I'm getting old

This Saturday I turned 22, but it's one of those feels like 40 but is really only 22 sort of birthdays. With my midlife crises out of the way I'm hoping that things will just be smooth sailing when I do actually hit 40 later on in life :)

I had no idea what was going to happen on my birthday; this was the second one that Vinney had planned entirely for me and, once again it was entirely a surprise and as always the best birthday ever. There were about 9 of us total that night, which is good because I'm the type of person that would much rather keep to himself than be surrounded by tons of people (she knows me quite well). We had fun, we ended up doing a murder mystery dinner - surprisingly enough I didn't guess at the start that I would be the killer. I only ended up killing one person though, the person I killed happened to kill the only other person to die before I did my bidding. The dinner was a lot of fun, if you've never tried it before, get a bunch of friends and give it a try - laughter will ensue.

Vinney is a gamer so the night ended with a smaller group of us gaming. A friend of mine got me a Gameboy Advance and a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords for the Gamecube. Why? Well because after reading this Penny Arcade comic and its more informative (but less funny) newspost about the game we realized it would be a good way of quenching our thirst for decent 4-player coop gaming. Unfortunately 4 people need to invest around $490 to actually play the game because Nintendo requires that every player have a GBA as well as a link cable. Well, part of a birthday gift was a handful of borrowed GBAs and link cables so we could game the night away. Oh and by the way, the PA comic is totally accurate when it comes to the gaming experience :)

Always wanting to outdo herself (as well as completely astonish yours truly), Vinney put together an assembly of 22 presents for my special day. It's easy to feel special and get excited about a birthday when you're little, but it's much tougher to do so the older you get - Vinney continues to make that not apply to my life anymore though, damn she's wonderful. I love you sweetheart :)

As far as work stuff goes, I've been spending the past several days working on Dothan. At 2GHz Dothan is quite competitive with a 3.2GHz Northwood, which is to be expected thanks to its shorter pipeline. Unlike Prescott, Dothan is simply a die shrink of Banias with some added cache and architectural tweaks - no changes were made to the pipeline. Thus we get a good idea of the power consumption and scalability of Intel's 90nm process by looking at Dothan. I'll have to save something for the article so I'll stop babbling now :)

By now you should have seen the NVIDIA SLI announcement, which was made possible thanks to PCI Express. Unfortunately it looks like motherboard support is going to be nada at first, but if NVIDIA can get a reference design board out there based on their rumored nForce4 with dual PCI Express x16 slots then we may be in business. What many don't realize is that the technology for this has actually been in NVIDIA GPUs for quite some time. It was in NV30, NV35, NV38 and obviously in the NV4x line of GPUs as well. I can't remember if it was in the NV2x line as well though; there's not much required on the silicon level. The idea of prolonging the life of your graphics setup is quite attractive to me, but it'll be quite a feat to pull it off as it requires much more than just the interface itself. I for one am glad to see a dual card implementation that doesn't bring back the memories of pass through cables and degraded image quality, but man were those Voodoo2s fast back then.

Intel quietly launched their first 64-bit capable x86 processors yesterday, but there's not much to talk about as these chips are still going to be sold for use in 32-bit scenarios for the most part. Although many gave Intel flack for their comments when AMD was hyping Athlon 64, some of them were true - even today, almost 10 months after the Athlon 64 was launched, it's still essentially being sold as a 32-bit CPU. That being said, if AMD hadn't done it, we wouldn't be talking about Intel's 64-bit x86 solution here right now so it is still a win for the consumer. We'll be doing a piece on Intel's 64-bit solution at a later point in time, not sure when, but it'll happen.

The new site is coming along very well, I'd say extremely well even. There are some interface tweaks that should make getting to new and older articles easier, as well as the new sections that I talked about already. We're planning on launching either this coming Sunday or Monday and of course we'll launch with new content, as has been AT history for 7 years and counting now :) I haven't decided what the launch article will be yet, but I'll figure something out between now and then.

This week you'll see the Raptor RAID article from me (that's going up Friday morning), and I'm hoping to have the Dothan article done before the end of the week as well. I'm not certain when Dothan will be published, but I'll be pushing for next week. We're finally to the point where we have enough content that we actually have to decide what gets published first, it's not a bad problem to have, but one that I'm finally glad to have. The new AT team is one that I'm not only very proud of but also very happy with. It's a shame that two of the guys who really helped build and shape this site during its early years have since moved on, as I'm sure they would have liked to be a part of this. Mike Andrawes went off to med school after graduating from Duke and just started his first year of residency. And Matt Witheiler, who headed up graphics and mobile reviews, was scooped up by ATI a while ago.

As you may have noticed, we have started posting content on the weekends. I'm hoping to continue the trend going forward, as well as bring back the newsletter with even more content. I'll clue you in later with information about the new newsletter, but for now my focus is on the new site launch.

I think I've covered all of my bases for now: birthday, love of my life, articles and new site, yep that's all I set out to talk about tonight :)

Take care and have a great day.