SDP

Metrics for Intel's power-frugal Ivy Bridge chips questioned

The yardstick used for Intel's new power-frugal chips is being questioned in article posted by Ars Technica.

The article, titled "Power saving through marketing: Intel's '7 watt' Ivy Bridge CPUs," asserts that Intel may have been over-aggressive with its power-efficiency claims.

More specifically, the 7-watt Ivy Bridge processors Intel announced on Monday at CES are actually specified by Intel on its site as 13 watts, the article says.

"The 7-watt number advertised during Intel's keynote yesterday is actually from a new metric, 'scenario design power' (SDP), which purports to measure how much power the … Read more

Books for practical mechanical engineering

I've mentioned the Homebrew Robotics Club here a few times. The club has an active mailing list. And when I found myself writing a lengthy post there over the weekend, I figured it might be of interest to the wider audience.

The post was in response to this inquiry from club president Wayne C. Gramlich, included here with his permission:

Can anybody point me a book that goes into design issues associated with assembling mechanisms out of bearings, axles, and gears? I'm looking for pretty basic stuff, like when to use a ball bearing, where to place bearings … Read more

FixMyMovie gets an overhaul, premium service forthcoming

Having recently compared a small handful of video hosting services, it's fun to come back to FixMyMovie, a service I checked out back in September. Since launching at DEMOfall, FixMyMovie has been making tweaks and improvements. With a 15MB file size limit, it's a far cry from some of the heavy duty video file hosting services that let you upload files of nearly half a gigabyte. However, FixMyMovie holds true to its roots of attempting to make crappy camera phone videos look watchable on larger screens.

Earlier this week I got to chat with CEO Sean Varah about … Read more