First, a bit of history. AMD's Phenom II chips were released in January this year, and are AMD's first CPUs to be based on a 45nm lithography. While Intel's latest offering is the muscular Core i7 chips, AMD claims its new Phenom II chips are designed to compete with Intel's previous Core 2 Duo series. Particularly, the Phenom II go head-to-head with Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9xxx series chips.

Note: all chips listed here are quad-core chips.

My colleagues at ZDNet Germany performed a comprehensive set of benchmarks that make for interesting reading. Alternatively, you can read even more exhaustive testing on AnandTech. In these benchmarks, the AMD Phenom IIs go neck and neck with Intel's similarly priced CPUs.

Despite significant improvements, the Phenom II CPU is still soundly beaten by Intel's latest Core i7 architecture and is still just behind the best Intel Core 2 Duo chips.

That's great for Intel — except when first released in Australia, Intel's Core i7 chips retailed for between AU$600 and AU$2,900. Ouch. Intel's Core i7 also required a new socket, meaning those wishing to upgrade from Core 2 Duo needed to fork out extra cash for a new motherboard and possibly new RAM if they didn't previously have DDR3.

Once we leave this enthusiast price bracket, AMD's Phenom IIs start to look better and better — AMD hasn't implemented a new socket as Phenom IIs are compatible with the same motherboards as the original Phenom processors.

If you need more convincing, check out Phenom II's huge over-clocking potential.

When shopping at the AU$400 price point, AMD is offering a very competitive product. Given this, I expect AMD to sell a few Phenom II CPUs.

There is one caveat in an AMD comeback though; Intel has the option of simply dropping prices on its Core 2 Quad chips. This is not only possible but likely, and would wipe out any advantage that AMD has over Intel who currently have the superior technology.

Of course, I'm biased in all of this; I want to see AMD make a strong comeback. The company has been copping a terrible beating from rival Intel in the last 24 months, virtually disappearing from the mainstream business desktop and notebook market.

If this hiding continues, it opens the possibility of a future Intel monopoly. That means higher prices, and nobody pushing Intel to bring new technologies to market.

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• Five reasons SSDs are great
• USB 3.0 will crush eSATA, FireWire
• 64-bit Windows: It's time to get serious
• Will the NSW Govt put Linux in schools?

With close examination, it seems that the days of the good old mechanical hard drive are numbered, with SSDs ready to eclipse them in the long run. Here are five reasons to look forward to the ascendancy of SSDs.

1. Speed
First, some background. Unlike mechanical hard drives, SSDs don't contain any moving parts. Rather, they rely on millions of tiny flash memory cells. These tiny flash cells are non-volatile memory, meaning that they retain their data even when no power is present. Today SSDs most commonly utilise NAND-based flash memory.

This means no moving parts, and thus no spin-up speed, which results in shorter boot times. It also means faster read speeds from idle, and faster write speeds for larger files (unfortunately, due to the nature of their design, SSDs struggle with writing smaller block sizes, see here for more details).

Realistically, this results in hard drive access which is about 60 per cent faster — the score we achieved for a file transfer when comparing Intel's latest X-25M SSD with a 7,200rpm Seagate drive.

Or, for a more practical demonstration, here is a video featuring the MacBook Air.

2. Power saving
There is still a lot of debate around this, but it is safe to say that generally, SSDs have a lower power consumption than conventional hard drives (if only marginally so). This varies depending on the test, the SSD, and the mechanical hard drive you are comparing the SSD to.

However, what we can say is that in the long run, flash-based SSDs have one up on mechanical hard drives in the power consumption stakes. Comprehensive tests performed by Tom's Hardware show that while average power consumption is comparable between SSDs and mechanical hard drives, when optimised, SSDs can achieve a much lower average power requirement and performance per Watt figures.

3. Size
This one is a bit of a no-brainer, SSDs can be much smaller than mechanical hard drives. While they are generally packed in similar form factors to mechanical HDDs (1.8, 2.5 and 3.5 inches), they have the potential to be much smaller. MicroSD cards are a good demonstration of this, as is the seemingly endless increase in the capacity of USB keys. The ability to put a huge amount of storage into a tiny space creates new opportunities in gadget design — iPod Pico anyone?

4. Durability
It is said that the enemies of reliability are heat and moving parts. SSDs have no moving parts, meaning that they aren't susceptible to the vibration or drop damage associated with mechanical disk drives.

The nature of flash memory also means that it can survive through a larger temperate range, with some flash drives operating at up to 70 degrees Celsius.

It is safe to say that generally, SSDs have a lower power consumption that conventional hard drives

Write cycles vary markedly depending on the grade of SSD you are looking at. There are two kinds of flash memories available in SSDs: single level cells (rated at around 100,000 cycles), and multi-level cells (rated at round 10,000 cycles). This whitepaper provides more details.

Technologies such as wear levelling can increase durability, as can other improvements. Improvements can allow as many as 1 million write cycles, a value which allows for continuous use over decades. Given that mechanical hard drives are normally rated around 50,000 read/write cycles, SSDs currently have competitive durability and the potential to surpass mechanical hard drives.

5. The best is yet to come
This is the most important point of the five. SSDs are a fledgling technology, and currently aren't living up to their potential. Mechanical hard drive technology, on the other hand, is mature and so is seeing its limits pushed.

The first thing we can expect from SSDs is a dramatic fall in price. Secondly, we can expect steady increases in both storage capacity and reliability.

Finally, current software is optimised for use with mechanical disks, particularly more recent versions of Windows. As SSDs perform better under certain conditions (such as writing larger memory blocks), so software can be optimised to work with SSDs. This means software optimisation can parallel hardware optimisation, providing further headroom for improvement.

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• USB 3.0 will crush eSATA, FireWire
• 64-bit Windows: It's time to get serious
• Will the NSW Govt put Linux in schools?
• Hullabaloo about OLED

The USB 3.0 cable is substantially thicker than the
USB 2.0 cable as it contains six wires rather than two.

(Credit: Reuben Lee/CNET Asia)

When USB 3.0 is expected to hit the market in early 2010, it will have been 10 years since the now ubiquitous USB 2.0 was introduced (April 2000). The current USB 2.0 specification runs at a theoretical maximum speed of 480Mbps, and can supply power (for those looking for the hard details, you can find the USB 2.0 specification here (zip file)).

According to the USB Implementers Forum, there were 2 billion USB 2.0 devices shipped in 2006 (one for every three people in the world), and the install base was 6 billion (almost one for every person in the world). In November 2007, the USB Implementers forum announced the USB 3.0 specifications, and Intel officially demonstrated the technology at CES 2009.

Now, the juice: USB 3.0 promises a theoretical maximum rate of 5Gbps, meaning it's 10 times faster than USB 2.0. USB 3.0 is also full duplex, meaning it can upload and download simultaneously (it's bi-directional); USB 2.0 is only half duplex.

Put side by side with eSATA and FireWire 800, USB 3.0 is far superior. eSATA, an external connection that runs at the same speed as the internal SATA 1.0 bus, has a maximum theoretical of 3Gbps. This makes USB 3.0 faster than eSATA and about six times faster than FireWire 800 (full duplex at 800Mbps).

USB 3.0 also provides another advantage; while eSATA is faster than FireWire 800, unlike FireWire it cannot supply power. USB 3.0 has the advantage of being faster than both, even while supplying power.

Finally, USB 3.0 has improved power management, meaning that devices can move into idle, suspend and sleep states. This potentially means more battery life out of laptops and other battery-based USB-supporting devices like cameras and mobile phones.

Of course, there are other factors to consider; the FireWire 3200 standard is also in the works and promises to allow 3.2GHz speeds on existing FireWire 800 hardware. USB 2.0 generally doesn't meet its theoretical maximum throughput, due to its dependence on hardware and software configuration, where FireWire gets much closer.

It's hard to say whether USB 3.0's updated architecture will still use more CPU time than FireWire does.

But in the age of powerful hardware (can anyone say "3.2GHz, quad-core CPUs"?), all of this means that FireWire is still not going to match USB 3.0's theoretical maximum of 5Gbps.

The ultimate signal that this war has already been won is Apple's recent decision to ditch FireWire from its consumer line in favour of USB. Previously, Cupertino had been one of FireWire's greatest advocates. And surely the company will be one of the first to adopt USB 3.0.

All in all, we can't wait for motherboard manufacturers like Gigabyte and Asus to start supporting the technology and mainstream PC builders like Dell to start integrating it into their products. Bring on the speed.

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• 64-bit Windows: It's time to get serious
• Will the NSW Govt put Linux in schools?
• Hullabaloo about OLED
• Is green IT a marketing fad?

Despite the existence of 64-bit Windows 7 (along with 64-bit Vista and XP), consumers and businesses are continuing to adopt 32-bit versions of Windows, and with good reason. Many hardware vendors still aren't releasing 64-bit drivers, and businesses may want to hang onto a 32-bit OS for maximum compatibility.

It's time Redmond started looking forward rather than backward.

Unfortunately, this continued inertia will be to our peril. A continued desire to hang onto 32-bit for compatibility means hardware vendors have an excuse to continue to only release 32-bit drivers and applications, and the process goes around and around.

This loop leaves businesses in a trap where they will want to use a 32-bit system to ensure maximum compatibility, but get stuck with the physical RAM limitation of roughly 4GB that comes from a 32-bit OS.

It is well known that 32-bit operating systems can only address two to the power of 32 bytes of maximum system memory (4,294MB). On the other hand 64-bit systems can address two to the power of 64 bytes of maximum memory (18,446,744,073,709MB, commonly quoted in practical terms as 16 billion gigabytes).

Let's put this equation another way. In early 2008, IDC estimated the total amount of all storage globally to be 281 billion gigabytes. So theoretically if you could convert all the storage on the planet to RAM, a single classroom of 20 64-bit machines could address it all.

Programs optimised for 64-bit systems should hypothetically also be faster, as processes such as encryption can take advantage of the extra address space.

This means that the transition to 64-bit operating systems is a one time hurdle for the IT community. 64-bit should service the needs of IT for at least 20 years.

Every box builder knows that a cheap way to quickly upgrade the performance of a system (particularly for multitasking) is to drop in a little extra RAM, which is dirt cheap compared to other system components like CPUs and GPUs.

Apple is already ahead of the curve on this one. The company's latest version of OS X 10.5 (Leopard) ships 64-bit as standard.

Action on this issue needs to come from Microsoft's side. Users are keen to adopt 64-bit operating systems, but Microsoft needs to use its massive market muscle and demand that all products designed to work with Windows 7 be 64-bit compatible. It's time Redmond started looking forward rather than backward.

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• Hullabaloo about OLED
• Will the NSW Govt put Linux in schools?
• Is green IT a marketing fad?

Rolling out from 2009 onwards, the program will mean a whole generation of students will be a great deal more technically literate, which can only be a good thing. However, the cost per device (only $500) is going to be a challenge for vendors to meet.

At this price point, there is little ambiguity about the fact that the devices will be netbooks. This leaves an obvious question: will these netbooks run Windows XP or Linux?

In the rough IT environment which is public schools, Linux has a lot going for it.

In the rough IT environment which is public schools, Linux has a lot going for it. Firstly, with only $500 a computer to spend, not having to fork out for an XP or Vista licence will give vendors significantly more scope to spend on support, additional hardware, or network equipment.

Another hidden, but significant saving, will be a reduction in malware, spyware and viruses. Supplying Windows-based systems will mean costly subscriptions to security vendors, and all the support work that comes from endlessly killing malware that slips through the net. Malware for Linux, on the other hand, is a drop in the ocean by comparison. This is a big deal, as wirelessly networked schools are potentially a festering pit of malware.

Linux has reduced compatibility, but given that the Department of Education and Training wants to strictly lock down the netbooks, this may be an advantage. Teachers would not doubt be relieved that Linux-based systems won't be able to play the vast majority of games (other than internet-based Java or Flash games and a few others), meaning school machines will be left mostly for school work.

The use of Linux-based systems, combined with other open-source options like Open Office 3 also means no licence auditing, a huge potential headache for stretched school IT administrators. Given that the devices will be uniform, drivers shouldn't be a big issue. Open source also opens up a possibility of creating school-specific Linux distributions which suits the needs of the classroom.

If the government does decide to make its new "learning devices" Linux-based, the implications for open source in Australia could be huge.

Fancy a copy of "Sydney Public School Linux", anyone?

On the flip side, a Windows XP-based system has several disadvantages, beginning with the mass of malware out there for Windows-based machines. Putting that aside, there is also the problem that a Windows XP licence limits the specifications of the device.

Microsoft has previously said it would only continue to supply Windows XP for low cost "netbooks" as long as they could limit the specifications of the device, to stop competition with Vista. This is why netbooks have close to uniform specs, and specifically never more than 1GB of RAM. Thus Windows XP limits the ability of school administrators to future-proof or upgrade the netbooks.

Given this, it seems to me that Linux would be the natural choice. If the government does decide to make its new "learning devices" Linux-based, the implications for open source in Australia could be huge.

Giving every student who pass through the public school system a Linux system would be a huge boost to the OS and open source — and competition is always a good thing.

What do you think?

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• Hullabaloo about OLED
• Is green IT a marketing fad?
• How many Windows 7s will there be?

It's easy to understand why people are excited about this new display technology. It's more energy efficient, brighter and crisp at any viewing angle. It can also be made into flexible displays, has contrast ratios of up to 1,000,000:1, and is potentially much cheaper to produce than current LCD technology.

The concept behind OLED is fairly simple, rather than using polarised molecules to block backlighting (LCD), or the elemental emission of superheated noble gases (plasma), OLED uses the electroluminescence of organic compounds. Thus the name, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).

A subgroup of this technology is polymer light emitting diodes (PLEDs), which use the electroluminescence of conjugated organic polymers (which act as semiconductors). Semi-conducting organic polymers are a big deal; they have big implications for molecular electronics, which is perhaps why the guys who discovered them received a Nobel Prize.

In PLED, different polymers are used to produce different wavelengths, so different polymers are used for red, green and blue. Simple polymers like Poly(p-phenylene) (a polymer of benzene) can be used to produce blue, but as we move up wavelengths towards green and eventually red, more complicated polymers are needed.

These polymers are then sandwiched between an anode and a cathode in a matrix of tiny cells (each containing a red, green and blue polymer diode), and fixed onto a substrate (typically glass). This forms an OLED pixel. As these polymers can be dissolved in an appropriate solvent, they can be 'printed' directly onto a substrate, creating the low production cost.

Printed polymers also mean flexible displays, finally bringing the dream of true, flexible digital paper to life. I haven't heard of any commercial uses for flexible displays yet, but what I have heard of is use of the technology on small electronic devices and televisions.

Despite the unbelievable promise of this technology, there are a couple of catches. Firstly, when it comes to light emission, organic polymers just don't last as long as their more stable inorganic rivals, namely LCD and plasma. Figures vary depending on technology, but popular OLED polymers have about one quarter of the lifetime and an LCD display. Polymer impurities will also reduce conductance and conjugation, thus reducing efficiency and luminescence.

Oh, did I mention that they can be 3mm in depth or thinner? They also have response times of less that a one hundredth of a millisecond, well beyond human perception.

Despite all this, there isn't a lot of commercial noise around OLED, the marketing hullabaloo is yet to start. Economies of scale and existing infrastructure mean that vendors will want to get the maximum life and value out of their existing LCD and plasma production processes. Maybe that's why the 11-inch XEL-1 OLED TV is worth US$2,500.

However it's only a matter of time before continued refinement or the creation of novel new polymers brings OLED up to the same lifetime as plasma or LCD displays. This means the future will be sharper and brighter.

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• Is green IT a marketing fad?
• How many Windows 7s will there be?
• Samsung promises OLED monitors in 2009

It's not that I dislike the loyal business desktop, it's just that it's getting a little past its prime. After all, it takes a lot of time, energy and money to maintain, manage, patch and keep up to date. Worst of all, in its old age it's starting to get a little fat.

The future, it seems, is a thin client. Analyst Gartner puts the growth of thin clients at 45 per cent year on year from 2008 through to 2012, while it describes the growth of traditional 'fat' desktops as "effectively flat" in big business.

This isn't surprising, as when we put the two technologies under the microscope, it is hard to see anything but an impending funeral for our old friend, the 'fat' desktop, in big business.

Let's take a look:

Security & reliability
By hosting applications on a central server, critical data is better protected, both from hardware failure and physical theft or damage.

Further, security software can be deployed and updated centrally, meaning no more endless patching of endpoints. Even in the event of hardware failure at the server level, thin clients desktops have the ability to live migrate to new server hardware with minimum disruption to the end user.

Longer upgrade cycles
Desktops typically need to be updated every 2 to 3 years in a standard organisation. Thin clients, on the other hand, can have twice the lifecycle or more, as the processing upgrades all occur in the server room.

Mobile thin clients have also become popular in rough work environments, where machine with no moving parts are much more durable and reliable.

Lower support costs
Centralised management lowers support costs, as does the deployment of more reliable hardware.

Leaner is greener
Thin clients use substantially less energy than fat clients, and produce less waste because they don't need to be upgraded as often. Thin clients we have reviewed use a peak power usage of just 17W, while a desktop might use upwards of 50W.

With a list list like that, who wouldn't prefer thin clients? Are we there yet?

Think fat clients will last in big business? Can't wait to get rid your fat client fleet? Let us know what you think.

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• Is green IT a marketing fad?
• How many Windows 7s will there be?

How you answer this question will depend on how you define green IT. For the most part, the industry seems to have attached the term to technologies that reduce energy use, the size of hardware rollouts, and the amount of IT consumables such as paper and ink.

Companies have been pushing hard to pursue these goals, which is understandable, given their massive potential to reduce cost. On the surface this all makes sense.

However look a little bit deeper and things start to get a little bit murky. Hasn't IT, since the beginning of the industry, always steadily improved hardware to reduce energy consumption? After all, the first mainframes would have used an enormous amount of energy to do simple calculations that today could easily be achieved on tiny mobile processors.

It seems the entire history of IT development is full of examples of new technology that can do more with less — less space, less energy, less man hours. Were the engineers and developers thinking about the environment when they built these new systems? I doubt it, they were probably thinking about efficiency.

With technologies such as virtualisation, software has similarly been labelled green, through its ability to massively consolidate servers and reduce energy costs. But isn't this just a new form of the efficiency that IT continues to strive for, and thrives on?

Printer and imagining vendors have also been keen to brand initiatives such as duplex printing as green. But don't people just duplex print to reduce costs? Isn't the movement towards a paperless office about less clutter, more space and better organisation? Since when was it about the environment?

What is also telling is that environmental initiatives that cost rather than save tend to be slow to make it onto the agenda. E-waste recycling in Australia hovers at four per cent of all technology products.

All this leads one to ask the question; as a massive driver of efficiency, isn't IT just inherently green anyway? And if so, why wait until last year to label it that way? Is it not fair to say that this label has been attached to IT because it suits a current social climate?

What do you think?

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• How many Windows 7s will there be?
• NBN needs workers on board
• BarCamp buzz: Let the hacking continue

(Credit: Microsoft)

While screenshots are available displaying some of the features of Windows 7, for me questions remain about two key issues — versioning and pricing. One of the key differentiators between Windows XP and Windows Vista was the proliferation of editions available.

When first released, Windows XP came out with two on-the-shelf editions; XP Home Edition and XP Professional Edition. XP Pro contained all the functions available in the OS. This presented neither an ambiguous distinction nor a difficult choice.

Compare this to Vista, which came out with four shelf editions: Home basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. While not on shelves, there are also two other editions available, Windows Starter (for emerging markets), and Windows Enterprise (for enterprise desktops).

Microsoft may argue that this presents consumers with more choice, but I find this difficult to accept. Firstly, because businesses that only need a very basic OS are generally unable to get Home Basic on a business PC from large vendors. Secondly, those who forked out the extra cash for Vista Business gained extra features, but also lost features, as Windows Media Centre and the DVD burning software was stripped from Vista Business.

Finally, valuable features such as BitLocker were only available in the Ultimate Edition, meaning most businesses that did fork out to upgrade to Vista Business still only received a limited version of the OS, unless they paid the premium price.

Ultimately, I think Microsoft's move was about profit. By fragmenting its OS and then selling at different price points for different market segments, Microsoft was able to maximise volume by supply and demand.

This leaves two choices for Windows 7. Microsoft can continue with its fragmentation of its OS (Basic Home Basic? Semi-Ultimate?), or the company can return to a couple of editions or even just the one. This would give consumers and businesses that fork out for an upgrade all the bell and whistles available in the Windows 7. I know which option I prefer, what do you want to see?

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• Steve Ballmer: Live on ZDNet.com.au
• Windows 7 gets mixed reviews
• Windows Server 2008 R2 revealed
• Windows 7: Official screenshots