Karma

“Fisker Automotive is a green American premium sports car company with a mission to create a range of beautiful environmentally friendly cars that make environmental sense without compromise.”

What makes the Fisker special?  Materials, technology and style from what I gather.  Build materials are eco friendly and the technology is pretty forward thinking, at least for cars.  Basically the Fisker acts sort of like a diesel electric locomotive where the motor is essentially a generator powering the electric motors.  Major difference here though is that the Fisker mostly uses batteries and relies on being charged for maximum efficiency.  The goal is to have the vehicle run completely on battery power for the first 50 miles or so and when needed, the gasoline motor charges the battery back to full and once again, you are cruising under the stealthy whisper of electric power.  Why this is great is current electric cars have limited range and when drained, you have to recharge.   This method allows for extended road trips, however at the expense of adding less efficiency as the gas motor is engaged more often.

The neat thing though is that it does this all while giving 0-60 performance of 5.8 seconds, amazing luxury and style and supposedly up to 100mpg when used for commuting under 50 miles a day and charged properly prior to your commute.   Drawback is of course it’s $87,000 starting asking price.   Hardly affordable and even makes the way overpriced Chevy volt look cheap in comparison.   However, the Karma is in a different league in style and creature appointments, more in line with a BMW or other premium branded car so depending on how the production models actually perform, the price may not be to out of line with it’s normally aspirated competition over the course of lifetime ownership and you can have a lighter conscience knowing that your carbon footprint is much smaller than it would have been otherwise.

So everyone pay attention.   From today until July 11th, you will be able to preorder Windows 7 for a huge discount.   Pre orders will be available through participating vendors such as NewEgg, Amazon, Fry’s, etc.     The non discounted pricing structure is as follows:

For full retail versions:

Anandtech has a interesting write up on DDR3 memory and the Intel Core I7 , comparing how performance scales with memory latency and bandwidth.   Pretty good read for those of you that are interesting in moving to a DDR3 platform and would like to know what is the best bang for your $$.   Read about it here.

Basically the article goes through some exhaustive teting of DDR3 in various configuration at DDR3-1066 speeds up to DDR3-2000 and latency of CAS5 up to CAS 9.   In short, most programs are not that sensitive to the plethora of memory speeds tested, although a few are (synthetic tests do not count), but typically the performance gain rarely exceeds 5-6%.  What this means to you as the consumer is that you can feel safe buying a middle of the road  DD3-1333 C6 or DDR3-1600 C6 capable memory kit for a modest price ($75-80 for 4GB) and find solace in the fact that your performance will pretty much equal kits costing twice as much.

According to reghardware British researchers have created a hard rectanglular drive. The media is double sided and fits within the confines of  3.5 inch casings used by current HDD’s and SSD’s.   The read-write layer is made up of a grid of millions of read-write heads that are created using the same lithography process that is used to make silicon chips like your Intel CPU.  The read/write mechanics are controlled by sending a signal to the appropriate row and column of the grid.  Multiple heads can be doing their work in parrallel , but the current limit is 64 heads active at any one time.

Sounds great doesn’t it.   So what does that mean for performance?  Well for one, power consumption is just 4W, which is about 1/3 of a current SCSI drive.   Second, the supposed claimed data transfer rate is 500 MB/s which is screaming fast.  My current Hitachi 1TB peaks out at around 130 MB/s, so this would be a huge performance boost, even if only half of the claimed performance was realized.

Right now Dataslide is working on gathering additional funding and licensing.  It will be interesting to see if this technology can live up to the proposed claims and if so, how soon the market will act to introduce the new technology.

MSI Radeon HD 4890 1GB for $165!!!! ATI HD 4890’s are my favorite card on the market at the moment for affordable high performance single card solutions.   NewEgg has a killer deal just for Fathers Day. $199.99 - $20 Rebate -$15 (VGA61915 promo code) and free shipping = $165 of gaming goodness. Check it out here.

These cards were $250 not all that long ago.   Oh how I love market competition.

According to a source quoted by Digitimes, current Blu-Ray production costs are at about $100 per unit. By 2010, these costs should drop to as low as $50, which paves the way for much more affordable Blu-Ray players which typically are still in the $250 range for cheaper players. This should hasten the consumer acceptance to the media format. Sounds good to me.

According to rumors, AMD is going to cut prices on the existing 4800 series graphics cards this next month. This makes sense as they are supposedly getting their next generation gpu ready and should be available by the end of the summer. So the price drop should help them clear out inventory.

The good news for us consumers is that awesome cards like the HD 4890 could drop from it’s retail price of $249 to $199. Throw in rebates that always seem to be rampant and you could see them for under $175 which is great deal. This price drop should also drop the HD 4850 to under $100 which is also a great card for a mainstream gaming computer and even better if you get 2 to crossfire..

Last week or so I posted a little about the MotoCzysz electric motorcycle and somewhere in my ramblings I complained about the boring american motorcycle industry.   Well I forgot about a cool little start up motorcycle company right here in the United States by the name of Fischer.   They just finally started shipping their first motorcycle the MRX.  It is based on a Korean made 650cc v-twin making a claimed 77hp at the wheel, housed in a cast aluminum frame developed by the same group the engineered the superb handling VR1000.   It uses all kinds of well engineered bits from companies like Ohlin’s, Brembo and Woodcraft and all for a very reasonable $7995.

I bet one of these would make a awesome race or track day bike.   In lightly modfied race trim with race fuel, I bet these could make a easy 85-90hp at the wheel and according to documentaion in race trim the bike should clock in at around 350 lbs which is pretty light.   If you are interested head over to the Fischer site and find yourself a local dealer to check one out.

Again today, Xbitlabs has a nice little article on the power requirements of several different computer configurations.   From a light duty office computer all the way to a dual gpu performance gaming computer.   It goes to show how even with the most exhausting test programs even the highest spec and energy hungry configuration in their test only consumed a hair over 500 watts and a average gaming computer with a respectable ATI HD 4850 was pulling under 200 Watts under full load.  This will poke a hole in the misconception balloon presented by some enthusiasts that argue a 1000 watt power supplies is needed these days for a gaming rig.  Sure it is nice to have some headroom, so a 650 or 750 watt PSU might be a good idea, but anything beyond that is overkill.   Of course there are some people that do run 3x or 4x graphics card setups, then a 1000 watt PSU would make sense, but seriously, who really runs those.   Anyway, the article is here.

Xbitlabs has a good article on the performance gains on running two ATI HD 4770’s in crossfire mode.  Normally I’d say they are a fabulous option, but due to a global 40nm chip shortage, the 4770’s are going for $110 a piece.  You can pick up a HD 4890 for under $200 after rebate these days and HD 4850’s for around $90 each after rebate.   But once supplies return and prices go back to where they should be, running two 4770’s will be a nice option for those with crossfire enabled motherboards.   Read about it here.