René Rebe

When it was announced, released, back in the other year, the Via Nano (x86) CPU had so much potential:

• 64bit (x86-64, AMD64, Intel EM64T, …)
• VT (Virtualization Technology) extension (ok, unfinished in the early silicon, said to be in the 3rd stepping)
• quite power efficient, yet reasonable performance

Too bad they somehow did not manage to get into the market. Very strange given that the Taiwan company (Via) is located exactly where most of the devices are actually manufactured (Taiwan, China). On the other hand even the way bigger AMD struggles to gain in the ultra-portable, mobile market.

I guess Intel is just too established, pressuring, buying the manufactures.

So the Lenovo X100e is announced, compact, kind of ThinkPad design inheritance. And best of all: with a more powerful AMD silicon inside (AMD Neo and related ATi graphics) and matte 11″ HD screen! Too bad it misses an digital video out (HDMI or so instead of the so last millennium analog VGA). Looking forward to the dual-core AMD Neo (X2?) option mentioned by an Lenovo spokesperson in some hands-on video, …

Update: Of course the absence of digital video out (HDMI et al.) is a show-stopper. It also looks a little cheapish in real-life, battery life is also said to be disappointingly low (3-4h on a charge). I’d definitely wait at least for an AMD X2 variant to appear. Of course fixing the other imperfections would be welcome, too.

The first Pine Trail Atoms, N450 and the like, are trickeling leaking out. And guess what, the performance meter did not move a bit: Just some randomly picked Geekbench results:

score 916
ASUSTeK Computer INC. 901 6 days ago
Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

score 994
Hewlett-Packard HP Mini 311-1000 5 days ago
Intel Atom N280 @ 1.67 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

score 934
Acer AO532h 7 days ago
Intel Atom N450 @ 1.67 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

I wished Moore’s law would still be in effect as the Atom performance is barely endurable. At least the new Atoms finally come with the AMD64 (x86_64, EM64T) enabled, and might be slightly more performant in 64bit mode due to more general purpose registers being around, potentially shuffling more data per instruction, clock cycle (e.g. rendering your browser content, text, graphics et al.).

To my greatest amusement this is about exactly the performance of the Transmeta Efficieon, announced in 2003, and started to ship in 2004:

score 956
Linux PC (Transmeta Efficeon(tm) Processor TM8000) 20 months ago
Transmeta Efficeon TM8000 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, threads)
Geekbench 2.0.15 for Linux x86 (32-bit)

I wished more companies would switch to more competitive solutions, such as the AMD Neo and Neo X2 series that comes with a way higher performance envelope for some time, now, …

score 1687
Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv2 Notebook PC 4 months ago
AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.3 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

Update:

While at it, the Via Nano does not appear to be that much of a screamer in this regard, likewise:

score 1064
LENOVO 20021,2959 7 days ago
VIA Nano U2250 (1.6GHz Capable) @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

Oh, and you are looking for decent reference score?

score 18996
Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8384 5 months ago
Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8384 @ 2.69 GHz (8 processors, 32 cores, threads)
Geekbench 2.1.2 for Linux x86 (32-bit)

score 9777
iMac11,1 4 hours ago
Apple Inc. Mac-F2268DAE
Intel Core i7 860 @ 2.80 GHz (1 processor, 4 cores, 8 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit)

score 1872
Power Mac G5 (Late 2005)
PowerMac11,2
PowerPC G5 (970MP) @ 2.00 GHz (2 processors)
Geekbench 2.1.6 for Mac OS X PPC (32-bit)

At a time, a decade ago, at the advent of Mac OS 8 and 9 there were some pretty popular mobile strobe scanners from Visioneer, named PaperPort Strobe, Pro and Co.

However, Mac driver and support were abandon with Apple’s migration to the all-new, Unix-based Mac OS X. Since then Mac users where left with few choices when it came to mobile (abroad), desk-space-efficient and business card scanners.

Now, the new version 2.8 of ExactScan set of to change everything: among the now over 200 built-in scanner drivers, is support for the popular and convenient Visioneer RoadWarrior, as well as the Xerox Travel Scanner 100! On top of this, the version of ExactScan already supports the just-released Visioneer Strobe 500. A novel feature of the Strobe 500 is the detachable ADF dock: For use abroad, the ADF unit remain on the desk, leaving just the slimmer, mobile scanning unit to travel with you.

Read more: ExactScan homepage

Finally, after a month on some outdated 1.1.3 version, we Europeans (maybe all GSM Pré’s?) get the long awaited 1.3.1 update.

Why the Palm Pré (unlike Apple’s iPhone) does not have one universal software build for all phone variants, areas, is a mystery to me.

My favorite Change: Fast forward and rewind (current play position change), yay!

However some recent speedup, e.g. hardware accelerated graphics would be welcome, too, …

So for decades we had 3.5mm (⅛″) and 6,3mm (1/4″) headphone jacks on nearly any audio equipment. From the Revox A77 all the way down to the Sony Walkman and Apple iPhone. Nowadays they often carry a fourth ring, usually for the microphone for handsfree use on cell phones.

In the second week with the Nokia Booklet I thought to finally checkout the audio quality. Well, what should I say, I nearly fall off my office chair when I plugged in my V-Mode Vibe Duo headphone ( I got for use with the iPhone). It sounded like good old PC speakers (well beeper) plugged into a coke can. Awful, at best. Still shocked, I plugged in the standard headphone that came with the Palm Pré, which was not a bit better, rather worse.

Puzzled if it should be possible to mangle a DA convert’s output lines that badly, I grabbed the box, in which Nokia shipped the Booklet, from the shelf to give the Nokia headphones, which came with the Booklet, a try. All to my surprise they sounded somewhat better. Still sub-standard, but at least not like a PC beeper thrown into a tin.

I quickly checked the headphones in front of me:

• the iPhone’s work in the iPhone (obviously), the Pré, a MacBook, but not in the Booklet
• the Pré’s work in the iPhone, Pré, MacBook and neither in the Nokia Booklet
• the Booklet’s only have reasonable sound quality in the Booklet itself, in the iPhone, Pré or a standard outputs, such as the MacBook, they sounds awful
• at least a regular Sennheiser (without microphone ring) worked in all devices, puh

I get the feeling Nokia uses a different signal combination. One could have thought the vendors would be smart enough to all use the same, … Well, I guess they where smart enough to all use their own variant, sell matching accessories.

At least Apple and Palm where smart enough to make their variants work with good old standard devices, while Nokia somehow managed to make them incompatible with probably all the last decades audio equipment, …

So recently I mangled my PowerPC G5’s Apple partition map while installing Mac OS X on my Nokia Booklet 3G. Yeah, all this zero-based, one-based, everyone names them different device enumeration, …

So after the Chameleon Master Boot Record hit the Apple Partition Map of the G5, OpenFirmware was not able to read the remaining partition table anymore (I actually should lookup the layout, maybe just some magic was hit, or a backup copy resists somewhere, whatever).

So after about a week without the G5 I thought it would be a good day to install all the OS X flavors, which I need for testing, alongside my Linux, again.

Loading the T2 installable disk, Linux did neither recognize a valid partition table, anymore - however mac-disk still displayed all the 8 partitions just fine. It just wouldn’t save it without changes (at least I found no “forced write, really I mean it, yes I know I have not modified it” switch). So the last partition removed, re-added, re-written (yuck), and all was there again. Yay!

According to an O2 employee I just spoke to (regarding my memory glitching device) the Nokia Booklet 3G is already on the list of soon to be End-Of-Life’d devices? Given that it just went on sale just slightly more than a week ago this makes a pretty short lifespan. Even for cellphone standards, … I wonder if there is more behind this, such as a batch of faulty memory chips, PCBs, high return rate in general?

My last days experience with the Nokia Booklet 3G were not too superb, the Google memory stress tester spotted some miscompares:

Hardware Error: miscompare on CPU 1(0×2) at 0×5bd98480(0×0:DIMM Unknown): read:0×0000000004000000, reread:0×0000000004000000 expected:0×0400000004000000
Hardware Error: miscompare on CPU 1(0×2) at 0×49363240(0×0:DIMM Unknown): read:0×0000000004000000, reread:0×0000000004000000 expected:0×0400000004000000
…

Could explain some things.

Question is who’s to blame? Memory, Chipset, CPU, OS?

Given this, and Google’s latest paper on memory errors I consider making an stressapptest run part of my standard system installation procedure, …

Update: With the same binary, (Linux) kernel and (Google) test-application, from the same USB stick the Google memory tester does not find an issue with any other machine int the office, from other Atom 330, over VIA C7, Intel Core 2 Duo, to 8-way Xeons. I even just walked over the the Sony Style Store in Berlin, checked a Sony Vaio VGN-X with 1.86GHz Z-series Atom - which did not report a glitch in some minutes of testing, either. So the “generic” Intel Poulsbo chipset option becomes less likely (well, you’d never know, I just say Intel F00F, FDIV bug).

While we are at it: The Nokia support is a huge joke, they claim no warranty if the OS was formatted, e.g. the Win 7 Starter updaeted, manually installed, even just Win 7 Home Premium / Professional, whatever. Forget about Linux. They stress not to remove the “hidden” recovery partition. I just had the worst support call, ever!

Update 2: The same happens on an US (mine is DE) Booklet in a Best Buy store over in the US. So it’s certainly not a single incident. However, given other server hardware shows the same in the google stresstest application list I have hope this is a bug in the tester :-)

So Nokia, or their contractor, did not fill the BIOS mode table too carefully, forgot the native resolution of 1280×720 pixels.

The Poulsbo X.org / Linux driver is still a bloody mess. Thus for using the VESA driver with the native resolution we need to get it somehow into the BIOS. Turned out the BIOS and mode-setting is so Intel i810′ish that adding GMA500 / Poulsbo support to 915resolution was easy :-)

915resolution 49 1280 720 16
915resolution 58 1280 720 32

Give the similarities for the RAMDAC / CRT / other pipe control and the i810, it might be easy to get GMA500 mode setting and external output control into the regular Intel driver. Of course without acceleration, which given the PowerVR IP core will be 100% different. But native mode-setting, including external output control might be a nice start for a non-messy X.org / Linux driver.