The last day of IDF is always reserved for the Intel technology research keynote. This keynote has nothing to do with product announcements, or roadmap updates for the next year, it's a look into the future 5 - 10 years from now.

And we're here live blogging it. The Justin Rattner keynote should get underway in about 10 minutes.

Intel is about to give us the first architectural details on its 4th generation Core processor microarchitecture, codename Haswell. Follow the live blog for full details as we get them!

Today we're trying out something new: a beta version of our new Live Blog engine. As long as WiFi and cellular networks cooperate, we'll be providing live coverage from the kickoff keynote at this year's Intel Developer Forum. 

Dadi Perlmutter is set to take the stage at 9AM PST. Today is going to be all about Haswell disclosures so expect to see some hints of it this morning, as well as more throughout the day.

Get ready, this is going to be a crazy week.

The market for network attached storage (NAS) devices has registered huge gains over the last few years. In keeping up with the market trends, the coverage of NAS units has also seen an uptick on AnandTech since the middle of 2010.  We strive to provide readers with comprehensive coverage and improve our reviews with the help of reader and industry feedback. Some of the aspects which are barely covered in most NAS reviews include the performance of the unit when accessed from multiple clients and performance degradation as the disks get filled up. Towards the end of 2011, we started evaluating approaches to cover these important aspects. The end result was a new NAS testbed.

Read on for details of our approach and build process. We will also have a sneak peek at what can be expected in the upcoming NAS reviews.

Most of the servers in the datacenter, especially the ones running virtualization, database, and some HPC applications, are more memory limited than anything else. There are several server memory options: UDIMMs, RDIMM, LRDIMMs, and even HCDIMMs. RDIMMs are the most commonly used. The LRDIMM in 2011 was the most popular high capacity variety, but only for those with huge budgets.

In our lab we have Supermicro's Twin 2U server (6027TR-D71FRF) from our Xeon E5 review and 16 Samsung LRDIMMs and RDIMMs. We felt that dense servers and high capacity memory made for an interesting combination that's worthy of investigation.

What is the situation now in 2012? Are LRDIMMs only an option for the happy few? Can a Twin node with high capacity make sense for virtualization loads? How much performance do you sacrifice when using LRDIMMs instead of RDIMMs? Does it pay off to use LRDIMMs and Supermicro's Twins? Can you get away with less memory? After all, modern hypervisor such as ESXi 5 have a lots of tricks up their sleeves to save memory. Even if you have less physical memory than allocated, chances are that your applications will still run fine. We measured bandwidth and latency, throughput and response times, scanned the market and performed a small TCO study to provide answers to the questions above.

Last November, we reviewed the Netgear NV+ v2 and came away quite satisfied with the price to performance ratio. However, we had some reservations about the absence of NFS and iSCSI (which happen to be staple features in offerings from other vendors in this particular segment of the market). The maturity of the platform was also a concern (since this was Netgear's first attempt at introducing a NAS based on an ARM chipset).

Netgear recently updated the firmware for the NV+ v2 and Duo v2 units. RAIDiator 5.3.5 added support for a number of new share management protocols including NFS. It also brought along a number of fixes. In the meanwhile, LaCie also contacted us about a firmware update improving RAID-1 performance in the 2big NAS that we reveiewd a couple of months back. Keeping these updates in mind, it is time to take another look at the 2-bay NAS units in our labs. Read on to find out whether the Netgear NV+ v2 has improved, and also a refresh of the benchmark figures for the LaCie 2big NAS.

It has been months since AMD's Bulldozer architecture surprised the hardware enthusiast community with performance all over the place. The opinions vary wildly from “server benchmarks are here, and they're a catastrophe” to “Best Server Processor of 2011”. The least you can say is that the new architecture's idiosyncrasies have stirred up a lot of dust.

Although there have been quite a few attempts to understand what Bulldozer is all about, we cannot help but feel that many questions are still unanswered. Since this architecture is the foundation of AMD's server, workstation, and notebook future (Trinity is based on an improved Bulldozer core called "Piledriver"), it is interesting enough to dig a little deeper. Did AMD take a wrong turn with this architecture? And if not, can the first implementation "Bulldozer" be fixed relatively easily?

We decided to delve deeper into the SAP and SPEC CPU2006 results, as well as profiling our own benchmarks. Using the profiling data and correlating it with what we know about AMD's Bulldozer and Intel's Sandy Bridge, we attempt to solve the puzzle.

The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) / SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) NAS market is a highly competitive one. We have been reviewing a number of ARM-based 2-bay / 4-bay NAS units over the last year or so. In addition, we have also looked at some x86-based high-end systems such as the LaCie 5Big Storage Server and the QNAP TS-659 Pro II.

On May 15th, LaCie launched an updated version of their 2big Network 2 2-bay product, the 2big NAS. The 2big NAS comes in diskless and 6TB versions, priced at $299.99 and $649.00 respectively. At this price point, the NAS competes with advanced 2-bay SMB solutions such as the Synology DS211+, and not the LG NAS N2A2 (which is geared primarily towards home users). Do the features and performance match up to the price point? Read on for our analysis and detailed review.