Many people have heard about the Intel Xeon Phi by now but there is still a lot of misunderstanding about it. Here’s 5 of the misconceptions that I’ve heard mentioned when discussing the Xeon Phi.
AutoDesk AutoCAD 2014 Professional GPU Acceleration
AutoCAD 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for AutoCAD is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
Listening Beyond the Words
Are your customers telling you you’re doing fine? Can you trust that feedback?
Adobe Premiere Pro CC Professional GPU Acceleration
Premiere Pro CC utilizes the Mercury Playback Engine to take advantage of the video card to vastly improve both the performance and quality of certain features, but there is currently very little information available regarding the performance of the latest certified workstation video cards. In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of workstation cards in both single and dual configurations to find out how well the MPE in Premiere Pro CC works with both NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro video cards.
More on motherboards (even mATX!) for Xeon Phi
Some more advice if you are looking at (or having trouble with) motherboards for the Xeon Phi.
Technology Primer: Intel Ivy Bridge-E CPUs
With Ivy Bridge-E, Intel is finally moving their enthusiast CPUs to their newer 22nm manufacturing process. While this does not greatly increase the raw frequency that the CPUs are able to run at, it does allow them to draw less power while doing so. In addition to the smaller manufacturing process, the new line also has more L2 cache per core and improved memory support.
Can you submerge a hard drive in mineral oil?
Ever since we started developing oil-submersion aquarium kits in 2007, we’ve been repeatedly asked if you can submerge the hard drive in the oil along with the rest of the components. Our answer has always been a yes for SSDs and a no for traditional platter hard drives. While we are very confident in our answer, we have never actually tested to see exactly what happens. So, to finally set the record straight we decided to take the plunge and dunk a hard drive into mineral oil.
Ownership is Dead
During my teens, when music was at an apex of importance in my life, I stumbled across two large boxes full of albums in the back of my closet. Of course I was curious and began shuffling through them. Most album covers were in good shape, while others had seen better days. Their design and colors drew me in to the point I had to inspect each one.
Haswell Floating Point Performance
Some quick benchmarking using the Intel MKL double precision Linpack benchmark shows Haswell to have the potential to be a stellar performer for floating point heavy code.
Sharing Made Easy With Windows HomeGroup
Networking two more more PCs can be one of the most frustrating tasks of ownership. For years, many users emailed documents back and forth to themselves because getting to computers networked together was so cumbersome.
Microsoft must have been listening to frustrated customers because they released a nifty feature called HomeGroup that allows a group of PC connected to a home network to share pictures, videos, documents, music and printers with other people in your HomeGroup.
