I want one! No idea what I will do with it though.....
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle5207626.ece
YoYotech Fi7epower: the world's fastest PC
Gamers will love the Fi7epower, a £3,995 computer with a superfast processor, 9GB of Ram and powerful graphics
Where might you expect to find the world’s fastest PC? In the air-conditioned server room of a Silicon Valley tech company, perhaps, or cobbled together by boffins at a university?
The reality is different: in the showroom of an electronics store off the Tottenham Court Road in central London sits a glowing black monolithic machine, the YoYotech Fi7epower MLK1610. This desktop supercomputer, built by a small British company, is nearly twice as fast as the next most powerful PC in the world.
For £3,995 it is guaranteed to give you more computing power at home than you can access in your office. As the cost of PCs such as the Fi7epower fall, we can look forward to a world when, at least in terms of computing, it could be more efficient to work from home, and go to the office just to gossip and drink coffee.
The Fi7epower is the first computer to be built around a new Intel microprocessor, the Core i7. Remarkably, the computer giant chose a British custom PC manufacturer, YoYotech, to be among the first to receive its fastest chip.
YoYotech has a history of building speed-record-breaking desktop PCs, and Intel believed the company would construct a machine that would fulfil the potential of the i7. “I’d heard the Intel processor was about to be released because I keep my ear to the ground and Intel trusted us with some of their first units because they know we build our machines with love,” says Charanjit Kohli, YoYotech’s managing director.
The i7 consists of four central processing units, or cores, working together. But it also supports “hyperthreading”: each core can, in effect, do two things at once, creating a virtual eight-core processor. Add a number of other advanced facilities, such as the ability to access the fastest type of memory directly rather than being routed through the motherboard, and you have a lump of silicon with the potential to shatter PC performance records.
First, Kohli’s team matched the i7 with range-topping PC components. On the motherboard sits 9GB of the fastest type of Ram and a powerful graphics card, the Radeon HD4870 X2. The Fi7epower comes with a terabyte (1,000GB) of hard-disk memory, but the operating software — the optimised, 64-bit version of Windows Vista — lives on a second, 80GB solid-state drive. This consists purely of electronic memory, so it doesn’t need to be spun up to speed or read by clumsy drive-heads. The result is a start-up time of mere seconds.
YoYotech then “overclocked" the i7. By varying the voltage of the processor’s power it coaxed the operating speed from the Intel-recommended 3.2GHz to 3.73GHz — any higher and the computer crashed. The team also housed the components in a Cooler Master case with three huge fans feeding in cold air.
In the esoteric world of super-fast PCs, the speed benchmark is the SPEC CPU2006 test, which involves repeating meaningless tasks, such as manipulating enormous graphics files, continuously for three days. When the results came in last month, the Fi7epower had racked up a CPU2006 score of 130. The previous record was 85.5.
In supercomputing terms it had run at 80GFLOPS, or 80 billion floating-point operations per second. That’s 320 times the speed of the world’s first supercomputer, the Cray-1 of 1976. It’s proof of Moore’s law, coined by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore: that computing power doubles every two years. If the law continues for five more years we’ll have computers capable of running simulations of the human brain.
The Fi7epower, however, is designed for more mundane applications: to process high-resolution graphics and to play games. Gamers will pay big money for the ability to increase frame rates by even a fraction, which means the gaming market bucks the prevailing trend in business computing, where the emphasis is on light, mobile machines.
“We’ve taken dozens of orders,” says Kohli, who starts shipping his machines in a few weeks’ time. “Amazingly, customers are asking us to add even more memory and a second graphics card.”
For the first time in the personal computing age, the power of consumer hardware has overtaken that of the machines in your office. “You could design, test and play games on this box in a way that has never before been possible,” says Kohli, as the soft red light emanating from the Fi7epower matches his unmistakable glow of pride.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle5207626.ece
YoYotech Fi7epower: the world's fastest PC
Gamers will love the Fi7epower, a £3,995 computer with a superfast processor, 9GB of Ram and powerful graphics
Where might you expect to find the world’s fastest PC? In the air-conditioned server room of a Silicon Valley tech company, perhaps, or cobbled together by boffins at a university?
The reality is different: in the showroom of an electronics store off the Tottenham Court Road in central London sits a glowing black monolithic machine, the YoYotech Fi7epower MLK1610. This desktop supercomputer, built by a small British company, is nearly twice as fast as the next most powerful PC in the world.
For £3,995 it is guaranteed to give you more computing power at home than you can access in your office. As the cost of PCs such as the Fi7epower fall, we can look forward to a world when, at least in terms of computing, it could be more efficient to work from home, and go to the office just to gossip and drink coffee.
The Fi7epower is the first computer to be built around a new Intel microprocessor, the Core i7. Remarkably, the computer giant chose a British custom PC manufacturer, YoYotech, to be among the first to receive its fastest chip.
YoYotech has a history of building speed-record-breaking desktop PCs, and Intel believed the company would construct a machine that would fulfil the potential of the i7. “I’d heard the Intel processor was about to be released because I keep my ear to the ground and Intel trusted us with some of their first units because they know we build our machines with love,” says Charanjit Kohli, YoYotech’s managing director.
The i7 consists of four central processing units, or cores, working together. But it also supports “hyperthreading”: each core can, in effect, do two things at once, creating a virtual eight-core processor. Add a number of other advanced facilities, such as the ability to access the fastest type of memory directly rather than being routed through the motherboard, and you have a lump of silicon with the potential to shatter PC performance records.
First, Kohli’s team matched the i7 with range-topping PC components. On the motherboard sits 9GB of the fastest type of Ram and a powerful graphics card, the Radeon HD4870 X2. The Fi7epower comes with a terabyte (1,000GB) of hard-disk memory, but the operating software — the optimised, 64-bit version of Windows Vista — lives on a second, 80GB solid-state drive. This consists purely of electronic memory, so it doesn’t need to be spun up to speed or read by clumsy drive-heads. The result is a start-up time of mere seconds.
YoYotech then “overclocked" the i7. By varying the voltage of the processor’s power it coaxed the operating speed from the Intel-recommended 3.2GHz to 3.73GHz — any higher and the computer crashed. The team also housed the components in a Cooler Master case with three huge fans feeding in cold air.
In the esoteric world of super-fast PCs, the speed benchmark is the SPEC CPU2006 test, which involves repeating meaningless tasks, such as manipulating enormous graphics files, continuously for three days. When the results came in last month, the Fi7epower had racked up a CPU2006 score of 130. The previous record was 85.5.
In supercomputing terms it had run at 80GFLOPS, or 80 billion floating-point operations per second. That’s 320 times the speed of the world’s first supercomputer, the Cray-1 of 1976. It’s proof of Moore’s law, coined by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore: that computing power doubles every two years. If the law continues for five more years we’ll have computers capable of running simulations of the human brain.
The Fi7epower, however, is designed for more mundane applications: to process high-resolution graphics and to play games. Gamers will pay big money for the ability to increase frame rates by even a fraction, which means the gaming market bucks the prevailing trend in business computing, where the emphasis is on light, mobile machines.
“We’ve taken dozens of orders,” says Kohli, who starts shipping his machines in a few weeks’ time. “Amazingly, customers are asking us to add even more memory and a second graphics card.”
For the first time in the personal computing age, the power of consumer hardware has overtaken that of the machines in your office. “You could design, test and play games on this box in a way that has never before been possible,” says Kohli, as the soft red light emanating from the Fi7epower matches his unmistakable glow of pride.
" mode!
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