Intel Turbo Boost is a hardware technology that Intel uses to put additional electricity into its CPU’s to have them temporarily operate at a levels above their traditional specification. You might be tempted to call this “overclocking” and while the concepts are very similar, they are definitely not the same. Read more…
Today Bloomberg reported that Apple and Amazon were (are?) using servers with an extra chip that hacks their data at the hardware level making it virtually impossible to detect. From a technical perspective we wanted to know how this could happen, and so here is the explanation. A secretive part Read more…
If you want to buy a Dell corporate PC you are likely looking at the Optiplex line and finding it very difficult to figure out what the hardware differences are between their three offerings, the 3060, 5060 and 7060’s. All three of these lines: are offered in Mid-Tower, Small Form Read more…
If you have a PC that is very slow and you notice that Task Manager shows near 100% disk is being used but the individual items do not sum to anything approaching 100%, you may have an issue with SuperFetch. Fortunately it is easy to correct. We recently dealt with Read more…
If you want to distill the argument between Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc server processors down to three things, they would be: AMD’s interconnection of the Cores on Epyc is much slower than on Intel Xeon’s AMD Epyc CPU’s are faster than Intel Xeon in memory intensive applications In general, Read more…
Last week we provided a very quick explanation of the Meltdown & Spectre CPU flaws which you can read HERE. However, much more is now known and so here are the current answers to Meltdown & Spectre Frequently Asked Questions: What are Spectre & Meltdown? Spectre and Meltdown are related Read more…
UPDATE Saturday Jan 6 – 2018: There are now two known flaws named “Meltdown” and “Spectre”. Spectre still has not been detailed but applies to virtually all CPU’s including x86 and ARM. It is now known that Intel (and possibly other CPU manufacturers) have a very serious design flaw with Read more…
Intel says that the Xeon Scalable Processor line is the largest upgrade in server CPU’s in a decade. Lets take a very quick run through of what has changed and then you can make up your own mind. NAMING: The new CPU’s are code named Skylake and the new Chipset Read more…
Intel AVX-512 is the latest version of Advanced Vector Extensions. Since x86 instruction set was designed in the 1970’s there has been a drive to extend that instruction set so that the CPU can handle more and more tasks. This means that fewer and few special purpose add-on cards are Read more…
If you are looking at CPU‘s you would be wise to consider the latest batch of Intel Processors cleverly named 8th Generation Core Series. As usual Intel claims gigantic performance improvements through a series of changes to their CPU’s. Those claims may have been dubious in the past (gen over Read more…
In the video below we show how to remove the spinning disk from a Dell Latitude 5480 and replace it with a larger one and then enable SSD Caching. To use SSD Caching your PC needs: The connectors to add an SSD and a spinning disk A BIOS that supports SSD Read more…
We explain and demonstrate what Intel Optane is, what you need to run it, and if it will really improve your PC’s performance. What is Intel Optane? Intel Optane is an accelerator for your hard drive. Intel Optane is stick of non-volatile memory, which means it does not get wiped clean Read more…
Intel used to have a pretty simple naming scheme for its CPU’s but as the market demanded more features, Intel started adding suffix letters to its processors. Often the letters added on to the end of an Intel CPU number can mean enormous differences. Below is a list of Intel CPU Suffix Letters: C Read more…
This page details the keys needed to boot a PC into various modes (like the BIOS and PXE Network) from various manufacturers. If you are stuck and you can try the common keystrokes during a POST and before the Operating System loads: ESC, F1, F2, F8, F9, F10, F12 and Delete key. Read more…
If you have recently purchased a laptop and heard about Windows 10’s new facial recognition software called Windows Hello, you are likely going to be disappointed. Windows Hello is a FANTASTIC feature and from my brief testing on a Microsoft Surfacebook, it works quite well. Unfortunately, it requires one of Read more…
Over the years Intel has released a number of variations on their CPU’s and started some lines that have since faded out (does anyone remember the Core 2, Pentium Pro or DX Math coprocessor). So there is no mystery why many people find Intel’s current lines mysterious. They just don’t Read more…