text:
AMD Unveils Bulldozer & Bobcat: 2011 Microachitecturesby Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/11/2009 5:00 PM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
68 Comments
Back to Article
smilingcrow - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkThere seems to be a lot of confusion over what the Bulldozer block diagram represents. Fudzilla seemed to suggest that is of a complete Octo core CPU made up of two quad core blocks. Techreport seemed to suggest that it represents a 'true' dual core CPU block and that actual CPUs will consist of one or more of these which seems wrong as that suggests AMD would release single/dual thread versions of Bulldozer.
Anandtech's interpretations seems more logical and the big surprise is that it will seemingly be a 4/8 core/thread design although performance may well be much closer to that of an 8 core. But if it's up against an Intel 8/16 design surely it will struggle unless the other enhancements can close the IPC gap.
As for those expecting to see a very high performance GPU (relative to whatever current discrete cards offer) on the same die as the CPU well just forget it. The socket would be enormous and the TDP ridiculous. You'd be looking at up to 350W which sounds impractical.
JFAMD - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - linkEach Bulldozer die will be made up of multiple modules. Each module has 2 integer cores and a shared FPU.
An 8-core bulldozer die has 4 modules and 8 total integer cores.
The product will be marketed as an 8-core processor
The system (hardware)will see 8 cores.
The OS will see 8 cores.
The applications will see 8 cores.
Don't get hung up on modules. They only exist to the designers and in powerpoint slides. They will not be visible to the system or to the software.
smilingcrow - Friday, November 20, 2009 - linkA single Bulldozer "module" looks to the OS like a single processor core with simultaneous multithreading (SMT) enabled. Reply
JFAMD - Friday, November 20, 2009 - linkNo, a single bulldozer module looks like two individual cores, it does not look like a hyperthreaded core. The OS cannot see the module, it only sees integer cores.
With HyperThreading, the job scheduler needs to know how to deal with "full cores" and "shared cores."
For instance, if you have 4 cores with HT, if you are only running 4 threads, you want them each spread out on to individual cores, you don't want all 4 of them sharing 2 cores while other cores are sitting idle. That is a relatively low level of scheduler complexity (relatively speaking.)
But when 2 more threads come through, as you start sharing cores, you want to try to optimize the threads around execution. Let's say you have all 4 cores active with threads, 2 "heavy" threads and 2 "light" threads. If you need to "double up" the 2 new threads, you'd rather put them on the 2 cores that have light loads right now. So, this is a much more complex level of complexity.
So, with HyperThreading, you have an added level of complexity. You have to think about WHERE to put threads vs. just looking for the next available resource.
Both could be considered the same if you are contending that HyperThreading is unoptimized and there would be shared cores with other cores fully idle. But I do not believe this is the case.
With Bulldozer, each new thread has the same shot at resources and each resource acts the same, because your schedulers are dedicated. Reply
Zool - Monday, November 23, 2009 - linkI dont know where do you get the bulldozer module thingy. From the picture its quite unclear. If they would have more modules it would be on the picture. The slides say "two tightly linked cores" each with its own L1 cache. But the L2 and L3 are all shared so ading new modules look like ading new L3 and L2 and thats stupid.
For me from the picture it looks more like amd hit the nail right on the head.
Maybe the pipelines they reffer are execution units of seweral cores together tied to one L1 cache. If u think about it why would you need 8 complete cpu dies with all the transistors just to hawe 8 times the execution units ? So why not just put together the most main core logic u can in one core and conect it on one L1 cache and the rest is all shared. Those 8 cores would be actualy in 2 super wide cores without the need for os or programers to take care of each physical core.
Zool - Monday, November 23, 2009 - linkIt would also reduce the die size for a similar 8 core cpu and with it the cost of course.It would be also much faster than 8 cores with its own L1 and L2 cache comunicating trough external bus (QPI or HyperTransport link). Maybe AMD did learn something from ATI and the gpu-s. Why would you increase the gap betwen cores with increasing the amount of them when u could hide them to software and put them closer right next to each other. Like anyone would need a 16 core nehalem when majority of programs cant use even 4 of them. Reply
dew111 - Sunday, May 30, 2010 - linkThis diagram represents one block that acts as two cores. Zool, modern x86 cores need multiple functional units to support efficient out of order execution and keep the IPC high. Modern x86 architectures translate x86 instructions into multiple 'micro-ops' which are simple, RISC-like instructions. These can be executed in parallel much easier. The 'integer scheduler' will only hold micro-ops for one thread. Thus, the pipelines in the diagram are not individual cores. Superscalar (multiple parallel pipelines) design has been common for over 15 years now in CPU's.
Therefore, as stated in the article, this block will be replicated on-die to create 4, 6, 8+ core processors. The processor would almost certainly have a monolithic L3 cache, and would probably have separate L2 caches for each '2-core' block. Reply
Zool - Monday, November 16, 2009 - linkThere isnt to much programs that can use more than 2 cores if u dont count graphic rendering , encodings. On a single computer in benchmarks the only thing that is increasing performance near linear are rendering and encodings for quite a time. For a average user using a average program the intel 8/16 is overkill. There arent to many people runing 8 active working programs at once. And for virtualization double the integer performance is much better.
Also high performance gpu on cpu wont hapen until they dont solve the bandwith for it.(something over 150 GB/s right now for high end)
With curent cpu memory bandwith it will be enough for low end gpu and a fast coprocesor. Reply
Risforrocket - Monday, November 16, 2009 - linkI don't think anyone expects this first APU to provide strong graphics. However, it might surprise if the cpu cores are involved sufficiently but that might lead to other disappointments. I am hoping the gpu core will be used not so much for graphics but for the types of computing tasks that it will do well. I will certainly be using a discrete graphics card as I always have. And I'm sure it will come in 4 core and 8 core versions, anything less will be a step back. Reply
qcmadness - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkI would expect IPC to be enhanced.
The "good old" K7 integer and floating point units will be redesigned. Reply
eek2121 - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkHi Guys, unfortunately, despite what this article implies, AMD is NOT targeting the high end with bulldozer. A quote from AMD's blog:
" "Bulldozer" is AMD's completely new, high performance architecture for the mainstream server, mainstream desktop and notebook PC markets that employs a new approach to multithreaded compute performance for achieving advanced efficiency and throughput. "Bulldozer" is designed to give AMD an exceptional CPU option for linking with GPUs in highly scalable, single-chip Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) configurations. "
Notice the use of mainstream in "mainstream server, mainstream desktop and notebook PC markets".
Will bulldozer be faster? Yes it will. Will it target high end/enthusiasts? No it won't. Enthusiasts will be using intel for the forseeable future unforunately.
Source: http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/tag/bulldozer/">http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/tag/bulldozer/ Reply
medi01 - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkIf the APU approach succeeds it will mean that we have CPU based on AMD + ATI expertise vs Intel + Intel's GPU. (even if Intel decides to buy nVidia, it will take time)
Performance difference between AMD CPU and Intel CPU is much smaller, than between ATI GPU and Intel GPU. So I don't get, what would stop AMD from getting "top gaming performance" crown. Reply
Risforrocket - Monday, November 16, 2009 - linkAMD's APU concept, as I see it, is a heterogeneous cpu which involves conventional cpu cores and gpu cores. The interesting but perhaps subtle point that needs to be looked at is that there is a trend in gpu design that is leading to a highly parallel floating point (don't know how to say it) graphics-like computing device that can be used for tasks other than graphics. This is exciting and if AMD does this right this can lead to a first strong step in new heterogeneous cpu architectures. This is the next step in the movement towards multi core cpu design. Reply
srp49ers - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkI dont think Intel would be allowed to buy nvidia by regulators Reply
7Enigma - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkTDP? Reply
fsdetained - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkYou have no concept of business terminology do you? Reply
lifeblood - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkHow will the CPU / GPU combo work? A low and CPU comes with the low end GPU on die, while the high end CPU comes with a high end GPU on die? Is this the end of discreet graphic cards? Or will you still be able to plug in a discreet card and it will work over PCIe as before?
This is important for me as I tend to upgrade incrementally, a part at a time as I can afford it (and my wife doesn't notice it).
Also, will the first Bulldozer suck because it doesn't have the GPU on die? Will it try to use the discreet or IGP video card for FPU stuff at a horrible performance penalty? Reply
Mr Perfect - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkThe bulldozer slide says it's using a shared L2 cache. Does this mean L2 is shared between the two half-cores, or between two or more of the whole-cores?
That particular slide doesn't make it clear where the core stops, and where the rest of the CPU(uncore?) begins. O_o Reply
GaiaHunter - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkIt is shared between those 2 cores. I think AMD isn't calling them half-cores. Reply
Mr Perfect - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkHmm. I really wish they'd have shown off a block diagram of the whole CPU.
The way it reads, it sounds like it will be 4 "cores", each with two smaller cores in it(what I called half-cores) making a total of 8 threads. I guess they don't want to show to much of their hand. Reply
Etern205 - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkA insider from Intel has leaked the design for their future cpu.
Build on a 2nm process, quad qpi of 1.3TB/s, 24GB of L3 cache, operates at 1.6Ghz-5GHz, and comes in flavors of dual and all the way to 48 cores.
The leaked memo states Intel with having much ran out of good codenames, they've all decided to agree to call this one TONKA. :P Reply
camylarde - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkOk, so I am planning to purchase that ATi 5870 next year after all. Its amazing what your 300 $ can do for the shape of a world ;-) Reply
fitten - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkBut I think it's risky... how much software is available to use the GPU and how much will be by then? Also, there are things like latency and such to consider when doing GPU offloading. So, doing something between no-floating point work and some amount of floating point work that amortizes the latencies and such for setting up the GPU to do the work, especially in a multithreaded program, will likely tank on it, I think (I don't know where the tradeoff is).
As it is, you can write your programs to use the GPU using OpenCL/etc. but that has to load both your program and data onto the GPU to do the work then offload the data when done (the runtime may handle that stuff for you but it still takes time). What are the latencies involved with that (seriously, I don't know... haven't looked into it that deeply)? Reply
pcfxer - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkTwinning the L1 cache, DAMN AMD beat me to that one and I'm a computing architecture MASTER!
Note to AMD: Optimize the garbage out of the software side - micro-code, perhaps even hire on some GCC and PCC compiler teams to develop smarter linkers/cross-compilers.
I don't know how Intel manages their microcode but I can assume that their software is more efficient considering the hardware similarities. Reply
JVLebbink - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkWith these two cores looking a lot the same (removing one integer cluster and not looking at the FPU) would that mean that Bulldozer also has only 90% of the single threaded integer performance of the current Phenom II?
I wonder how they are going to make up for that with other enhancements? Reply
GaiaHunter - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkI don't think you can infer that. The pipelines are bound to be different and don't forget L3 cache and new set of instructions "Bulldozer" will have compared to Phenom II. Reply
GaiaHunter - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkThere is been some discussion about this on the forums.
When AMD says 4 Bulldozer cores, does it means 4Cores/8Threads or does it means a pair of bulldozer cores each with its "2 tightly linked together cores" able to do 4 threads?
Thank you. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkI believe it means 4 cores/8 threads, but I will ask AMD to confirm.
Take care,
Anand Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkConfirmed. 4 cores/8 threads, each Bulldozer core can handle two threads.
Take care,
Anand Reply
Eeqmcsq - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkSo does this mean the rumors of an 8 core Bulldozer are wrong? That they were referring to an 8 thread Bulldozer? Or is there really an 8 core/16 thread Bulldozer in the works? Reply
GaiaHunter - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkSincerely I've been reading contradictory information everywhere.
From what Anand said in here in response to my question, I would believe Zambezi would be release in 4 cores/8 threads and 8 cores/16 threads flavors.
But then JF-AMD, a server AMD guy in other forums, stated that "Interlagos" is 16 cores/16 threads, so at this moment I don't know what to think.
First, I was looking at Bulldozer has a CPU with HT, maybe requiring more hardware than Intel solution and maybe with more performance on the logical thread compared to Intel improvements, but now I'm starting to think that "Bulldozer module" is a dual-core with that actually uses less hardware to accomplish the same thing than current AMD CPUs (I'm not saying anything about how Phenom II compares to Bulldozer, especially because I don't know).
Really, I think the question I should have asked Anand was "Will Zambezi be released in 8 "Bulldozer Modules"/16 threads or only 4 "Bulldozer Modules"/8 Threads?"
I think maybe what I need to is review my way of thinking about cores in the AMD case.
Bulldozer seems to be a twin-core that can't be split, but otherwise is equivalent to the way we see 2 current cores. Reply
qcmadness - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkI don't think AMD will make next gen CPU without SMT support.
AMD already stated that the lack of SMT support in K10 as a mistake. And I remember someone in AMD said that they try to put 32-thread in 1 socket at 32nm node. It could be if dual Zambezi MCM is achieved.
chiddy - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkIs it likely that bulldozer will be able to compete with sandy bridge/ivy bridge also due out around the same time? Reply
GaiaHunter - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkThank you very much :) Reply
iwodo - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkBullDozer Looks good... However, By the time they have BullDozer Core with an APU, Intel will already be launching IvyBridge.
While BullDozer looks very well on paper to be better then Intel Nahalem in General Desktop Performance. SandyBridge is designed for improving IPC as well.
I can only wish AMD could accelerate their Roadmap.
Just a question pops up on my mind, When was the last time AMD push forward their Roadmap? Intel has a quite a few times pick up pace, while AMD always seems to lag behind themselves. Reply
7Enigma - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkThat's actually a very interesting question (when has AMD brought a CPU product to launch before originally expected).
Anand could you comment? Reply
mikeepu - Monday, November 16, 2009 - linkWasn't Istanbul and shanghai slightly ahead of schedule? Reply
Glenn - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkIf they plan on 2011 we might see it in late 2012 and the world is coming to an end then, I heard? Reply
murray13 - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkThe overall look of fusion looks to me like way back in time when they added a 'co-processor' chip. Adding FP power.
Only now they are taking away FP power and letting it be done by the chip that does it so well.
Old ideas never really go away.
K.I.S.S. rears its head again, I just hope performance will be up to the elegance of the architecture. Reply
Eeqmcsq - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkWhy does the slide "Heterogeneous Computing" appear twice? Reply
Zstream - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkBetter then homosexual computing? We would not have baby Athlons if that be the case :D Reply
Denithor - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkAMD chose to call those "baby Athlons" Bobcat... Reply
StormyParis - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkThis is totally biased: whay doesn't this articale strat off with an Intel slide ? they always do ! stop the fanboism, Anand ^^ Reply
jav6454 - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkI like innovation, but deliverying by 2011 can make AMD fall behind from intel. Although by the look of these designs, AMD seems to have a better multithread solutionthan intel. Reply
webmastir - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkhttp://digg.com/hardware/AMD_Unveils_Bulldozer_Bob...">http://digg.com/hardware/AMD_Unveils_Bulldozer_Bob... Reply
Zstream - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkNo Intel picture for the front page lol. Reply
Denithor - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkBeat me to it! Reply
jaimeoc - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkI'm sorry but I'm not familiar with all this acronym fuzz.
Anybody nows what the difference is between A-pipe and M-pipe in the Bobcat's slide? Can it be one specific pipe for add, one for mult? Reply
mczak - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkThat would certainly also be my interpretation. One mul and one add pipe hint to a similar design to current K10 - so seems like bobcat won't get the updated fpu from bulldozer (both pipes fmac capable) but get the same integer unit (however, only one instead of two) as bulldozer. Reply
mczak - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkThat would certainly also be my interpretation. One mul and one add pipe hint to a similar design to current K10 - so seems like bobcat won't get the updated fpu from bulldozer (both pipes fmac capable) but get the same integer unit (however, only one instead of two) as bulldozer. Reply
bakerzdosen - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkI'd LOVE to see AMD come out with a true Nehalem EX competitor, but it doesn't look like 2010 will really be the year where AMD leap frog's Intel. And that's too bad for all of us. Reply
yyrkoon - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkPlease explain to me why it is necessary for "AMD to leapfrog Intel". Well first, I suppose some clarification would also be necessary.
Anyways, it is not necessary for Intel, OR AMD to lead anything. All that should matter to us consumers is that there is enough competitiveness in the market; That *we* the consumer get a good product, for a fair price. You should hope that neither go away, and both stay competitive. Reply
strikeback03 - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkMight not be technically possible, but it is nice to think that if AMD were to leapfrog Intel, a) that would be a very good AMD processor; and b) Intel would respond with something on the order of the P4 to C2D jump. Whereas when Intel already holds the lead, we see the C2D to i7 jump. Reply
Indigo64 - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkIt's fun to see them leapfrog for sure, but I'm with the poster I'm quoting - as long as the consumer wins. I'm always for AMD AND Intel's success. I can't wait to see what each one has to bring to the table. Innovation FTW. Reply
Scali - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkYea, the rules of the game are pretty simple...
If AMD wins, Intel will compete on price by offering cheaper alternatives.
If Intel wins, AMD will compete on price by offering cheaper alternatives.
If they're tied, they're going for a direct pricewar, and both will have low prices.
I think in any situation, at least one of the two will be going for maximum price/performance. It doesn't really matter whether that's AMD or Intel, does it? As long as the product does what it says on the tin. Reply
Calin - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkCompeting on price is financially bad for the company that compete on price. Remember when AMD had the performance crown? Its products were more expensive than Intel's. That ends up with more money for the same products. As soon as Intel leapfrogged AMD, the same products were cheaper, and brought fewer money. Reply
JPForums - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkFunny, I seem to remember a different view of when AMD was on top. They offered a top of the line Athlon64-FX for ~$750. The clearly inferior, but competing P4- Extreme from Intel was still priced around $1000.
In the mainstream, you did pay a premium for AMD chips. However, the premium wasn't that great. Consider that Intel still had to lower the prices of their offerings to compete. However, they still didn't lower prices to the point that they could be called a better value. In other words, AMD's offerings at the time had AT LEAST enough of a performance advantage to justify the premium they sought. Further, demand for the AMD chips were high enough that they couldn't always keep up with demand. It's a wonder prices didn't get significantly higher.
Now that Intel is back on top, AMD has show itself much more willing to price its products at price points that (for the most part) are justified by their performance. When Intel lowered prices to match the value of AMDs processors, AMD kept lowering prices to maintain the value advantage.
Notably, Intel's processor lineup suffers an incredible price disparity between the chips that AMD can compete with and the chips for which there is no competition. Just look at the current pricing of the Core i7 series (from newegg).
Exerts from the 900 series:
Model 920 950 975
Pricing $289 $570 $1000
or if you prefer the 800 series:
Model 860 870
Pricing $290 $550
That all said, if AMD got on top for long enough, they would eventually do the same thing. It isn't wrong of a company to charge a premium for a superior product. Of course using monopolistic and/or illegal business practices to restrict alternatives and trap people with higher costs would be wrong, but that's a different story. As it stands the price of Intel's mid-high grade offerings are competitive. If they wanted to sell more high end chips, they'd lower the prices of these chips to the point that more consumers considered it worth the money over their own mid-high grade chips. It seems that their are enough people willing to pay the premium that Intel isn't worried about it.
This is why leap frogging is important to the consumer. People are much less willing to pay premiums for chips now if they believe that you competitor will come out with something better in the near future. Just look at ATi and nVidia. nVidia had been dominant so long when the GTX 200 series chips came out that they thought they could charge $650 for the high end single GPU card and people would pay it. ATi then released a competing (not even dominant) 4800 series at a much lower cost. The next high end single GPU card nVidia release was ~$200 cheaper at launch than the previous one. If they release Fermi at $650, I seriously doubt they'll achieve consumer market penetration. Of course, Fermi seems geared towards the scientific and professional markets, so they may not care about consumer market penetration.
In the long run, you don't want a situation where one competitor is on always on top and the other is constantly competing on price either. Such a situation allows the dominant competitor to sink significant amounts of money in R&D, while the other competitor's budget dwindles and they have an increasingly hard time of keeping up. In the worst case, the dominant competitor gains patents that criple the other competitor's ability to effectively compete. Reply
Scali - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkThe way I recall it, the FX was $1000 aswell (okay, perhaps there were two models, one $750, the other $1000).
At any rate, I think Intel was in denial initially, and tried to maintain the high prices... or people just continued to pay the high prices anyway, because of Intel's stronger brand recognition.
However, when Intel launched the Pentium D, they started an all-out pricewar. They were absolute bargains. Intel repeated the trick with the quadcore. The Q6600 was being sold at very low prices, even before AMD actually had a quadcore on the market. A pre-emptive strike, if you will.
If you ask me, the Core i5 and i7 860 are priced very nicely. They're still at 'mainstream' prices, compared to what we paid a few years ago for mainstream Athlon X2s, Pentium 4/D or Core2. $200-$300 for a CPU that is hugging the outer extremes of performance is just great value.
Currently AMD is cheaper, but you take a pretty significant dip in performance compared to Core i5/i7.
You are ignoring the Core2 which is still being sold under the Core i5/i7 models. Core2 is also priced very competitively against AMD.
It's not like $500-$1000 CPUs only happen because there's no competition. As you said yourself, Athlon FX and Pentium Extreme Edition were sold at those prices aswell, and that was the most competitive period in all of Intel/AMD's history.
So I think it's a fallacy to claim that prices go up when there's no competition. If AMD has the performance they will just inflate their prices, rather than Intel's prices going down on the high-end.
Currently they don't have the performance, so AMD's offering is empty in that market segment. The market segment has always been there though, and AMD has been in it. Reply
Scali - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkYea well, we were talking about consumer benefits.
If AMD is having trouble bringing in enough money, that's their problem.
They'll either have to adapt and make their products cheaper to produce, or make them perform faster, so they can get enough profit out of them.
If they fail to do that, well, too bad. History is full of companies that went out of business simply becasue their products weren't bringing in enough profit. That's just business. Reply
blyndy - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkIf AMD wanted Hyper-Threading (they should), shouldn't they be able to license it from Intel given their patent sharing agreements (eg AMD64)? Reply
JumpingJack - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkActually, I am not so sure AMD would need a 'license', SMT (symmetric multi threading) has been around for years, researched, published, and implemented in many other processor designs besides x86. I am not so sure Intel would hold a patent to something as generic as SMT (i.e. Hyperthreading), there could be underlying details on the exact implementation that are patented but at that level I would suspect there is 'more than one way to skin a cat', meaning so long as the details of any implementation is unique there is no harm no foul.
However, it is clear AMD is taking a much more radical approach to multithreading into a single execution core, it is almost a melded dual core chip. This will certainly yield bigger gains in a multithreaded environment over the more simple SMT approach. How much more will remain to be seen.
Alberto - Friday, November 13, 2009 - linkI don't know if this new Amd solution is good. It is less elegant than SMT and very "buldozer" like. Likely the new cpu will be clocked lower than Intel counterpart in order to stay in the TDP limits.
So the +90% versus Intel +40% thanks to the new SMT done well, will be undermined by problems of power consumption.
Moreover this cpu seems "not for consumer space" but server only. Two full integer units with L1 cache mean more die space, lower yields, more leakage and they are useless in consumer SW.
This is the reason why Amd do not utilize the new core in Fusion.
Another K8?. Yes it seems.....Amd has done the same old mistake.
They have not the technical resources to make a new Cpu good for all utilizations. Reply
JumpingJack - Saturday, November 14, 2009 - linkI don't think it is fair to call it less elegant, it is similar in some ways but radically different in others.
With Intel's SMT implementation, they simply needed logic to track and manage two distinctly different contextual threads, cache, the pipeline, dispatch, execution resources are all shared either fixed sharing or demand based sharing. Translation, it is possible that from the perspective of one thread or the other (depending on the workload/environment) each application could perform worse than if run alone, even if the total number of instructions retired is higher.
AMD is doing much more here, as it appears they are not sharing nearly as much resources but actually duplicating them. There are trade offs, of course, die size and efficiency with respect to performance. AMD seems to be designing to the concept that the software infrastructure will be much more advanced in multithreaded capabilities at the time they release their product. A common quandry of any CPU designer -- what will the market/software environment look like years from now such that 'my product' fits best within that framework.
Calin - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkPerformance could be improved up to some 90% in integer heavy workloads, but it might come with a small decrease in performance in floating-point heavy benchmarks. Remember that the first hyperthreading version from Intel had a performance increase between +40% and -20% (and in some very particular cases, even worse than that) Reply
blyndy - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - linkCPU design is a patent minefeild; all the other/better ways of skinning the cat could well be locked up, so I think they would need at least a few patent licenses from someone.
To be honest I think it's amazing that AMD can even compete with Intel considering that Intel is 10x bigger and has 10x more R&D and patents. Reply
Samus - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - linkwhy license jackson technology from intel when they have a perfectly competative alternative architecture design? Reply
hamiltonham - Friday, May 28, 2010 - linkIn short, each module consists of two integer(whole number) cores
and one floating point (number with decimals) core.
It's an architecture deigned for integer calculations.
where the majority of Intel's processor architectures are designed for FP calculations.
the computer sees the two Int cores as separate processors,
even though all of the FP calculations go to the same core.
so AMD can market it as a 8 or 16 core processor.
Simple enough? Reply
tomsworkshop - Friday, December 24, 2010 - linklets say if the upcoming AMD dual core cpu named as Phenom III X2 , 1 Phenom III X2 has 2 bulldozer core inside , each bulldozer core has 2 tiny core inside , and each tiny core has 2 pipeline inside ? Reply


text:
Update: AMD Quietly Releases The OEM-Only Radeon HD 7000 Series: VLIW5 Rides Againby Ryan Smith on 1/5/2012 11:04 PM EST
33 Comments
Back to Article
Samus - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linktalk about market fragmentation. its the nVidia 9000-series all over again... Reply
Medallish - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkIf you notice, this is a theme AMD has been doing for a while, only the top of the line x8xx and x9xx gets a architectural upgrade each generation, while cards below gets one every other time.
57xx became 67xx(With the exception of 6790 which was a cutdown 68xx)
from 56xx to 66xx we saw the upgrade being made to Turks 20% more shaders, UVD3 etc.
This time around the 67xx gets an 28nm upgrade to 77xx while 76xx is left behind. I don't like the fact that they change the name and don't add like the most basic of things, like a die shrink(One would think that it could improve their margins?) I think it's because the market these chips cater to work on a different wavelength than the high end does, that being said, it would be better if they didn't rename them, it sucks a little. Reply
Sahrin - Friday, January 06, 2012 - link>If you notice, this is a theme [s]AMD[/s] nVidia has been doing for a while, only the >top of the line x8xx and x9xx gets a architectural upgrade each generation, while >cards below gets one every other time.
FTFY Reply
MySchizoBuddy - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkso this is VLIW instead of the new architecture.
thanks for creating confusion Reply
MrSpadge - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkIt's not even VLIW4, it's the same old VLIW5 we've known since years. Reply
ET - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkAMD has gone downhill in this respect. It's the same hill NVIDIA went down before, but maybe it's even worse. The rumours about the 7xx0 family has the 7890 card use the same chip as the 7950/70 and 7790 use the same chip as the 78x0, making it even harder to know from the name what the underlying tech is. Reply
designerfx - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkuh, Nvidia and AMD have gone down the exact same hill. I'm not happy about it (personally, rebrands are just bad and misleading period), but it's no different. Reply
JonnyDough - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkPrecisely. The marketing department and the power the OEMs have annoy us all. The naming schemes have to go. We should protest by buying VIA chips. No, not really. Reply
tipoo - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkAgreed. If its an updated 6k series card, name it as such. The 7k name should only be given to the new graphics core. I vote tech sites boycott market names and just call these cards by their core names exclusively ;) Reply
piroroadkill - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkPlease don't do this junk. It's getting as low as NVIDIA... Reply
piroroadkill - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkJust to clarify, this isn't a fanboy comment. I don't care what card people buy.. I don't understand why anyone would.
I'm simply saying that NVIDIA is infamous for rebranding the same cards over and over. Reply
Wolfpup - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkAs is AMD, but I don't remember Nvidia ever releasing some GPUs with a new design and some with an old design using the same model numbers. At least they had the decency to increment the numbers.
Well, the Geforce 4 and and 4MX was confusing for a lot of people, since the 4MX was basically a Geforce 2. Reply
StevoLincolnite - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkBasically the same isn't the same.
The Geforce 4 MX was more like a Geforce 2 on steroids.
The Geforce 4 MX advanced over the Geforce 2 in multiple areas like the then-new bandwidth and fill-rate saving technologies and in an improved memory controller.
One of the larger issues with the Geforce 2 was how badly it was memory starved.
This was evident when it was pitted against the technically inferior Radeon 7500 which had HyperZ to save on Fillrate and Bandwidth.
It was also able to hardware decode video which made nVidia comparable to ATI for the first time in that regard, this is something that the Geforce 4 Ti and Geforce 2 lacked.
ATI was also not immune to the "Re-Branding" issue.
Take the Radeon 9600 for instance. It would go on to be the:
Mobility Radeon 9600, 9700, Radeon x300, x600, x1050 with all the other variations like the Radeon 9550, SE and XT and others.
Plus... I remember reading awhile ago that 28nm was going to prove more expensive than 40nm for awhile, so with this in mind... The more cost-conscious segments will probably stagnate for awhile.
And nVidia hasn't exactly been competitive in the low end either as of late which doesn't help things, in fact... After the Geforce 240 GT and GTS they took a step backwards in regards to performance with the Geforce 430, 440 and 530. Reply
Mortius - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkThe Geforce 200 series comes to mind. It was a mixture of G9x and GT2xx based parts For example:
GTS250 - G92b
GTX280M -G92b
Not only that, the capabilities differed. GT21x parts supported DX10.1, everything else only supported DX10.
Then there is the GT230. It shipped had G92b and G94b variants. The former having twice as many shaders.
It isn't completely dead. The entry level G210 lives on as the G310 and the G405. Reply
bennyg - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkA complete list to relive the full extent of the chicanery at and around that time. It is even more complex if you include the while 9000 and 9000M series as there's even more overlap.
GT230 - mix of 48 shader G94b and 96 shader G92b
GTS240 - OEM only G92 based
GTS250 - G92b
GTX260 "Core 216" - mix of 55nm/65nm GT200a/b
GTX260M - G92b
GTX280M - G92b
GTX285 - GT200b
GTX285M - G92b
GT215 lived on in GT335M/GTS350M/GTS360M.
Radeons have a while to go before they get THAT bad. But they're building up a nice head of steam, with 6970M/6990M parts which arent Cayman-like (i.e. VLIW4) at all, and 68xx parts which are just the same Junipers as 57x0 and 58x0M, and now these "new" 7xxxM parts ...
And I guarantee if Kepler runs late Nvidia will start doing the same thing... Reply
Dribble - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkIn none of those examples did nvidia do an exact replacement at the same model number like 6770 to 7670. That is perhaps a new low. Reply
Mortius - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkWhat about the following pairings?
The last one was indeed mentioned earlier. Reply
coldpower27 - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkYeah the renaming game is getting annoying I don't mind though if it's only DX10.1 -> DX10
DX11 parts though should be named as such..
There is also the 9800GTX+ -> GTS 250
GTX 200 (GT200) Series was still largely the same tech G92 based parts which is still largely the same as G80..
It wasn't until Fermi and it's derivatives that we got a major architectural change...DX11 with GTX 400/500 Series based parts.
I miss the days of clear nomenclature..
Geforce 5 was pure Direct X 9.0 Shader Model 2.0a
Geforce 6/7 was Shader Model 3.0 w/Direct X9.0c
the Direct X 10 gen was too many cards
Geforce 8, 9 and the 200 Series and even some 300 Series for the low end.. WAY too spread out.
At least we have a cleaner break with the Geforce 400/500 Series with Direct X11 Support. Reply
chizow - Saturday, January 07, 2012 - linkI think that's largely why Nvidia's rebadges were justified in those cases, but not not so much with these AMD parts.
Nvidia has stayed remarkably consistent with their feature sets over a generation of GPUs, perhaps to a stubborn fault. They resisted DX10.1 on the majority of their parts as it would clearly bifurcate their product line and create inconsistencies and market confusion.
Not to mention their shader architecture today is also largely the same as G80. No small feat considering AMD is going on its 3rd major change in 2 years. So for the most part, the feature set and compatibility on Nvidia parts has remained the same while the price and performance regardless of rebrand has remained intact. Reply
chizow - Saturday, January 07, 2012 - link8800GT to 9800GT was a die shrink from 65nm to 55nm.
The other two parts were OEM only for the short-lived and incomplete 300 series. Technically the rebrand was justified as these were Nvidia's only DX10.1 parts and also the first to support limited HD audio and probably fit better in a 300 series rather than being lumped into the DX10-based 200 series. Reply
coldpower27 - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkIt's tolerable consider the jump is DirectX 11-> 11.1 which isn't that significant of a difference.
As always Caveat Emptor I guess. Reply
MrSpadge - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkAgreed.
Although AMD probably does it, because the OEMs want to put higher numbers on their products.. which is what regular customers buy.
MrS Reply
marraco - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkIn other words, OEMs want to lie, cheat, and mislead customers to take his money.
And AMD is fine with that. Reply
chiddy - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkWell, AMD do need to sell their GPUs! Reply
Wreckage - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkAt least the NVIDIA products were worth buying. Not like these. Reply
haukionkannel - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkI think that in old releases the low end cards were suposed to be usin oler vliw architecture. The reason is to allow crossfire between AMD APU chips and these new GPUs. The APUs use older vliv tecnology. GCN is coming to AMD APUs maybe in the next year (2013) if everything goes well, so AMD has to keep those old vliw cards in production at least as lon time... (actually longer, because they have to hava a crossfire option of those older APU's that are made today.
We can only hope that these are 28nm... There seems not to be any information of that at this moment. If not, we have to stick 7700 series to 7900 series cards if we want to have upgrade of anykind. The only reason why they would use 40nm production is that TSMC don't have enough 28nm production capacity (it is possible) or that 40 nm are so much cheaper to produce (allso possible, but not in long run)
One thing is sure. Even AMD 80xx series have some GPUs that are vliw based, because of the need for APU crossfire! Reply
chizow - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkI can understand in this case the point of emphasis:
"The following is a list of some the important attributes and major features being introduced with Southern Islands. None of which will be available with the Turks based 7670."
That's a pretty big bullet list of missing features. In the past these kind of rebrands were understandable because the features and relative price and performance fell in line with newer generational offerings. Turks just really looks out of place in that 7-series stack mainly because AMD made so many changes with SI.
Another concern is they usually bump the rebrand parts or equivalent shader count parts down one hundred spots in their naming convention, but not this time. Are the % gains of SI already spread so thin at the top that there's nothing left to shave? Probably less complaints if this was a 7570 instead of a 7670, but as it is it'll be the same performance as last year's model with none of the new features while filling the same market position. Reply
Natfly - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkRebrands are fine and all, but I want a 28nm mobile midrange. Something that seems unlikely to happen in the near future. I don't care if they simply shrink their VLIW5 or VLIW4 designs or update them with GCN. I just want better power consumption for light-mid range gaming.... Reply
Mr Perfect - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkThis reminds me of the rash of rebrandings in the mid 2000s. The tech support forums for the latest games would fill up with people who couldn't get the game to run correctly on their "new" video card. The game listed support for their series of cards, but since the card they had was really from the previous(or older) series, the game didn't work. What's even more mind blowing though, is the people would get mad at the game developers for not supporting their gimpy, half-assed rebranded card and not at the manufacturer/OEM who actually screwed them over. Threats of game returns, developer boycots and lawsuits followed... Reply
foxyshadis - Thursday, January 05, 2012 - linkThat debacle mostly taught devs to stop requiring a "series" of cards and start explicitly certifying DX or OGL version whatever, or very specific card numbers. Much harder on clueless consumers, but the devs have their asses covered from this kind of BS. Reply
Will Robinson - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkHow annoying that AMD announced months ago that only the top tier Tahiti series cards would feature the new GCN architecture....
The re branding of the old chip sets is par for the course with NVDA and AMD.
I'don't like it but I can live with it.
Pretending that this is all a big shock and that all the other 7 series cards would feature the new architecture as well as a die shrink however, is disingenuous. Reply
Wreckage - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkI agree, AMD has been disingenuous. Reply
ClagMaster - Friday, January 06, 2012 - linkWhy is AMD shooting themselves in the foot rebadging a 6000 series product to a 7000 series product using the same 40nm GPUs.
This is stupid and disingenous. And it really does not impress either the OEMs and the consumers. Reply

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Samsung SSD 840 (250GB) Reviewby Kristian Vättö on 10/8/2012 12:14 PM EST
- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Samsung
- Samsung SSD 840
85 Comments
Back to Article
roedtogsvart - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkMight have to finally replace my Intel 320 with this. Very nice review Kristian Reply
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkBoth the Intel 320 and the Samsung 840 Pro support encryption...does the non-Pro 840 offer it or not? I'm swinging back towards getting an 840 Pro for my laptop because of the lack of encryption in consumer 830 drives.
On a side note, I was disappointed to discover recently that my current desktop motherboard doesn't support hard drive passwords, which is a shame given the fact that my system disk (an Intel 320) does...oh well. Reply
ekon - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkThe ATA password-based encryption these drives use is beset with issues, flaky motherboard support being just one.
On top of which, it's very poorly documented, and notice how reviews give it nothing more than a passing mention without testing the feature. A TrueCrypt/DiskCryptor alternative it is not :-/ Reply
Samus - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkI've had my 320 for two years, no problems with encryption, ever.
And I second roedtogsvart that I may FINALLY replace my aging SSD with one of these. I've been thinking Intel 520 for awhile but still don't trust Sandforce, even with Intel at the helm.
Samsung and Crucial are keeping the controllers simple, which is why they have the most reliable drives outside of Intel's original X25-M/320 SSD's. Reply
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkWhen you say "these drives", do you mean the Intel 320, the Samsung 840 Pro, or both? My T430 supports hard drive passwords for the expressly-stated purpose of allowing for encrypted SSDs, which is why I'm looking at the 840 Pro in particular.
It seems like the only downsides would be having to enter the password to use the computer, and having to use a motherboard that supports HD passwords to access the drive (so I couldn't just plug it into my current desktop if something were to happen to my laptop and it were off for repair or whatever). Reply
ruberbacchus - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - linkOn one hand, it seems to me that the potential gains performance-wise with hardware-based rather than software-based encryption are enormous; particularly so on older computers with slower processors. On the other hand, an encryption solution that is not properly documented as well as thoroughly verified and verifiable does simply not exist as a solution; confidence in the implementation is essential to the deployment of encryption. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to obtain clear references to how encryption works in this new class of SSD's. I read somewhere that it should conform to the OPAL standard, which mandates hardware-embedded keys. I am not sure this is such a great idea, for two reasons:
- the keys will potentially be known to the manufacturer;
- the keys will be open to physical attacks on the chip controller.
With TrueCrypt e.g., the user himself generates the encryption keys, the master key used for encrypting the data as well as the header key used to wrap the master key. The latter is tied to the user's password. With hardware-based encryption, passwords may be used for authentication, but the keys will not necessarily be derived from the password. Unchangeable encryption keys weakens the security. In order for the system to be trustworthy, the user should be able to generate and re-generate at will their own encryption keys. At the moment it is not clear this is the case. Reply
A5 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkI guess I'm old fashioned and don't throw away my laptop every 6 months, but a 3.5 year lifetime seems really really short. Reply
crimson117 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkAgreed; maybe for a video card, but I expect longer than 3.5 years out of my hard drives. Reply
repoman27 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkReally? I rarely expect a consumer grade HDD to last much longer than that these days. In fact, I've seen an alarming trend of drives failing just past the 2 year mark, and still within the 3 year warranty period. (RMA'd one last week even.) Reply
travbrad - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - linkI had a 80GB WD that lasted 8 years without failing. I eventually had to stop using it simply because it was too slow. I also had a 250GB WD drive that I used for 5 years (then switched to all SATA). Now I have a 640GB drive that I've been using for almost 4 years. My brother has a couple 500GB drives in his system that have been running for 4-5 years as well.
Maybe I've just been really lucky, but the only drive I've personally had fail in the last decade was a Hitachi drive (obviously selected for cost not quality) in my HP laptop.
Now at work it's a different story. Those pre-built machines cut every corner they can to bring costs down so they end up with low quality components (especially PSUs). Even in that situation there is a fairly low number of hard drive failures though (considering how old most of the machines are) Reply
mapesdhs - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
I have SCSI disks that are more than 20 years old which still work fine. :D
Ian. Reply
MarkLuvsCS - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkConsidering Write Amplification has been significantly reduced compared to the initial SSD tech, I don't believe it's going to be a problem for the consumer market. Google xtremesystems Write Endurance to see a Samsung 830 256gb with 3000 P/E still running at 4.77 PETABYTES.That page also shows you other brands and how they fare. I would trust Samsung wouldn't put this tech to use without truly understanding how it would pan out.
That is why the worry of the 1000 P/E 840 vs 3000 P/E 830 is overblown. Either way you have little to worry about with Samsung's controllers causing any fuss unlike Other CompanieZ. Reply
Kjella - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkNot giving one fsck about wearing out the SSD I burned through a 10k-rated SSD in 1.5 years. Now with fairly normal SSD usage - a standard Win7 desktop with torrents etc. on other drives - I'm down to 57% health and looking at 3 years 10 months on a 5K-rated drive. I don't know exactly what is eating it but I'm guessing every log file, every time MSN or IRC logs a line of chat, every time something is cached or whatever it burns write cycles. I feel the official numbers are vastly *overstating* the actual lifespan, not understating it. TLC with 1K writes? Not in my machine, no sir. Reply
madmilk - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkThere's no way MSN/IRC can burn through an SSD in 1.5 years since they're all text. You must be doing something unusual, or at least your computer is without you knowing it. A good idea would be to open up Task Manager, and select the columns that count the number of bytes written by various programs. Maybe then you can find the source of your problem. Also make sure you have defragmentation off, and sufficient RAM so you're not constantly hitting the pagefile. Reply
piiman - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - linkBetter yet put the page file on a different drive and also move your temp folders to a different drive. Reply
Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkAbsolutely hilarious ending there pal... I wonder how many people got it!
I got burned by them on a couple of drives, and promptly dumped them on some well-known auction site, sold as-is. Reply
creed3020 - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkI see what you did there ;-)
Great review Kristian! I'll be looking at this drive as option for a new office PC I am building. Reply
B3an - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkDid you people even bother to read?? Because you're conveniently missing out the important fact in this article that you'd have to write 36.5TiB (almost 40TB) a year for it to last 3.5 years. I know for a fact that the average consumer does not write anywhere near that much a year, or even in 3 years. If anyone even comes close to 40TB a year they would be using a higher-end MLC SSD anyway as they would surely be using a workstation.
Most consumers don't even write 10GB a day, so at that rate the drive would easily last OVER 20 years. But of course it's highly likely something else would fail before that happens.
You're also forgetting out DSP which is explained in this article as well. That can also near double the life.
I think Kristian should have made this all more clear because too many people don't bother to actually read stuff and just look at charts. Reply
futrtrubl - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkGranted the usual use cases won't have so much data throughput. However those same usual use cases have the user filling 3/4 of the drive with static data (program/OS/photo archive etc) reducing the drive area it's able to wear level over. So that 20 years again becomes 5 years.
Also the 1000PE cycle stat means that there is a 50% chance for that sector to have become unusable by that time (ignoring DSP).
I'm not saying that TLC is bad, and I am certainly not saying this drive doesn't have great value. I'm just saying that we shouldn't understate the PE cycle issue. Reply
xdrol - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkYou sir need to learn how SSDs work. Static data is not static on the flash chip - the controller shuffles it around, exactly because of wear levelling. Reply
name99 - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - link"I think Kristian should have made this all more clear because too many people don't bother to actually read stuff and just look at charts."
Kristian is not the problem.
There is a bizarre fraction of the world of tech "enthusiasts" who are convinced that every change in the world is a conspiracy to screw them over.
These people have been obsessing about the supposed fragility of flash memory from day one. We have YEARS of real world experience with these devices but it means nothing to them. We haven't been screwed yet, but with TLC it's coming, I tell you.
The same people spent years insisting that non-replacable batteries were a disaster waiting to happen.
Fifteen years ago they were whining about the iMac not including a floppy drive, for the past few years they have been whining about recent computers not including an optical drive.
A few weeks ago we saw the exact same thing regarding Apple's new Lightning connector.
The thing you have to remember about these people is
- evidence means NOTHING. you can tell them all the figures you want, about .1% failure rates, or minuscule return rates or whatever. None of that counts against their gut feeling that this won't work, or even better an anecdote that some guy some somewhere had a problem.
- they have NO sense of history. Even if they lived through these transitions before, they cannot see how changes in 2000 are relevant to changes in 2012.
- they will NEVER admit that they were wrong. The best you can possibly get out of them is a grudging acceptance that, yeah, Apple was right to get rid of floppy disks, but they did it too soon.
In other words these are fools that are best ignored. They have zero knowledge of history, zero knowledge of the market, zero knowledge of the technology --- and the grandiose opinions that come from not actually knowing any pesky details or facts. Reply
piiman - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - linkThen stick with Intel not because they last longer but they have a great warranty.(5 years) My drive went bad at about 3.5 years and Intel replaced it no questions asked and did it very quickly. I sent it in and had a new one 2 days after they received my old one. great service! Reply
GTRagnarok - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkThis is assuming a very exaggerated amplification of 10x. Reply
Kristian Vättö - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkKeep in mind that it's an estimation based on the example numbers. 10x write amplification is fairly high for consumer workloads, most usually have something between 1-3x (though it gets a big bigger when taking wear leveling efficiency into account). Either way, we played safe and used 10x.
Furthermore, the reported P/E cycle counts are the minimums. You have to be conservative when doing endurance ratings because every single die you sell must be able to achieve that. Hence it's completely possible (and even likely) that TLC can do more than 1,000 P/E cycles. It may be 1,500 or 3,000, I don't know; but 1,000 is the minimum. There is a Samsung 830 at XtremeSystems (had to remove the link as our system thought it was spam, LOL) that has lasted for more than 3,000TiBs, which would translate to over 10,000 P/E cycles (supposedly, that NAND is rated at 3,000 cycles).
Of course, as mentioned at the end of the review, the 840 is something you would recommend to a light user (think about your parents or grandparents for instance), whereas the 840 Pro is the drive for heavier users. Those users are not writing a lot (heck, they may not use their system for days!), hence the endurance is not an issue. Reply
A5 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkAh. I didn't know the 10x WA number was exceedingly conservative. Nevermind, then. Reply
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 05, 2013 - link3.5 years is considering you are writing 36.5 GB of data a day. if the computer it is sitting in is mostly used for online work of document editing, youll get far more. the laptop would probably die long before the ssd did.
also, this only apples to the tls ssds. mlc ssds last 3 times longer, so the 840 pro would be better for a computer kept longer than 3 years. Reply
Vepsa - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkMight just be able to convince the wife that this is the way to go for her computer and my computer. Reply
CaedenV - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkThat is how I did it. My wife's old 80GB system drive died a bit over a year ago, and it was one of those issues of $75 for a decent HDD, or $100 for an SSD that would be 'big enough' for her as a system drive (60GB at the time). So I spent the extra $25, and it made her ~5 year old Core2Duo machine faster (for day-to-day workloads) than my brand new i7 monster that I had just build (but was still using traditional HDD at the time).
I eventually got so frustrated by the performance difference that I ended up finally getting one for myself, and then after my birthday came then I spent my fun money on a 2nd one for RAID0. It did not make a huge performance increase (I mean it was faster in benchmarks, but doubling the speed of instant is still instant lol), but it did allow me to have enough space to load all my programs on the SSD instead of being divided between the SSD and HDD. Reply
AndersLund - Sunday, November 25, 2012 - linkNotice, that setting up a RAID with your SSD might hinder the OS to see the SSDs as SSD and not sending TRIM commands to the disks. My first (and current) gamer system consists of two Intel 80 GB SSD in a RAID0 setup, but the OS (and Intel's toolbox) does not recognize them as SSD. Reply
mayankleoboy1 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkSamsung is known to release only a few firmware updates (unlike SF).
But due to the somewhat quirky nature of TLC NAND, do you expect Samsung to release a newer firmware , with maybe better read performance , or better TRIM support ? Reply
Taft12 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkWho cares?? Frequent firmware updates are a sign of an incompetent engineering and testing. I'll stick with the vendors known for getting it right the first time thank you very much. Reply
JuneBugKiller - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkIf Samsung 840 120GB cost's $109.99 and you can get an OCZ Vertex 4 128GB for $104.99, which is faster in 80% of the benchmarks and is $5 cheaper then who's going to want it? So what if the price goes down to $80, are people going to save $25 thinking their hard drive is going to die twice as fast. I have bought (with works money) around 30 ssd's including Intel 80GB & 160GB Silver Case, Intel 710 100GB, Vertex 3 Max IOPS 120GB and Vertex 4 128. So far I've only had 2 ssd's go bad and they were both Intel 80GB ssd's. One wouldn't power on and the other reported at 8MB. Intel replaced them under warranty.
The point is I have been buying SSD's for years and I just don't see how anyone would want these samsung ssd's. Samsung is famous for huge margins on each product. When a company pockets $240 off of a $500 tablet and their name isn't Apple then something is wrong. Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkWow, talk about skewing the data by cherry picking the worst-case numbers for the 840. The Vertex 4 is only 85% faster in one specific test: AS-SSD Write performance. Of course, in the AS-SSD Read performance it's also 10% faster than the Vertex 4 256GB, but you just ignore that? Samsung also has some of the best SSDs in terms of large reliability figures, so even if the 840 is slightly slower than other drives in some tests, it may be the better option. Also don't forget to factor in that the 840 appears to be well-tuned for light workloads (e.g it's near the top of our light workload results).
Personally, I think the 840 needs to come in below the current 830 drive prices to make sense, and it probably will not long after the official release. 128GB 830 drives already go for under $100, and 256GB drives have been at $200 for over a month now -- likely all in preparation for the release of the 840. TLC NAND is cheaper to manufacture (per GB), and long-term it will be significantly more profitable for Samsung. Get some good DSPs added into the mix and I wouldn't be surprised to see most SSDs in two generations being TLC based, with MLC moving to the enterprise level and SLC basically going away because it's too expensive. Reply
JuneBugKiller - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkNo I'm talking about counting each benchmark add the total and divide the number by how many OCZ Vertex 4 won and it was over 80% of the total number of benchmarks. How is Samsung a better option? TLC over MLC, OCZ fastest drive to Samsungs slowest new drive. Of course Samsung is going to make more profit but why would you want to spend the same amount on a slower drive with less endurance? Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkSorry, 80% of benchmarks is correct; I read that wrong. But let's put that in perspective:
If we look at average performance across all benchmarks, the difference between OCZ Vertex 256GB and Samsung 840 250GB is a 12.4% advantage for OCZ. However, OCZ hasn't exactly been free from firmware issues. That right there is the reason many people will pay a bit more for a Samsung (even if it's slower).
Would I buy an 840 right now for $200 or whatever? Definitely not -- I'd actually take the 830, just for proven reliability over time. Give the 840 a couple months just to be safe, then check the prices. If it's still more expensive than the Vertex 4, sure, go for OCZ if you'd like. If they're the same price, though, the 12% performance is practically meaningless for most consumer workloads. Reply
sean.crees - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkBecause it's not just about performance, it's also about reliability. This is user data we are talking about. Even a single loss could be catastrophic. OCZ doesn't have the reliability track record that Samsung and Intel has, and for that reason there are many people who will only ever buy from Samsung or Intel. So then OCZ isn't even mentionable. It doesn't matter if they are faster because who cares if your data is at risk?
Also you have to consider that the REAL WORLD difference between any modern 6Gbps SSD is negligible, so then performance means even less. It ends up being a contest of reliability instead of a contest of speed. In that contest, OCZ loses. Reply
krumme - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkI would want it :)
We have about 7-8 ssd in the house, about 3 of those is vertex 3 ssd, and there have been realiability and firmware issues.
I think ssd speeds since the last 2 years have been good enough and would prioritize reliability any day.
I had to replace an sandisk u100 in my Samsung 9 series x3c to a faster one, but that was because the u100 was like a return to 4 years ago. Its a good backup now.
Now hopefully reliability is there, and prices will go down so everyone can afford it. We dont need more firmware updates and shit. Its like the first 3d gfx in the mid 90, - a mess.
But you are right Samsung is starting to get expensive, and charge for the brand. Wether you like it or not it will certainly mean more Samsung reviews too. Being a big boy, have advantages :) Reply
Taft12 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - link"If Samsung 840 120GB cost's $109.99 and you can get an OCZ Vertex 4 128GB for $104.99, which is faster in 80% of the benchmarks and is $5 cheaper then who's going to want it?"
A person who values reliability at a value higher than $0 will choose the non-OCZ product every time. Reply
Jaybus - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - linkTime will tell. The TLC NAND should end up around 30% cheaper per GB than MLC. Then it will come down to buying a 240 GB MLC for $200 or a 320 GB TLC for the same price. Reply
iwod - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkI would be buying an Intel instead if it cost $109.99. While Sammy is possibly the closest to intel in terms of reliability. I wouldn't want a TLC SSD for the same price. And the difference would be marginal anyway. I could feel the difference between a decent 3Gbps SSD and 6Gbps SSD, i am not sure if there is anything to feel for two decent 6Gbps SSD.
Now if the retail price is really in the range of $70 - 80 that would be a huge difference. Because you are essentially choosing the second best reliable SSD for decent performance and cheapest price. Reply
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkThe Samsung 830 is the 7th cheapest SSD (based on €/GB) I can find on my go-to price comparison website. 3 of the six before it are much slower Kingston/OCZ drives and the other 3 have SF controllers. Considering the kind of inconsistent performance that delivers and the track record, I would go with the Samsung all the time.
Now, the 840 just launched and the pricing here is 25% above the 830. But it isn't even available for shipping anywhere. So I don't think that your comparison based on the Vertex4 ship has been shipping for months has any relevance. Also, aren't the Vertex4 numbers with their turbo-mode enabled which stops working after filling the drive to 50%? The Vertex4 256GB model costs 175€, the Samsung 830 256GB model costs 148€. Do you really think the 840 will be more expensive than the 830 in a couple of months? And even so, do you think the Vertex4 if that much better for consumers than the 830? I just don't see it. Reply
Blazorthon - Monday, October 29, 2012 - linkActually, the slowing down after 50% and such for Vertex 4 was fixed in firmware 1.5. The current numbers don't rely on Turbo, they're all the time.
Also, to all of you, Vertex 4, unlike its predecessors, uses a Marvell-designed controller. Anyone who's used a Crucial or Plextor SSD probably knows that Marvell based SSDs are about as reliability as you can get, up there with Samsung and Intel. Vertex 4 is OCZ's most reliable SSD to date by huge margins, especially with current firmware where it rivals even Samsung and the others in reliability unlike the original firmware (which was specifically stated to be in beta, so anyone who bought Vertex 4 around launch time without doing their research and finding that out probably isn't someone who should be allowed to buy their own SSDs without expert help).
Also, IDK about UK prices, but in the USA, the Vertex 4, Samsung 830, Samsung 840, and occasionally also the Crucial M4 and Plextor M5S are all at about the same price points for 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities right now. As someone who has experience with Vertex 4, I'd definitely recommend it over Samsung 830 and Samsung 840 so long as it's not more expensive. Reply
Assimilator87 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkHow come the OCZ 4 series just suddenly disappear when the review gets to the power consumption tests? Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkBecause Kristian imported the results from SSD Bench for the "1.4 Firmware" for the OCZ drives, and when those were retested Anand didn't add in power use figures. I've added them to the graphs using the original power figures at release. Thanks for the heads up! Reply
Coup27 - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkExcellent article Kristian, enjoyed it.
Some constructive criticism, although I appreciate that English is not your native language. Sentences aren't that clear when you use a double negative, such as "I wouldn't find it unlikely...". It would be much clearer if you had wrote "It would be likely..." Reply
Kristian Vättö - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkPoint taken, thanks for the feedback :-)
Some things sound logical in my ears but they may not make much sense for a native speaker. I guess this is partially because in English exams and stuff, using more difficult sentence structures (like double negative) will yield higher scores, even though they are not commonly used by natives. Will try to pay more attention to this in the future. Reply
Sufo - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkI don't know if I agree with this. While double negatives are certainly inappropriate in some situations, the example you give is nit picking. Add to that, there is a subtle (albeit not technical) difference between "I wouldn't find it unlikely" and "I would find it likely". I accept that had Kristian made a legitimate grammatical error, then correcting it (while a little pedantic) may have been justified, but simply editing for style seems unnecessary.
I guess my point is Kristian was not objectively wrong, or even unclear (although admittedly, complexity for complexity's sake benefits no one) and so he shouldn't pay too much heed to comments like this simply because OP is an English speaking native and he is not. I am, however, confident that he's more than capable of coming to his own conclusions on the matter :P Reply
smartthanyou - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkI am probably in the minority on this, but as a matter of policy, I don't think you should call anything a review without pricing and a approximate release date.
Particularly the price. If I don't see a price, I don't bother to read the article. Reply
sean.crees - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkPrice is on the 5th page labeled "The Samsung SSD 840" about half way down.
Although i noticed the price for the 840 250GB is the same as the 840 Pro's 256GB? Is this a typo? Why would anyone buy the non pro with 6 less GB and slower speeds for the same price? Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkWhat price are you looking at? The table shows $199.99 for the 250GB Samsung 840 (MSRP) and $249.99 for the 256GB Samsung 840 Pro. Reply
Kevin G - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkOn the fourth page:
"With perfect wear-leveling and write amplification of 1x, you would get 256TiB of writes out of a 250GB Samsung 840 with TLC NAND and 1,000 P/E cycles. "
Shouldn't it be 256 GiB? Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkNo; he's accounting for the visible storage capacity (and spare area). So 250GB is 256GiB of NAND but only 250GB end-user storage. You can still write 256TiB of data (256GiB * 1000 P/E), which means on a 250GB SSD you end up with the ability to write 281TB of data (for an effective P/E cycles of 1125). Reply
schizoide - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkI'm not comfortable with TLC, particularly since it doesn't come at a huge absolute cost savings. I've been burned too often with SSDs, and now only buy the most bulletproof devices available. Maybe next generation. Maybe. Reply
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkI wouldn't draw any conclusion for pricing just yet. Everyone is comparing street prices of current gen SSDs to MSRP of next gen SSDs. Give it a few months to get the 840 into stores and selling and then we'll se how prices fair.
I'm personally fairly confident that there will be a distinct cost advantage. Reply
name99 - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkHave ANY SSDs given you a failure based on the flash cells themselves, rather than on crappy firmware?
It's stupid to demonize a technology because some companies sold you a bad product --- especially when your response is to refuse to buy a product from a company that is known (in this respect at least) NOT to have shipped crappy firmware. Reply
harijan - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkPretty sure 3650GiB != 3.65TiB.
It doesn't do anything to your percentages, but this is Anandtech, we hold you to higher standards ;) Reply
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkYou are correct, I forgot that binary units don't scale up linearly (1000GiB is not 1TiB); metrics are just so much simpler. Thanks for the heads up, I've fixed the math now. Reply
iaco - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkI wonder if Samsung will ever make a SSD made of SLC NAND. The performance would be amazing. Reply
Conficio - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkFirst thanks to the Kristan and the Anand Team for another comprehensive review and the inclusion of in depth knowledge about the technology behind it.
I'd like to see included in the test (or in another article) a review of the available tools for each SSD. I think it is important to know if the manufacturer supports its tools to low level format, secure erase, TRIM, ROM update etc. beyond the obligatory Windows (7). Are those available for Linux (command line and/or GUI)? Are they available for Mac OSX? Do they work if the drive is connected over USB? Are these tools user friendly to use?
It is useless if I buy an SSD and have to find out that Mac OSX does not support the tools. I have a couple of Vertex drives which I can't find a way to secure erase in order to restore full performance. They are pre TRIM drives and Mac OS X does not support trim on them anyway.
As with motherboards, the the BIOS or UEFI is important, so is with SSDs the ability to actually perform some of the low level functions. I hope you can add that to your workload! A comparison of the different tools for each manufacturer for current drives would be a great start. Thanks again! Reply
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkSamsung will be releasing Magician 4.0 later this year and we are definitely going to do an article about it. I tried to get a beta version of it but Samsung wasn't willing to send us one, yet. Magician 3.2.2 that comes with the 840 is the same that's available for the 830, so I didn't find it that important to cover.
But you are right, we need to cover the software side more as well because it will also drive manufacturers to make their own SSD tools.
P.S. Try installing Ubuntu to a USB stick (just use UNetBootin) and then use hdparm commands (see below) to secure erase the SSD.
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass password /dev/sdX
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase password /dev/sdX
"password" is whatever you choose as the password and "X" is the drive (you can see which it is in Disk Utility) Reply
Impulses - Monday, October 08, 2012 - linkAt one point in the article you mention 830 users would at least wanna upgrade to the 840 Pro if they aren't gonna wait for next gen drives... I kinda thought the Pro qualified as next gen, with the vanilla 840 being more of a side grade from current gen drives. So what would you consider or expect from a next gen drive? Reply
KAlmquist - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkOne thing I've been wondering is what voltage the controller uses. I can't identify every component on the board, but I don't see anything that looks like a voltage regulator. It seems kind of crazy to run a chip with three processor cores at 5 volts, but I guess it's possible. Reply
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkLoved the review. I'm really looking forward to more data on the DSP usefulness inside SSDs, could be a huge advantage (though I don't worry about going through my P/E cycles at home).
With SSDs, we are at a point similar to GPUs and CPUs where I don't understand upgrading from generation to generation. Unless you have a very specific usage case and can make great use of the better speed (video/picture editing or something equally I/O intensive), I don't think a 840 Pro will feel that much faster than a 830.
I'm still rocking a first gen Agility 60GB in my (ULV) notebook and a Vertex2 120GB in my desktop and they feel plenty fast, especially those times when I'm at a friends PC with only mechanical storage.
I might upgrade to a 830 or 840 (non Pro) when the prices have dropped for the 830 or stabilized for the 840 (I don't like paying for launch pricing). :D
And I finally got my brother to go to SSD storage, too! He'll either get a 512GB 830 or 2x256. Does anyone know why 256GB usually has the best price/GB instead of the 512GB drives? Considering the cost for casing, PCB, controller etc. stays the same, I would expect the 512GB to have better pricing/GB. Do they need to go with more dense packages which are more expensive? Reply
name99 - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkI agree completely.
I've said before that the current emphasis on performance over everything else is as stupid as Intel's Pentium4 philosophy. Devices have to become more balanced if they want to sell better.
In particular the current atrocious write power draws for these devices mean that they will not sell in the external drive market --- they can't be fully powered by USB2 and
- no-one wants a drive that needs two USB connections because it's clumsy and it uses up limited USB slots
- saying it can be fully powered by USB3 is not good enough because, for the near-term future, people want to share drives between USB2 and USB3 computers.
Of course MOST, but not all, the external drive market is about capacity, not speed. However each time SSD capacity doubles, a larger portion of the external drive market makes sense; AND power is not only an issue for the external market. The higher you set your peak power draw, the less your flash appeals to Ultrabook manufacturers.
Just remember Pentium 4 and its power draw, and compare to Intel trying to get Haskell to run at <10W nowadays. Balance matters, and current flash manufacturers seem to be far too unbalanced compared to the requirements of most users.
(It would be fascinating, for example, if we learn that the flash in the next round of iOS devices, or even MacBooks, was designed in-house by Apple because they were not satisfied with the power vs performance choices that were being made by the major flash manufacturers. Remember --- Apple bought Anobit...) Reply
moadip - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkdoes the 830/840 family support AES encryption? Want to buy one of those but there is no official word on any support for this. Is anyone of you guys/girls using them in that way? Reply
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - link840 and 840 Pro both support 256-bit AES encryption Reply
moadip - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkwhat about the 830? Reply
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkI'm not 100% sure but as far as I know, only the OEM/enterprise version (i.e. PM830) supports encryption, the consumer 830 doesn't. Reply
MrSpadge - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkWhat an amazingly well balanced drive! Currently it's more expensive than the 830 at similar capacities, but as soon as 21 nm yield ramps up (and prices are adjusted) this will probably be one of the best or maybe the best consumer SSD on the market. Reply
iCrunch - Tuesday, October 09, 2012 - linkThanks for another tremendous AnandTech review! You guys are insane! ;-)
I own a 256GB Samsung 830 as part of my Retina MBP and I must say, I'm blown away! My first SSD was an Intel X25-M G1 80GB and through the years, I've had the fortune to own several solid state drives, including the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6Gbps, a couple of Intel 520's in RAID 0, the Samsung 470 as well as pre-470 Samsung OEM models. Thanks to this review, I'll be going for the 840 Pro as soon as soon as I can justify getting another desktop or laptop. Decision made!
I'm used to high SSD pricing, so if the 840 Pro 256GB will be going for $250 or less, count me in. If the downward trend of SSD prices really does continue, or, even better, if a breakthrough drive like the 840 series with its less expensive TLC NAND appears to be, I'd love to start getting 512GB drives. Black Friday, here we come... Reply
chrcoluk - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - linkI have a 830 and am happy with it but it does have a weakness on high threaded i/o and random writes, it seems they have address this on the 840 pro which seems a bug fixed 830. However I have noticed the huge price premium on the 840 pro. Seems samsung have finally realised they can sell based on their reputation as they are in the same league as intel for reliability above the likes of OCZ who are trash. This day was inevitable. The basic 840 is to cater for the lower price market to try and keep hold of customers who wont pay more and time will tell if it works out. My observation so far is the basic 840 still costs more than the 830s, for me thats a no go, whilst it does have the newer controller which gives higher random writes, the random writes arent slow enough on my 830 for it to be an issue, its not noticeable. So for me its about reliability and the 830 I expect with its superior nand to be be the better product yet is still cheaper. If I won the lottery I would buy some 840 pros, but otherwise its 830s for me.
As for write wear, my browsers alone are writing 10s of gigs of data a day, I moved my browser temp data folders to a ramdisk. Everytime someone views a youtube video eg. it writes to the browser cache even tho its a stream. Same if you download files, they written to the temp folder before the download folder. I feel anandtech solely focusing on performance are not been responsible they need to warn people of the risks of using TLC. Reply
TheExpertGuru - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - linkThis SSD looks great, although it does not appear to be widely available. I just got the Samsung 830 SSD to replace my hard disk drive and it is wonderful so far - boot speed is terrific! See my initial experiences with the SSD at www.Samsung830.com. Reply
infoilrator - Friday, October 19, 2012 - linkAs a looker on (just going to install a couple Kingston HyperX 3K 128s) my understanding is that the way SSDs work performance and speed increase with size, as does complexity.
Essentially the magic costs a little more but is worth it.
I will be experiencing the result as I have 2 HyperX 3k 128s to Raid0. Probably
Amazon one day deal.
As a penny pincher I won't be the first to purchase any 840s. OTOH SSDs seem to become habit forming. Reply
dgigibao - Monday, October 22, 2012 - linkSeveral times you recommend the Samsung 830 for Mac OSX users for the same kind of controller whitch Apple in puts in their factory SSD. Whould would recommend 840 for Mac OSX users to? Reply
whiggabo - Sunday, October 28, 2012 - linkI really miss the answer, whether to choose the 830 or the 840 non Pro. As I'm in the position, where both are possible at the same pricing-level (for me), it's hard to take an decision, which one I should build into my Laptop/Desktop. As there are an 128GB 830 and an 60GB Vertex 2 working, the Vertex would be retired to use it for my future HTPC, so that the new 830 or 840 would replace it.
I really could use some Help. ;) The 840 Pro clearly would be an easy decision, but as it's not available in Germany now and the price gab is huge, it's no option. Reply
Blazorthon - Monday, October 29, 2012 - linkI'd first recommend whichever is cheaper for you and if they're at the same price, then the 840. Reply
araczynski - Monday, October 29, 2012 - linkstill no clear winner in anything it seems. hate paying for tradeoffs.
maybe this would all make much more sense if the graphs were shown with a standard 1TB 7200rpm hard drive thrown into the mix. most desktops/laptops from the pc world still ship with those as the standard (or a 7200rpm variant).
a 50% performance difference between SSD 1 and SSD 2 could become inconsequential when compared to the relative performance of said 1TB 7200rpm platter drive.
a lot of these SSD benchmarks do nothing more than perpetuate the manufacturer's intent to focus on raw individualized numbers, rather than real world meaning, whether consequential or not.
if nothing else, throw a 1TB 7200 rpm into the light/heavy suite only. then things would become crystal clear (i think). Reply
Nilth - Sunday, November 04, 2012 - linkGreat review, as always.
There's one thing I'd like to know: is the DSP present in the other samsung drives?
I mean the 830 and the 840 pro. Reply
SSDFDE - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkThanks for all the useful information on that drive.
Hardware Encryption (full disk, FDE) is an important feature for me. I have been working with external Buffalo USB HDDs supporting hardware encryption. As expected there is a software that lets you define a password for the drive as well as unlocks the drive with the before given password.
So I bought a SDD supporting Hardware Encryption (also full disk, FDE):
- The 840 Basic (256 GB). To my big surprise no password has to be entered anywhere.
- Also the supplied software (Magician) does not mention encryption or password at all.
- Nor is the a pre-boot environment (maybe a small Linux core system before system boot) that asks me for a before set password when booting from the drive.
- Is there any official documentation from Samsung that explains the FDE with this drive in more detail that the / a key is in the hardware of the drive? Actually if it is on the hardware pre-set it will be available on every computer I use the drive with so where is the security gain after all?
- Also I read that you can reset the pre-installed on-chip set by the hardware vendor to gain full security no one can access the drive e.g. if a used keys file leaks from samsung or the asian sub-contractors if existent. Is this possible on this Samsung drive?
- Also I read you can set the SSD password via a BIOS setting. These option were actually used to set an IDE password using a SMART feature (which was not a really secure method after all). So is there a chance to check if the SSD is just encrypted using the BIOS password as IDE SMART password ot if the SSD really is Samsung AES hardware encrypted.
- Also when I have to tell the password to the BIOS, is it safe to enter it here? I am not familiar with the BIOS HDD password functions, so maybe someone can clarify and add some light in here?
All in all I more feel distorted and puzzled by the hardware full disk encryption of the Samsung SSD drive and do not feel safe and secure at all. I think of returning the drive as security has to be intelligibly secure and not a totally black box.
In case this drive does not support my subjective security requirements can anyone advise on a hardware-encrypted SSD drive not too costly that has a clear documentation and key entering and keeping concept?
Thanks a lot for any hint on this.
I really feel very left alone by Samsung Hardware, Software and Documentation here.
Jan Reply
SSDFDE - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - link... actually what happens if I set the IDE (sorry, its ATA actually) password in BIOS and then move the drive to another computer with no ATA HDD BIOS password set? Will it be readable there as the internal key in the drive of course still is the same?
As ATA password is an option only, and setting the ATA password does not alter the internal SSD key, the actual encryption on the drive does not change at all no matter if a ATA password is set or not, right?
BTW: Resetting / generating an new internal key seems to be done with "secure erase" on hardware-encrypted drives with internal encryption key... clearly then its only bitshit on the dive once the old key is lost. Is there an option to do that an the Samsung drive anyway? Reply
JellyRoll - Saturday, November 24, 2012 - linkDigital Signal Processing has nothing to do with the voltage states of the NAND. It is processing of the actual signal that comes from the NAND packages.
DSP is used for multiple technologies, from audio to video to radar. These devices do not utilize nand, and DSP has zero interaction with the NAND itself, it merely reduces and corrects the amount of errors that come from the NAND.
here is a primer on DSP: http://www.analog.com/en/content/beginners_guide_t...
There needs to be more research before these incorrect explanations are posted.
"Even though DSP doesn't make NAND immortal, it causes a lot less stress on the NAND, allowing it to last for more P/E cycles than what you would get without DSP."--This statement is entirely untrue, as DSP has no interaction with the NAND itself. It seems there is a bit of guesswork going on when writing this article.
DSP simply corrects errors. With lower endurance NAND you experience more errors. Reply
PanzerIV88 - Thursday, December 27, 2012 - linkI just bought on Boxing Day that Samsung 840 250Gb for 150$ + Taxes. The sequential write speed is what scares the most but other than marketing bs it's actualy what's the less important. There's much more happening into the small files or reading speed which it shines in. I'll definitely replace my Vertex 4 128Gb which isn't as amazing as I thought it was, mostly since I learned that once it reaches 50% capacity, it turns into storage mode instead of performance and the write speed falls of 2 to 3x!!! I can confirm this with benchs I've done, it's really sad..
Also thought of doing a Vertex 4 Raid 0 but other than bragging with bench numbers, seriously wtf does 600-800Mb/s is gonna do for a daily light load or gaming?! Totaly nothing more... so I'll save my money. Reply
sriggins - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - linkI have been using an 830 in my MacBook Pro since last October. I use FileVault 2 and do a ton of compiling on the drive. Performance has been steady. How does using OS X encryption affect the life of the drive? Is there any way to tell how many writes have been done so far? Reply
brainfuck - Wednesday, July 03, 2013 - linkIs there any way to find the Erase Block Size of Samsung 840 250GB?
so that i can align my disk accordingly
thanks Reply
WildBillvms - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - linkGreat Drive , but if you have memory problems click here ----> http://www.billatkinson.net/evo Reply


text:
Please Note: By clicking a link to any resource listed on this page, you will be leaving this site.
American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS)
The AAOS provides information for the public on sports safety, and bone, joint, muscle, ligament and tendon injuries or conditions.
American Medical Association (AMA)
The AMA has made a commitment to medicine by making doctors more accessible to their patients. Contact the AMA at: American Medical Association 515 N. State St. Chicago, IL 60610 (312) 464-5000


text:
Rivatuner Generic Discussion forum This forum is intended for generic questions and discussion of the RivaTuner Utility. In this section the users help each other out with answers.
« Previous Thread | Next Thread »
Powered by vBulletin®
Copyright ©2000 - 2017, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
vBulletin Skin developed by: vBStyles.com
Copyright (c) 2017, All Rights Reserved. The Guru of 3D, the Hardware Guru, and 3D Guru are trademarks owned by Hilbert Hagedoorn.


text:
Pediatric Neurosurgery
There is currently no content classified with this term.
Jump to navigation
Personalized care to help your family stay healthy.
When you need a specialist for treatment at an outpatient facility or hospital.
A quick check list to help you get ready for your visit.
Helpful tips to use during
your visit with us.
How to stay in touch with us after your visit.
Get answers to your health questions.
Discover our wellness facilities and programs.
Events, screenings & classes.


text:
SME is unleashing its breadth and depth of manufacturing content into a powerful, user-friendly, 24-7 online resource. Everything you want to know about manufacturing is available when you want it, where you want it.
NOW AVAILABLE! The former Tool & Manufacturing Engineer's Handbook (TMEH) has been digitized and is now available in a new peer-reviewed and validated WIKI environment.
An (*) next to the name of the chapter listing indicates previous year information. For those chapters not showing a chapter chair or faculty advisor, please contact SME Customer Care at firstname.lastname@example.com or 800.733.4763.
Istanbul Technical University U203Ramazan Murat Tabanli, PhD18.104.22.1680, Ext. 2441 (B) | Email


text:
sandpiperimports.com coupon codes
Save and get maximum discount with 3 best sandpiperimports.com coupon codes for August 2017. These discount coupons can help you save money and this page has popular coupon codes & discounts for sandpiperimports.com. Always check for latest sandpiperimports.com discount coupons, offers, free shipping coupons and related special promotions when you shop for your favorite items. Feel free to bookmark this page so that you can get new sandpiperimports.com promo codes.sandpiperimports.com usually offers promotional discount codes, offers and deals frequently.By using these coupons and discount codes you get a good opportunity for saving your money.It's always nice to have a sandpiperimports.com coupon code to save money.Using a coupon code is very easy all you need to do is click on the button to reveal the code so that you can use the code at the store website.How can you get exclusive sandpiperimports.com coupon code? This site is updated frequently with new discount codes. To get new, latest and exclusive codes bookmark this page and keep on checking back to get latest discount code.
Discount Coupons
coupon codes & offers
Latest sandpiperimports.com coupon codes & Discounts August 2017 - 3 coupons
Sandpiperimports.com 20% Off W/ Discount Code
Sandpiperimports.com discount:20% Off w/ Discount Code 20% sandpiperimports.com discount
Sandpiperimports.com 25% Off With Coupon Code
Sandpiperimports.com discount codes:25% Off with Coupon Code 25% sandpiperimports.com discount codes
25% coupon
Promo Codes/DealsGet Code
Sandpiperimports.com 20% Off
Sandpiperimports.com discount:20% Off 20% sandpiperimports.com discount