews. I was offered two or three different videocards and rejected them, we have one flying here right now, I hope it arrives soon. But when the time comes everybody should have their reviews ready and it won´t be much of a surprise. Next time I´ll raise up the ante and work my poker reading skills…

One of my big hobbies is civil aviation, I´m one of those strange people who don´t only like travelling but also like airports and airplanes. I´ve been following the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner development since a while, this will be one of the new composite made civil airliners and the next generation mid capacity family from Boeing. The 787 will come in three flavors, 787-3, 787-8 and 787-9, being the 787-8 the first one to be on service during 2008. This last one can carry up to 223 people in three classes and has better autonomy of than the -3 variant due to it´s larger wingspan and winglets.

Avianca just announced that will be the first southamerican airline to fly the 787-8 during the 2010. Unfortunately American Airlines and LAN – my airlines of preference to and from the United States – are not in the order list, and SCL-MIA/SCL-DFW is not a high demand route, it means I´ll have to continue flying on the old 767-300 (763) for a while.

Yesterday we went to IBM´s Software Day 2007. This is an invitation IBM makes to key people in large coporate organizations, IT professionals and media, where they try to explain why buying one of their excellent but extremely expensive business solutions is a must inside their companies. This is usually a big event, where they spend a lot of money, but if things go well, they can pay all the event with just one new client.

Unfortunately things didn´t go to good. The invitation was at 6 PM, a time when most of the people are starving after work, luckily I´m not most of the people and had a muffin at a coffee shop 30 minutes before, because there was nothing to eat before the event, just natural juice.

The first demo – which was supposed to take 25 minutes – took 45 minutes and was terrible. Instead of using a test server and logging from the event to show some real demonstration it was a crappy fake image over html demo. In 45 minutes they didn´t say anything worth, my buddy Juan Pablo part of ChileHardware Staff works over Rational Software – which was the demo about – and almost cried. The product is excellent but they made it look like crap.

After this demo we went out for a coffee break, and trust me, it was really a coffee break, only coffee. This was 8 PM, and still nothing to eat, considering the event was going really bad and we where starving we decided to leave. I may respect a company that makes an event with a great product on a low budget, what I cannot understand is a company that makes an crappy event with no food spending a huge amount of money.