Monday July 07, 2008
- SSD and 2.5" HD: Fight about Power Consumption - Eric - 14:08:19
Couple of days ago, Tom's Hardware ignite fire by publish a test aiming to compare power consumption of SSD vs. 2.5”HD. Surprisingly, and against all claims published by HD manufacturers, Tom’s found that SSDs use more power than traditional notebook HD. Several readers and websites quickly question the test procedure used by Tom’s while pointing out to some serious flaws in testing. Tom’s Hardware ran a benchmark designed to keep the notebook active all time regardless of the performance level or amount of crunched data. As a result, the higher efficiency of SSDs was leading to slight higher power consumption. Indeed tom’s test did not take into account the fact that with such SSDs most task and/or request will be performed faster than from a traditional HD, so requiring less disk usage.
By using a website-based test procedure, blog.laptopmag.com nicely demonstrated that SSD provide longer battery life, but certainly not as long as one could have predicted it, or claimed it. In their test, 2 SSDs, one from SanDisk and the other from Samsung, lasted 10 minutes longer than the same laptop equipped with the default HD.
So, to conclude on that point, current SSD can drain more power than HD but this is mostly when heavily loaded, and as they will perform the task faster than traditional HD it should NOT translate in higher power consumption. However, unlike some SSD manufacturers could claim it too broadly, the real power saving value with SSD might well be with current SSD generation not that much different than with traditional 2.5”HD. However, in the future, improvement of power consumption of SSD will have much more room too improve than with the current standard plate-based 2.5” HDs.
- Comparing Leopard and Snow Leopard - Lionel - 09:14:18
The website mac-zone.nl run a test aiming to compare Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4 and the Snow Leopard version distributed during the WWDC using GeekBench as a benchmarking tool.
The test was performed on a MacBook Pro, and did not unveil any performance gain when running 32-bits applications, and only marginal improvement with 64-bits applications. This is not surprising, as Snow Leopard is far from being “gold” or finalized, and optimization are for sure not there yet. One will have to wait for additional months before having the first real view of a true Snow Leopard, and one should not forget that most changes are “inside”, in deep layers of the code and OS organization, preparing our favorite system for the multicore (CPU/GPU) revolution to come in the coming years.
[translation by Linathael]
- No Defective NVidia GPU in our Macs? - Lionel - 09:05:54
According to Digitimes, the defective GPU shipped by NVidia for powering notebook graphic cards should be the GF 8500M launched in 2007.
If this information is confirmed, as NVidia does not really want to communicate about it, Apple would then not be affected as Cupertino only used the GF 8600M GT for powering the MacBook Pro.
Last but not least, in Taiwan, this story is making quite some noise, as several companies would like to identify which one is the bad black duck; in order to avoid dealing with it, as such issue might have a huge impact on a company's image as well as on a financial aspect.
[translation by Linathael]
- iPhone: The war between operators has started in Switzerland - Lionel - 07:54:37
Orange quietly let Swisscom fire the opening shot concerning the tariffs for the iPhone in Switzerland before proposing its subscription plans, which are a little bit more interesting.
But the French operator has not stopped there. In order to take its competitor's wind, he will propose that its customers précommander the iPhone from July 9 until the 11 with the tag: " within the limit of stocks disponibles".
[translation by crispin]
