The build process and thermal performance of a fanless Ivy Bridge HTPC was covered in detail last month. I had indicated that the piece would be the first of a three-part HTPC series. Today, we are looking at the second part of the series. My original intention was to present the HTPC oriented benchmarks and aspects of the PC as it was built in the first part.

After a few experiments, we had to do some updates to the build in terms of both hardware and software (OS). Is Windows 8 a worthy upgrade for HTPC users? The second part of our HTPC series addresses that question and also provides some guidance to ensure that your Ivy Bridge HTPC performs to its full potential.

Over the years, we’ve seen many budget-oriented Acer offerings of one form or another. There have also been a few higher-end options, but for most of their products Acer has never quite managed to shake their budget-oriented feel. That changes today with one of the sleekest Ultrabooks to grace our test bench since Intel announced the platform two years back.

Acer’s third-generation Ultrabook leaves behind the S3 and S5 models of yesteryear and goes all-in on quality, with a 1080p IPS touch screen, Gorilla Glass 2 on the cover, and a sturdy yet extremely thin chassis that can lay claim to the title of “thinnest Ultrabook” for the time being. With some help from Windows 8, Acer has also managed to improve on boot times and you can be up in running in under 10 seconds flat. With all the good, however, you’re probably wondering if there’s a catch. There is, potentially, but it’s the same old concern we’ve raised before: cost. Read on to find out what we think about Acer’s S7 and whether it’s the right Ultrabook for you.

Late last month, Intel dropped by my office with a power engineer for a rare demonstration of its competitive position versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3 when it came to power consumption. Like most companies in the mobile space, Intel doesn't just rely on device level power testing to determine battery life. In order to ensure that its CPU, GPU, memory controller and even NAND are all as power efficient as possible, most companies will measure power consumption directly on a tablet or smartphone motherboard.

The process would be a piece of cake if you had measurement points already prepared on the board, but in most cases Intel (and its competitors) are taking apart a retail device and hunting for a way to measure CPU or GPU power. I described how it's done in the original article.

The previous article focused on an admittedly not too interesting comparison: Intel's Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail) versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3. After much pleading, Intel returned with two more tablets: a Dell XPS 10 using Qualcomm's APQ8060A SoC (dual-core 28nm Krait) and a Nexus 10 using Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual (dual-core 32nm Cortex A15). What was a walk in the park for Atom all of the sudden became much more challenging. Both of these SoCs are built on very modern, low power manufacturing processes and Intel no longer has a performance advantage compared to the Exynos 5.

Read on for our analysis.

The untold story of Intel's desktop (and notebook) CPU dominance after 2006 has nothing to do with novel new approaches to chip design or spending billions on keeping its army of fabs up to date. While both of those are critical components to the formula, its Intel's internal performance modeling team that plays a major role in providing targets for both the architects and fab engineers to hit. After losing face (and sales) to AMD's Athlon 64 in the early 2000s, Intel adopted a "no more surprises" policy. Intel would never again be caught off guard by a performance upset.

Over the past few years however the focus of meaningful performance has shifted. Just as important as absolute performance, is power consumption. Intel has been going through a slow waking up process over the past few years as it's been adapting to the new ultra mobile world. One of the first things to change however was the scope and focus of its internal performance modeling. User experience (quantified through high speed cameras mapping frame rates to user survey data) and power efficiency are now both incorporated into all architecture targets going forward. Building its next-generation CPU cores no longer means picking a SPECCPU performance target and working towards it, but delivering a certain user experience as well.

Intel's role in the industry has started to change. It worked very closely with Acer on bringing the W510, W700 and S7 to market. With Haswell, Intel will work even closer with its partners - going as far as to specify other, non-Intel components on the motherboard in pursuit of ultimate battery life. The pieces are beginning to fall into place, and if all goes according to Intel's plan we should start to see the fruits of its labor next year. The goal is to bring Core down to very low power levels, and to take Atom even lower. Don't underestimate the significance of Intel's 10W Ivy Bridge announcement. Although desktop and mobile Haswell will appear in mid to late Q2-2013, the exciting ultra mobile parts won't arrive until Q3. Intel's 10W Ivy Bridge will be responsible for at least bringing some more exciting form factors to market between now and then. While we're not exactly at Core-in-an-iPad level of integration, we are getting very close.

To kick off what is bound to be an exciting year, Intel made a couple of stops around the country showing off that even its existing architectures are quite power efficient. Intel carried around a pair of Windows tablets, wired up to measure power consumption at both the device and component level, to demonstrate what many of you will find obvious at this point: that Intel's 32nm Clover Trail is more power efficient than NVIDIA's Tegra 3.

Microsoft’s Windows 8/RT launch has been a bit choppier than expected. I remember hearing rumors that the OS release could slip into next year, but it seems that the solution to the problem was to launch as devices were ready rather than delay everything. Surface was among the first out of the gate, and I was generally pleased with the tablet, but Microsoft’s partner devices have been slower to release. ASUS held its VivoTab RT launch on the same day as Surface RT, but there were many key absences from the launch week in late October.

Among those missing from launch week were any x86 Windows 8 tablets. Although for most of the year Intel had been quite confident in its Windows 8 tablet story, the fact that I had to secretly borrow one just to get some rough performance numbers in our Surface RT story was a problem.

A little over a month later and things are beginning to change. Contrary to popular belief, driver problems aren’t what kept the first Atom Windows 8 tablets out of the market at launch. A bug (not related to power management) caught several months ago caused schedules to slip by about a month and a half. Depending on whose design the OEM followed (Intel’s or their own), the implementation of the fix could come quickly or would take a bit longer. In this case, Acer and Samsung found themselves on the right side of the fence. We’ve had Atom based Windows 8 tablets from both companies for weeks now.

Vivek is working on our review of the Samsung ATIV Smart PC, while I’ll kick things off with Acer’s Iconia W510. Read on.

Though mobile devices continue to consume more computing marketshare at the expense of traditional desktop PCs, phones and tablets, and to an extent even laptops, simply cannot compete with desktops for getting work done. Workstation productivity systems aren't particularly sexy like powerful gaming computers or svelte small form factors HTPCs, but very few people earn a living playing games or watching movies.

The systems outlined in this guide are built to produce, not to consume. Whether you're interested in producing and editing HD video content, prosumer-grade photography work, financial data analysis, scientific computing, or something else, you need a desktop computer. In this guide we outline three productivity machines at a range of prices, featuring the latest CPUs from both Intel and AMD.

There have been many interesting developments in the small form factor market segment since our last SFF buyer's guide. Specifically, current-generation Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs and AMD Trinity APUs use less power than their respective predecessors, and GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA are similarly less power hungry than last year's architectures. Using less electricity translates to emitting less heat, meaning small form factor systems are more viable than ever. Further, there are many new mini-ITX cases available to house the latest products from Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. In this guide we outline budget-friendly general use tiny desktops, a small file server, and svelte gaming systems.

When we reviewed Intel's SSD DC S3700 I started looking at consistency of IO latency, an area that Intel's latest controller specifically targeted for significant improvement. In our review of OCZ's Vector I took the same methodology and applied it to the current crop of high-end consumer drives. As I believe improving IO consistency is a good optimization practice for all SSDs, the hope is that we'll see improvements in this area on both client and enterprise focused drives.

In the comments thread for the Vector review, jwilliams4200 posted some very interesting data. The S3700 has 264GiB of NAND on-board but only exposes 186GiB of it (200GB advertised capacity) as user accessible storage, the rest is used as spare area to improve performance, consistency and endurance. Most client drives on the other hand only feature about 7% of their total NAND capacity set aside as spare area (256GiB of NAND, 238GiB of user storage). The obvious hypothesis is that a big part (if not all?) of the S3700's advantage in performance consistency is due to the large amount of spare area.

We've understood the relationship between spare area and write amplification for quite some time now. The real question is what's the relationship between spare area and IO latency/performance consistency.

To find out, I repeated jwilliams4200's tests. I took a bunch of 240/256GB drives and filled them to various percentages of their capacity, and performed our IO consistency test with an identical span of LBAs. The goal was to simulate worst case IO consistency while taking into account greater percentages of spare area. Read on for our analysis!