Could the Zii be an FPGA?

So, Creative is about to unveil a new chip or product, at CES: the Zii. It has been called "Stemcell computing" in marketing lingo and, as such, some things can be infered from this designation.

The first thing that comes to mind when we think about a stem cell is it's a type of cell that latter differentiates to something more specific.

The stem cell of the computing world is the FPGA, the Field-programmable Gate Array. This type of chip contains, nowadays, millions of programmable "gates"(the one pictured above has one million), basic building blocks for computer logic. You can build virtually anything in an FPGA but the ASIC(application specific integrated circuit) is what's used for the typical graphic card or processor is due to the lower cost to produce in high volume.
The modern FPGAs aren't fully programmable: they're a hybrid. They contain not just gates but more specific logic like SRAMs, lookup-tables and even one or two microprocessors, sometimes. This way a large amount of it's logic goes unused, since much of it can't be mapped, while an ASIC is built with mostly 100% of it's logic for use, other than redundancy stuff.

FPGAs can be used for fast integrated circuit prototyping, or deployment, since they can be programmed multiple times, frequently at runtime, changing architecture as pleased. They can be used to implement things like network controllers, switchs, simple RISC processors or a specific, highly efficient co-processor. You just need to code/describe it.

Currently FPGAs have been able to support millions of programmable gates in one chip, opening them up to new applications previously made impossible. It's still a far cry from the billions of transistors that ASICs currently have but in Creative's market there isn't a need for such complex chips. The X-Fi "only" has 51 million transistors - a paltry number when compared to Nvidia's GTX 2xx 1.4 billion transistors - but still out of reach for pratical FPGA applications.

What Creative might be introducing then is an hybrid design, already similar to current FPGA designs, that they may somehow reuse for multiple product lines or even upgrade with new "hardware" features along the life of the product. I wouldn't expect an upgradable product, given Creative's recent inability to supply updated drivers to Audigy owners, let alone new "hardware" features - still, all is possible.

The official announced should come in the next few days, from Las Vegas.
In the meantime, visit the products website, if you haven't already - although there's not much to see.

Talismoon Xbox 360 PSU Energyzer quick review

Tired of the noise that my "Falcon" Xbox 360 produces, especially the PSU, I had a look at quick fixes. Soon, I stumbled upon the PSU Energyzer, which allows you to use a standard 20-pin ATX PSU with your Xbox 360, and the use of a silent PSU.
What I was to find out soon is that the PSU Energyzer is quite tricky.

One thing I was afraid when I ordered the PSU Energyzer off from eBay, was that the use of an ATX 20-pin plug was going to be a problem, since it only has one 12 volts, yellow wire.
The "Xenon" 360 drains 16.5 amps from the 12v line, so this is a huge issue for a cheap PSU, even more for a single wire.

If you pay attention to the evolution of ATX PSUs, you know that, currently, you have at least a dual 12v, dual ground plug, known as the ATX 12v connector. This connector was introduced by the time of the Pentium 4's introduction and has since remained as standard. It was designed to supply a dedicate power source to the CPU, which consumed about 90 watts at the time.
With the recent 125 and 140W CPUs, the ATX 12V plug has been updated to 8 wires, four 12v, four ground, to accomodate these power requirements. Although most 125W CPUs can work fine on the standard 4 wire connector, problems may arise. Sometimes, failure to comply with the requirements can be disastrous.

I was obvisouly astonished to find that Talismoon hopes that the PSU Energyzer will be able to feed 198 watts - that the "Xenon" Xbox 360 pulls from the 12v rail - through one wire. Still, I gave it a try.
The short run wasn't disastrous but the 12v wire was considerably warm(it should be completely cold, as is usual. A warm wire indicates thaat it's struggling to keep up); the console itself worked fine for the short run it took. Remember that it's a "Falcon" model, which only churns 170.4A maximum, from the 12v rail, not a "Xenon", for which the PSU Energyzer was designed to work with.

I didn't liked it, so it's going out of service until I mod it somehow, you know, the proper way. Maybe even using the ATX 12v plug. You should do the same.
Some people who bought it, obviously, had problems, as an Amazon customer explains:

Ive purchased 2 of these thinking that they were a good low cost alternative to replacing the power supply. I have numerous good pc power supplies . Both of these talismoons practically caught fire they got so hot. I managed to salvage one but have to keep a fan running on the connector and my 360 frequently locks up. I will be throwing them all away and purchasing a microsoft oem power supply.

Although the PSU choice might have helped the disaster - some might have better wiring, some are more "compatible" and might work fine(as I explained before) - this is definitely a fault by design. No electrical engineer, in it's right mind, would design this and hope it lasts for long.

At the very least, Talismoon should have used the ATX 24-pin connector, which provides two 12v wires. That could have been enough to solve most problems. The connector that plugs to the Xbox 360, by standard, uses 3 wires. The standard ATX plug coupled with the ATX 12v plug would have perfectly fit that.

The PSU doesn't turn off

The other problem with the PSU Energyzer is that it doesn't turn off the PSU as it should, it just stays on as long as it's plugged to the wall.
This might be a problem of an earlier revision, as some people claim this doesn't happen on newer versions. The rest remains unchanged.

On a final note:

If you do plan to still use the PSU Energyzer, do check that the PSU you choose can provide, at least, 1 to 2 more amps than what the Xbox 360 requires, which is:

Xenon/Xephyr: 16.5A
Falcon: 14.2A
Jasper: 12.1A

Also, be sure that this is on a single rail. Most modern PSUs have different rails for the 12v, sometimes as much as four, with different amperage. Most importantly, the ATX 20-pin plug usually gets a weaker rail.

Conclusion

Stay away. Unless you want to mod it somehow, you shouldn't use the PSU Energyzer. It may catch fire and possibly damage your Xbox 360, or worse. The lucky ones only loose the adapter itself.
The issue with the PSU not turning off is also another reason to stay away; to wait that Microsoft finally releases a passive PSU, the one worthy of a media center.

Samsung Pleomax PKB-4500 - A year later

More than a year has passed since I reviewed the Pleomax PKB-4500 keyboard. It's now time for an update, since it's around this timeframe that bad build quality starts to show repercursions.

The first indicator of a bad keyboard are keys starting to get stuck. You can buy a decent keyboard that, provided that the keys aren't getting stuck due to small amounts of dirt you "put" there, can be working almost as new for 5 years or more. This Pleomax insn't of of those keyboards.

In the review, I praised the silent typing that this keyboard provided: that is completely gone. It's still not particularly loud compared to other keyboards but it's quite different now.

The worse problem, though, is that the keys now require me to push a bit harder than before to have the same pressed state. This seems to be due to the structure of the keys, which is really quite cheap and not very well structured for durability:


As you can see from the picture, the keys have an "X" structure, which fits in a larger, female type, "X". You then have a bit of rubber with the conductive part, which is quite easily pressed - I've seen €5 keyboards that are better built.

The problem with the PKB-4500 is that the fitting of the keys starts getting less looser with time and so the keys can tilt more, becoming more "stuck", hence requiring to use a bit more pressure to fully press. This becomes more aparent for the non-central keys, where you usually press them from an angle and not from straight up.
Unless you wanna lubricate the problematic keys, I don't see any good solution for this - you will probably be able to ignore it, as it's not a very serious issue.

For most uses, especially casual one, this is a good keyboard. Still, it's probably not worth the €20 I paid for it and definitely not recommended for someone who types a lot. Also, it's starting to get quite yellow now, but that's expected from white plastic.

HP in negotiations to ease restrictions on Atom platforms

Digitimes reports that HP in in negotiations with Intel, so that the the latter will "ease" the restrictions on how the Atom platform is used. That may be the smart thing to do. The story is quite vague and doesn't mention if these negotiations involve the dual-core Atom or the Ion platform from Nvidia.

It does mention Atom based laptops with more than 10" of screen size:

In light of competition from Asustek Computer and Acer in promoting netbook PCs, HP's 2009 roadmap shows that the company hopes to enhance its netbook lineup by offering an 11.6-inch model in the second quarter of 2009 and an 13.3-inch model in June 2009, the sources pointed out.

Nice. Pair an Atom 330 with that 13.3" screen and a better chipset than the 945G and I'm all over it.

Overclocking out of control...

I always have some fun pushing things to the extreme, and when it comes to overclocking, I've had my very good share of voltmods and watercooling. I never went to the extreme of using stuff like liquid nitrogen or dry ice, but I void my warranties and, unfortunately, I killed a considerable amount of my hardware in the process.

I couldn't help myself, I did it again. The victim was an hand picked AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ F3 revision "Windsor" core, the good ones, 90nm, with the full 2MiB of L2 cache and the 65W Energy Efficient version; I am, therefore, very sad with this picture:


In my defence, I had done this a good amount of times before, never damaging any of the Athlons I tampered and obtained excellent temperature drops. This was done almost a year ago and I hadn't find any record of anyone removing an IHS on these cores.

When I picked it up, I was with too little patience and brute-forced my way in. The IHS was having a tough time coming off and, strangely, I kept being able to cut stuff inside, which I thought was the heatspreader glue. It was the resistors and that's what killed it - the core itself doesn't seem damaged, if I was able to clean it - the silver stuff is not completely solid but not your typical TIM either, seems more like some kind of alloy. You probably can't notice the detail on the picture but this "TIM" has some small air bubbles, not anything near troubling, just worth mentioning.
Both the core and the IHS have a kind of golden layer that seems to be what "solders" with this metallic stuff that goes in the middle of both, not something that I've seen before, not even from Intel.

I had a 5ºC difference between the two cores, so I thought that it might have been of bad IHS interface with the core. I had a socket 939 X2 3800+ to which I removed the IHS with very good results, in a very easy way. I should have noticed that I was cutting resistors and not glue, but since they usually are quite well soldered, I thought I was just cutting glue. The new lead free solder is also used in the new CPUs and it is usually more fragile than the lead carrying solder, certainly the solder type used with the old 939 cores. That must have been the cause of the fragility I experienced here - I never used carefulness before. If you look carefully at the picture, you'll see the Xacto knife I used cut very easily through the solder.

On a final note, this CPU was tested to run at 3.3GHz, at 1.4v, so I needed good thermals. Lukily I had another equal sample around, which overclocked a bit less. Not much to do now, other than to dwell at the interesting(but sad) find that it was.

As I said before, this was overclocking out of control, this won't surely be worth the effort or the risk. You'll have better luck by lapping the CPU since they usually aren't very flat when they come from the factory.

If any doubt persists, the Phenom is also using this new manufacturing technique.