[H]ardNews 5th Edition

Madison @ 1.5GHz:

If you think Intel is sitting around waiting to see what the Opteron is going to do, you would be very wrong.

Intel said the size of each Madison will be 374 square millimeters, will consume a maximum of 130 watts, and will have 410 million transistors, the basic circuitry elements out of which chips are assembled. Until now, Intel had said only that the processor would have "about half a billion" transistors.

Wow, going to be interesting to see a couple of those stuffed in a 19" 1U. While at Comdex we did talk to AMD about putting a couple of their Opterons in close quarters and they explained that they had not seen any issues under the most adverse datacenter conditions.

Beer Q&A:

You really should know more about something, especially when you put so much of it into your body at one time. How Beer Works.

Have you ever wondered what "malt" really is, and how you get malt from barley? And what about hops, and why do we need yeast? Barley, water, hops and yeast -- brewers combine these four simple ingredients to make beer.

If you really want to get up close, personal and friendly with beer, may we suggest some home brew. A fun weekend project for sure. Thanks Blair.

Benchmark Needs:

ViperLair waxes poetic about benchmarks, their value, and what exactly their need is. No doubt that a lot of what we do around here is benchmark, but we know that benchmarks are becoming less and less important. What is becoming more important is a comprehensive subjective analysis of the products we are interacting with and we will of course be trying to do a better job at communicating that as raw numbers become less and less important to some extent.

Am I using this benchmark because I want to bias the reader into accepting an erronious conclusion? Is there any other benchmarks that I can use to find out the full potential of this hardware? Do I want to spend time/effort on a benchmark to make the review better?

Hey dude, you spelled "erroneous" wrong. And yes, we know that is the pot calling the kettle black, but it is still funny.