First some news items

• Facebook IPO was May 18th and it will be an IPO to remember for all the wrong reasons. The stock did not live up to the hype:
  • Why America loves the Facebook fiasco – Jon Friedman’s Media Web – MarketWatch http://on.mktw.net/KLFWaI
  • Facebook Stock Drops – What Really Goes On In IPO’s – Forbes http://onforb.es/LaWAAj
  • A Morgan Stanley analyst also emailed select clients of his before the IPO alerting them that he had reduced the target for FB earnings. MA is issuing a subpoena for Morgan Stanley

Remember bill C-30 the bill introduced by Vic Toews that would allow the authorities to monitor your internet traffic? It supposedly died and everyone believed that was it. Well guess again

• Michael Geist – How Canada’s Telecom Companies Have Secretly Supported Internet Surveillance Legislation http://bit.ly/JQ0hk3
• Michael Geist – The Secret Lawful Access Regs: What the Gov Told the Telcos While Keeping the Public in the Dark http://bit.ly/LoUdgf

Effective August 1, 2012 Manitoba will have Environmental Handling Fee on all new electronic devices at point of sale. If this fee is not shown as a separate item on your bill then it will be subject to PST & GST.

What Is An EHF?

The cost of recycling electronic waste material through EPRA Manitoba is funded by an Environmental Handling Fee (EHF) collected on the purchase of new electronic equipment. The EHF reflects the actual cost to recycle materials in the product. The fee is not a tax and not a refundable deposit.

Program Product and Environmental Handling Fee Paid on Purchase

Desktop Computers CPU $15.00

Portable Computer $3.00

Display Device w/ diagonal screen size:

29” or smaller $9.25

30” or larger $23.25

Printers, Scanners and Fax Machines $8.00

Computer Peripherals $1.10

Personal/Portable Audio and Video Playback and Recording Systems $.40

Home Audio and Video Playback and Recording Systems or Components $3.50

Home Theatre in a Box (HTB) Systems $6.00

Vehicle Audio & Video Systems/Components $2.75

Non-cellular telephones and Answering Machines $.85

Countertop Microwave Ovens
Under 1.0 cu. Ft.  $7.50
Over 1.0 cu. Ft.  $10.00

Intel Ivy Bridge CPU

Today I will be discussing Intel’s new CPU, Ivy Bridge. With Intel they usually follow a tick tock release cycle with their CPUs. What this means is that a CPU architecture is released that is a slight improvement (tick) over the prior CPU. Then the next CPU architecture is a big improvement (tock) over the prior CPU.

Ivy Bridge is a tick release. Haswell (2^nd qtr 2013), the successor to Ivy Bridge will be a tock release. Ivy Bridge is a successor to Sandy Bridge, that was released on January 2011. Ivy Bridge is Intel’s first processor to be based on 22nm Process Technology. This process allows for higher performance with low power usage.

The Sandy Bridge featured an onboard HD 3000 graphics processor. In order to be able to use this graphics processor one had to purchase a motherboard based on the H67 chipset. If you wanted a performance machine you had to purchase a P67 chipset based motherboard. The P67 though deactivated the on CPU graphics processor.

The Ivy Bridge CPUs have an HD 4000 graphics processor built into the CPU. The HD 4000 allows support of up to 3 monitors without the need of an external graphics card. The older Sandy Bridge CPUs required a 1155 pin motherboard CPU socket (LGA 1155).

The rest of the desktop lineup for launch looks good too with the low wattage parts going down to a 45 watt with the Core i7-3770T.  It still has four cores and supports HyperThreading with a base clock of 2.50 GHz and a Turbo clock that is 1.2 GHz higher.

The flagship Ivy Bridge processor, the Core i7-3770K, will have a base clock of 3.50 GHz and a top Turbo frequency of 3.90 GHz.  Both of these clocks are 100 MHz higher than that of the Core i7-2600K and match up with the Core i7-2700K.  The 3770K will of course have four cores and support HyperThreading for eight total addressable threads.  The L3 cache size sits at the top end of 8MB and it includes the highest end HD 4000 graphics as well.

The Ivy Bridge cpus still use an LGA1155 CPU socket which means some Sandy Bridge based motherboards could support the Ivy Bridge. These Sandy Bridge motherboards are based on the H61, H67 (video), P67 and Z68 (video) chipsets. In order to support Ivy Bridge cpus the Sandy Bridge motherboards will need a BIOS update. Doing so won’t give you access to some of the newer 7-series chipset features like PCIe Gen 3 (some 6-series boards are claiming 3.0 support), native USB 3.0 (many 6-series boards have 3rd party USB 3.0 controllers) and Intel’s Rapid Start Technology.

Review comments from tech sites:

• PcPer.com: “In a general sense, I would give the new Core i7-3770K a 10-15% performance advantage over the Sandy Bridge designs available in any given CPU workload.”
• PcPer.com: “The updated processor graphics on Ivy Bridge impressed us as well as far as integrated graphics go – the HD 4000 saw as much as a 45% performance advantage compared to the HD 3000 on Sandy Bridge in real-world gaming tests like Left 4 Dead 2 and DiRT 3.”
• PC World: “The HD 4000 GPU built into these processors is a huge improvement over the chips found in current-generation Sandy Bridge products, and is fast enough to make inexpensive entry-level graphics cards obsolete. You’ll still want a good discrete graphics cards for serious gaming, but our benchmarks show that there’s just no reason to buy a $50 graphics card anymore.”
• PC World: “This stands in contrast to the processor’s general compute performance, which is just slightly faster than current Intel CPUs. (For more, take a look at our testing of overall Ivy Bridge performance.) Ivy Bridge is more energy-efficient, which will be especially useful in laptops, but the most noticeable change in performance will be felt when you run 3D graphics applications.”
• The desktop CPU has been found that when one overclocks the CPU it gets alarmingly hot. One tech site seen temperatures reaching 80C when a 3.5Ghz was overclocked to 4.2Ghz. The surprising thing was that this test computer was using a liquid cooled CPU cooler.
• Several motherboard makers have announced Z77 based chipset Ivy Bridge motherboards. These include Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.
• Some of the Asus models have a header on the motherboard to provide Thunderbolt support with a $40 addon module.
• Thunderbolt is a way of providing high speed data transfer whether it is to a video display, hard disk or other devices. Apple introduced Thunderbolt, which combines PCI-e and Apple’s mini DisplayPort, over a year ago but it did not take off due in part to lack of peripherals along with the high price of devices. Thunderbolt was designed to use fiber optical cable (20Gb/s) to daisy change the devices together but in order to get the product introduced Apple started with a $50 copper based cable (10Gb/s).
• The Asus motherboards also allow you to control individual case fan speeds even if the fans have no speed profiles. Of course they support USB3 on the motherboard Intel chipset without the need of an additional controller chip like the Sandy Bridge boards do.