Recent Comments:
Texas Memory breaks records, budgets with blisteringly fast RamSan-440 storage device {Engadget}
Jul 24th 2008 1:35AM Fact check: present server class Opteron processors for 4 way systems only go up to DDR2-666. Thats ~42GB/s. It can however support a maximum 256GB of ram. Phenom can support DDR2-1066, but that is single slot only.
Texas Memory breaks records, budgets with blisteringly fast RamSan-440 storage device {Engadget}
Jul 24th 2008 1:25AM Honestly I dont really understand. In comparison, its not really stellar: A single PCI-E 2.0 8x slot is 4000MB/s. A mid-range Intel chip will have DDR2-1066 ram, which is PC8500: 17GB/s, twice what this thing is claiming. A four way Opteron should let you get to 128GB and four times that throughput (68GB/s, 15x more than 4500MB/s). I dont know what kind of IOPS a Quad socket Opteron can provide but it cant be too far off 600,000. Given the 140,000$ you'd save buying a Quad Opteron server instead, you should still have enough money left over to add some hot-failover redundancy and additional capacity. Is there any reason a huge ram-disk wouldnt blow this thing out of the water?
Samsung's low-power 128GB SSDs go mass production on the cheap {Engadget}
Jul 9th 2008 6:02AM The Macbook Air SSD is made possible because of the plethora of portable media players. Portable media players far exceed sales of all SSD drives combined right now; Macbook Air and this drive both have portable media players to thank for advancing flash memory to price points low enough for SSD. I doubt the Macbook Air had any real influence or impact on this drive becoming available.
Samsung's low-power 128GB SSDs go mass production on the cheap {Engadget}
Jul 9th 2008 5:59AM @loosely_coupled: you are just making stuff up. the flash in this drive is almost certainly much higher performance than your media player; theres no reason to put high quality (read: high performance) flash in a media player when it just has to read fast enough to play a low bitrate movie. performance metrics aside, this drive probably does use the same types of flash as a media player. second, the controller on this ssd is certainly worlds advanced a media player's flash controller. media players just have simple NAND/NOR flash serial interfaces muxed directly to a cpu, this drive undoubtely has multichannel data access to achieve high speed data transfer, and the controller doubles duty by providing a standard sata interface / bad block management / load levelling subsystems.
ECS G10IL: Stateside September for $399 {Engadget}
Jul 9th 2008 5:50AM The Wind uses Via's C7m processor, which has been around for quite a while (since May 2005). Atom will knock the socks off it, performance and performance/watt wise (encryption tasks aside). On the other hand, Via's new Nano/Isaih processor should be landing soon and should completely wreck Atom on the performance and performance/watt measures. But, imo, the Wind is a dud for using such a poor processor (it was slow way back in 2005).
ECS G10IL: Stateside September for $399 {Engadget}
Jul 9th 2008 5:46AM Its showing now. My main gripe is that you can hit reload and engadget will give you a different view of the comments every single time. I've seen plenty of people post stuff 2-5 times because its so inconsistent. Your avatar is likely a similar deferred update issue.
ECS G10IL: Stateside September for $399 {Engadget}
Jul 9th 2008 5:45AM Atom based, havent seen word on official ram capacity but it has one slot. Three USB slots. 1.3 MP cam. 3G only on the 11" model. Bluetooth. I still havent seen word on my favorite spec: display/screen resolution.
Tesla Roadster takes 30 hours to charge from a standard wall socket {Engadget}
Jul 7th 2008 5:05AM The limitation to charging this vehicle is not the batteries, its the power supply to feed them. If Tesla thought your average consumer would safely be able to provide 200a of power at 220v or 480v they would almost certainly have built a much faster charger, but as 220v @80a is the maximum safe power most houses will be able to provide, they built a charger that works to that specification. The batteries in this vehicle are almost certainly able to be charged faster, its just that your house cannot provide enough power to do so.
Most homes are rated at 200-400 amps at 220v. We could hypothetically get near that, but thats a pretty hard limit for the maximum charge speed, and utilizing that would require running extremely large and very high powered cables from your site connection to your garage.
Tesla Roadster takes 30 hours to charge from a standard wall socket {Engadget}
Jul 7th 2008 4:56AM Wow do I ever hate the insane latency and lack of feedback of Engadgets comment system. I dont see any feedback then all of a sudden theres three posts.
I also did my conversions wrong, in two ways. I solved for kWh yet counted MWh and my litergallon conversion was inverted.
It should have been:
39MJ/l (.27777 kWhr/MJ) (1 l/.264gallons) = ~41 kWh/gallon
Charging the car takes
17kW * 4hr = 70kWh.
So it takes the energy content of 1.718 gallons worth of gas to fully charge this car. Please forgive the math slips, it should have occured to me those numbers were outrageous.
Tesla Roadster takes 30 hours to charge from a standard wall socket {Engadget}
Jul 7th 2008 4:37AM Permit me to "drive the point all the way home":
According to wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Energy_content ) a gallon of permium gas contains 39MJ/liter of energy. Factor that by (.2777 kWh/MJ) (.284 liters/gallon) and gas is 2.86 MWhr's per gallon. If you were to burn that over four hours (.25) it would put out a continuous 716kW, meaning a single gallon of gas contains *42.1 times more energy* than this car takes to completely charge.
17kW * 4hr is miniscule compared to what a gasoline car consumes.
