Category Archives: Hardware

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Five years of the iPhone

Computing

Sea change.

I bought mine on day 2, June 30, 2007, in the San Luis Obispo Apple Store for some $500. Ouch! But I consoled myself that, as a money manager it was both deductible, constituting research, and might actually be useful.

Today I use an iPhone 4S for all calls and have no landline at home.

That first iPhone was obvious; you know, like shorting builders’ stocks in 2007 or going long corporate debt when IBM’s was yielding 7% in 2008. There were lots of things it could not do. No camera, 2G only, no App Store, web apps only plus the few it came with. But look at the businesses it obsoleted over these past five years and others which will not be around five years hence:

  • RIMM
  • Nokia
  • Palm
  • Nintendo
  • Landline telephony
  • Hewlett Packard
  • Dell
  • DVDs and CDs
  • Garmin and TomTom GPS
  • Printed books and bookstores
  • Print manuals, flight maps, etc.
  • Point and shoot camera makers
  • Print news media
  • Print magazines
  • Apple’s own OS X, now very much in its last innings

Another in huge trouble is Microsoft, cursed with no credible offering, no attention span and no leadership.

At the same time, iOS created a huge raft of new businesses which did not exist before:

  • Independent software designers
  • Mobile games
  • Interactive advertising
  • Facebook – OK, not all change is good
  • Specialty medical and forensic tools
  • Hand held intelligent industrial inventory tools
  • Interactive video telephony
  • Broadband expansion
  • Mobile investing
  • GPS/war/traffic/weather systems
  • New CPU designs from the likes of ARM
  • 2 billion+ prospective new computer users who will go from abacus to iPhone overnight
  • 10 million making a poor living in China where before they made none

Sure, many of these were around earlier, but they scarcely moved the needle of any metric.

Because the iPhone not only changed how we communicate, while creating a new mobile computer, it gave Apple a five-year lead in touchscreen design with the iPad 1 three years ago. This is what poorly run businesses like HP and Microsoft fail to understand. Nothing about that iPad was rushed to market. By the time you could buy one in April 2009, the user interface had thousands of man years labour invested in it. It did not just happen, and iPad 1 must rank right up there with the Leica M3 (1954) as one of the most perfectly developed ‘Version 1’ models of any machine man has yet made. That iOS has worthy competition from a company which had never made a computer – Google – in the Android OS, is no surprise. By definition, GOOG’s thinking was out of the box. They had no blinkers to discard.

It’s common to see the iPhone and its OS referred to as ‘disruptive’. Wrong. A disruption is when you put down your tea to answer the door for the UPS man. The iPhone was both intensely destructive and creative at the same time. It is a tsunami device, not a storm in a teacup, and it created the world’s largest corporation, Apple, Inc.

The Leica M3, 1954. The previous occasion on which Version 1 was perfect.

The new Kindle – Part II

Hardware

Second try.

Kindle, iPad 1, MacBook Air.

I last wrote about the predecessor to this device a couple of years ago, having returned mine because the UI was about as bad as it gets. The keyboard was indistinguishable from a bilge pump. Both suck, and the page turn buttons on the long sides were way undersprung, so I was always turning pages unintentionally. It’s the only thing I recall returning – OK there was that awful 20mm Canon EF lens – in ages.

Well, the new one – mine is the bottom of the line $79 model – dispenses with 3G, being wi-fi only, and deletes the physical keyboard in exchange for a button-activated virtual on-screen version. An improvement from the execrable to the awful. This makes the device smaller and lighter, as it’s now down to 6 ounces, and the only time you really have to use the clunky keyboard is when first signing in to wi-fi. UK residents pay $138, 75% more, which will serve to remind them not to try and tax our tea ever again. Call it war reparations.

In the US, Amazon Prime members ($80 annually for 2 day UPS on almost everything, plus free movie rentals – recommended) can also get free access to all the Harry Potter books which is enough to make you want to cancel your Prime membership. Still, you don’t have to read this tripe and J K Rowling has no need of your filthy American money. They have enough worthless paper there already, not least in her interminable, glutinous prose-laden novels.

Such a deal.

This is actually a lending library, so I thought I would get off to a good start and borrowed Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short‘ because though I am tall I am also short, if you get my drift. Woo hoo, $9.99 saved already. (Lewis attended my alma mater Salomon Brothers. No, it’s not a Catholic school).

Why am I subjecting myself to this torture again? I want to spend some quality time with our son on the beach and as my earlier piece illustrates, the iPad is useless in direct sun, whereas the Kindle is useless everywhere else. Bright sun is a reasonable bet on California’s beaches, and the prospect of sitting there on me bum like a dope doing nothing would mean early insanity. Swimming? Excuse me, I would rather like to return home with at least two legs attached, rather than with one stashed in the belly of the local Jaws. We are talking Pacific Ocean, here, and those boys gotta eat. Now all I have to do is avoid the discarded hypodermic needles on the beach. So Kindle it is.

The device remains useless for viewing pictures. It automatically downloads software updates unprompted, and did so in my first 30 minutes of use. Nice, if accompanied by more flashing than your local member of Congress in the men’s room at the airport. Unlike your MacBook Pro, there is no telltale odor announcing the fact that you have just fricasséed your gonads, as the Kindle remains perfectly cool.

The weight is so low that it goes unnoticed, one hand operation is a non-event (page turn buttons are on both uprights) and the buttons need a far firmer push on this model, preventing accidental page turning. As before, it comes pre-registered to your customer name and account at Amazon – very nice. Best of all the gadget fits in the back pocket of your Levi 501 button-front jeans, the type Real Men wear, allowing you to do it justice when you next sit down in a forgetful moment.

Finally, not having email etc. means there is no distraction from the old guilt feeling when using an iPad that you have not checked email in the last five minutes or the markets in the last two seconds. That’s not all good, though. Germany loses at soccer, their Chancellor goes berserk and next thing you know the market is up 20% because she was seen making off to the Führer Bunker in the Chancellery with a loaded pistol and a cyanide capsule clenched in her teeth. Well, you will miss that joyous event in real-time if the Kindle is the only gadget you have with you at the time. I suppose there’s always the iPhone and a towel over your head for a quick trade or two while the waves roll in as you twiddle your toes in the sand and broken bourbon bottles.

The regular model is $109 and comes without home page ads; you can pay the extra $30 to remove these from the $79 version I bought, at any time. Smart pricing. These ads are referred to as ‘Special Offers’ which is rather like saying the IRS invites you to file an annual tax return. Your freedom of choice is identical. In practice the ads appear on the home page only and are unobtrusive. The first one I got was for diapers …. maybe condoms will be next? Battery life is claimed to be one month which is Kindlespeak for a week, I suppose. You recharge from any USB socket using the provided micro USB cable. Too bad it’s not mini USB – yet another thing to pack. Mine came 40% charged and was up to 100% in an hour using the MacBook Air as a power source, meaning it should recharge in about 3.5 seconds on a desktop machine. Switching wi-fi off is the best bet for battery life and trust me, only true masochists will keep it on for web surfing.

The Kindle continues to suffer from inept synchronization design. Amazon makes much of how a book read on one device, say an iPad, will be synced to the same location on any other, say a Kindle. They call it ‘Whispersync’ and I call it ‘Bollocks’. In practice if you choose to re-read a finished book, no matter which page you leave it at, all devices will think you are at the last page, and there is no ‘Reset’ button. Gee, how hard is that to do? The simplest fix I have found is described here and it works well. I reset my finished book on the MacBook Air, and then all other devices thought I was at the beginning, or whatever location I set it to on the MBA. No biggie, but really, Amazon!

And don’t ever dare hit a footnote reference because it’s back to Bollocksync and all your devices will once again be at the back of the book. Reminds me of my 10 years dealing with US Immigration. (OK Immigration and Naturalization, though there was nothing Natural about the methadone cases behind the counter). Any time you made an insignificant error on one of their interminable forms, it was back to the end of the line. About that time I recall entertaining serious thoughts about joining the Communist Party and lying on my application. I imagine they were running a pool to see who could accomplish this sadistic ‘back of the line’ trick most often. “Yo, Phil, I did sixteen today!” Once such victim in the line in front of me had a fully fledged nervous breakdown when this treatment was visited on her. Needless to add, she was French. I suspect the software designers at Kindle must be the same ones who work on Fuji cameras or INS forms. Neither ever uses what they create and sure as hell none of them are Americans.

There’s also a ‘Shop in Kindle Store’ option which is rather like asking an amputee to use chopsticks. Yup, that keyboard again. Buy your books using a Mac or iPad, then sync the device. Life is too short for the alternative. I challenge you to find the fiction work you want from the catalog of 504,779 titles and counting. This year’s US Budget will make it 504,780.

One special feature is the ability to rotate the screen orientation whereupon, in landscape mode, the device’s buttons take on all the utility value of a eunuch looking for a spot of fun in a harem. Don’t go there. (The landscape mode; the harem’s fine). However, in flipped portrait mode it works well, moving the button pad to the top. It’s not used when reading and the long, side-mounted page turn buttons fall more easily under the fingers. However owing to another bit of coding genius from the chaps at Amazon, the home page advertisements do not invert which is either wrong or inspired. Probably inspired, as the first ad I saw upside down was for AT&T proclaiming the might of its 4G cellular telephony. Upside down it looks more like 1/4G, which is about right.

Finally, there’s a web browser under the mysterious menu choice of ‘Experimental’. After personal discussions with Jeff Bezos, I can disclose here for the first time that Bezos took my comments to heart and that the choice is being renamed to “I just crapped my pants”. I know this as I just looked up this site using the Kindle after a few hours of virtual keyboard input, and it looked like s**t.

Use with cellular wi-fi? No problemo. My iPad has Verizon cellular (the working alternative to AT&T in the US; AT&T is like government – you pay and nothing happens); fire it up, switch on the personal hotspot on the iPad and login the Kindle after seventeen attempts using the virtual keyboard. Works perfectly. You even get that little symbol on the Kindle telling you that magic is happening and this is not your grandfather’s wifi. You know, the kind in every Dell computer.

Hemingway on the Kindle in the sun.
The ability to change font sizes is welcome.

More when I have got through some more Hemingway. But take it from me, this is very much a single purpose device, designed for reading in bright light only. No idea if it does Chinese. Fair bet it does. Anything else, fughedaboutit.

First field test results:

On the beach at Half Moon Bay

Battery life – update July 23, 2012:

I kept wifi off except for downloads, read seven full length books since I bought mine on June 28, and the battery was showing dead with wifi on and maybe 10% left with wifi off. So Amazon’s ‘four week battery life’ is more like three weeks as long as you leave wifi off, which is not so easy, as after switching it on for a download, you have to dig into the Settings menu to place the device in ‘Airplane Mode’ which is Amazonspeak for ‘wifi off’. A full recharge using the USB cable took 2 hours.

HP100 – keeping the i7 cool

Hackintosh

The optimum setting.

Computer builder FU Steve writes about overclocking, heat management and power supply selection:

* * * * *

Having had a few days to experiment with the Core i7-2600 Intel CPU in the HP100, replacing the excellent i5, I set about varying overclock settings to see where the sweet point lies for Thomas’s HP100 Hackintosh.

The willingness of these CPUs to be overclocked falls, like most populations, on a Bell curve. Most will go to some decent OC, some will not, some will be superstars.

From much of what I have read the stock 3.4GHz speed is easily increased to 4.4GHz (+29%) simply by changing one setting in BIOS, the frequency multiplier. Thereafter things get tricky.

Here are my findings with settings for a stable running CPU; Geekbench results are shown also:


Intel Core i7-2600K overclocking table.

As is clear, the law of diminishing returns kicks in rapidly beyond 4.4GHz with Thomas’s sample of the i7. Go from 4.4 to 4.5GHz, a barely noticeable 3% Geekbench increase, and the idle temperature rises 8F. Go to 4.6GHz, a further 3% Geekbench improvement, and the temperature jumps another 11F, or 19F warmer than at 4.4GHz. After that the temperature rise:speed trade-off worsens quickly. You have to start juicing the core voltages significantly, Bclck is maxed out at 1005, and heat skyrockets. This is not consonant with a long, hard-working life for the CPU which, at $280, is the costliest part in the computer case.

Vcore will be set by the BIOS to 1.36 volts if you leave that setting (in “Advanced Frequency Settings”) at ‘Auto’. However, for maximum stability, override the Auto setting and set it to 1.385 volts. The maximum permitted by Intel is 1.50 volts, so it’s not like you are over-stressing anything.

Optimal setting? 4.4gHz, Vcore 1.385 volts, all other variables at default, failsafe BIOS settings, aftermarket CPU cooler.

In high stress scenarios, such as ripping and compressing a movie file, you can add 70F to the core temperature, so at 4.4GHz the temperature rises to 169F. Intel publishes exhaustive technical data on its CPUs, and you can find the following table in its 2nd Gen Intel® Core™ Processor, LGA1155 Socket: Thermal Guide which makes for fascinating reading:

Thermal table for the 2nd generation Intel i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs.

The maximum power consumption of the desktop Core i7 is 95W, at which point Intel specifies a case temperature of 72.6C (162.7F). Case temperature (the outside of the CPU) is 22F lower than CPU core temperature (the inside), which is where the temperature sensors used by apps like Bresink’s Temperature Monitor (free download) reside. So Intel’s maximum of 162.7F becomes 184.7F as a safe limit temperature as reported by Temperature Monitor.

In the following 24 hour chart I show temperature for all the cores. The small spikes half way across are for Carbon Copy Cloner running overnight SSD and HDD back-up jobs at 2am and 3am. The peak here is 129F – no biggie. The massive spike at the end is where I used HandBrake to rip a 4gB DVD movie and compress the result to H264 format for playing on an AppleTV2. The process took all of 11 minutes, by the way, and as you can see from the data, all eight cores of the i7 were working hard. There were several LR4 and PS CS5 sessions in the 24 hour period illustrated, but they barely register any heat increase. This is a mighty testimony to the suitability of the HP100 for still picture processing.

24 hrs, concluding with a movie rip/compress.

Ambient temperature was 75F when ripping the movie. The Core temperature rises to 169F, 15.7F below the Intel recommended core maximum of 184.7F. That’s slim headroom, but very safe, owing to the variable speed fan fitted to the large Coolermaster 212 CPU cooler – all of $28 and the best money you can spend on your Hack. Ripping movies with the ineffectual stock Intel cooler is a bad idea. For that matter, ripping movies on any iMac or, worse, MacBook Pro or MacMini, where cooling is severely compromised in the interest of sexy looks on the sales floor, is a positively rotten idea. Hey, it’s your money but be warned. Other than the MacPro, Apple’s hardware is simply unsuited to prolonged movie processing.

Here then is how my Hackintosh HP100 is set with regard to CPU speed and cooling. I use an Antec Sonata III case with the stock 500 watt power supply and two 120mm case fans – these can be manually switched to H/M/L.

  • Rear case exhaust fan – L.
  • HDD case fan – M.
  • CPU 120mm fan – variable – attached to Coolermaster 212 CPU radiator. This fan spools up instantly when the CPU heats up.
  • Intel Core i7-2600K CPU – overclocked to 4.4GHz.
  • BIOS CPU warning set at 176F – this will flash the temperature display from Temperature Monitor in the menu bar.

If overclocking you should experiment with frequency multipliers. Assuming you are using an efficient aftermarket CPU cooler, start by taking the stock frequency multiplier setting of 34x to 38x for the i7, the maximum supported by Intel’s warranty. Then take it up in steps of 2x, doing a Geekbench and Cinebench GPU run each time. The former will report CPU speed, the latter measures GPU speed and is also a good stability test. Once you get a Kernel Panic (grey screen with warnings) in OS X you know you have reached the simple adjustment limit and need to revert to the last stable setting, and you are done.

A note on ambient temperature. My measurements disclose that a 2F rise in room temperature results in a 1F rise in idle CPU core temperature. The above movie rip/compress was at an ambient temperature of 75F. At 95F ambient (we get that a few days a year in the Bay Area, and have no air conditioning) that means the CPU will be 10F warmer, meaning a peak temperature of 179F when ripping/compressing a movie, still within the 184.7F safe limit.

Preliminary measurements on the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display disclose that this is an exceptionally hot running machine, probably owing to the over-spec’d display, something no one needs in a small 15″ screen. And it doesn’t even have a DVD drive. I dread to think what its temperature runs once you connect an external DVD burner for ripping movies.

Determining power supply needs:

It’s easy to overlook the need to correctly specify the power supply when building a high performance Hackintosh. There’s an excellent free calculator at Outervision Extreme where you simply input your components to determine the wattage needed. Not all watts are the same. A cheap PSU with light windings and chintzy transformer iron cores will overheat and compound heat management and stability issues. Good brands include Antec and Thermaltake. I have used both extensively with no issues and many builders to whom I have recommended these remain happy. Here’s my output after using that calculator:

The result suggests that HP100 is bumping up against its limits with its 500 watt PSU, and that a beefier power supply may be called for in the interests of cool running and stability. Mercifully, the upgrade involves a few screws and a couple of connectors, and less than $100. There is no beating stock PC parts for price and reliability.

* * * * *

Thank you, FU, for that timely update, coming on the heels of your sterling work (FU is English, after all!) on the recent HP100 CPU upgrade.

Microsoft Surface recycled

Hardware

More of the same.

Microsoft Surface was a visionary product from Redmond, a decade ago. A huge table-style touch screen allowed icons and elements to be moved around by touch, and the whole thing was just so tomorrow.

Of course it was so good that it had to die; Microsoft has long known how to kill a good thing. Though there are many brilliant, innovative thinkers at Microsoft, neither skill has been in abundant supply in the corner office, occupied by a doofus whose only claim to fame is that not even he has managed to screw up one of the world’s great annuities – Windows + Office. The only other product which has sold in volume in the Ballmer years is the Xbox360/Kinect, emphatically not a Microsoft invention, and one whose profitability is a rounding error, so brutal is price competition in the game console segment.

For a long while I have refrained from knocking Microsoft in this journal as it has just become sort of assumed that anything from Redmond would be a costly time sink, and why mock the afflicted? But Microsoft’s latest just begs for a thorough thrashing, which it is my pleasure to administer.

Doofus with his latest disaster.

I mean, goodness, must he really insist on demonstrating something he is clearly clueless about? Has no one at MSFT the courage to tell this emperor that he has no clothes? Imagine the management culture at a company which prohibits criticism.

You see, Surface is the name for MSFT’s new line of tablets. Yes, the same tablet which Doofus was knocking (in this case, knocking on) two years ago. That was just when MSFT’s previous tablet effort was scrapped. And there’s little reason to think that the new one will last any longer. Goodness, they couldn’t even make up a new name for the product.

Each iPad comes with bullet proof software, iOS, robustly interlinked Mail, Scheduling, Address Book, etc. through iCloud, and a vast ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of applications developed over many thousands of man-years.

Now look at MSFT’s offering. First they are offering the tablet with two completely different CPUs – ARM and Intel. Eh what? Lucky developers having to craft apps for that. Then they come with plain, touch or type keyboard covers. There are two sizes – 32 and 64gB. And while they are mum on cellular, you can bet they will have to offer at least two carriers in the US, in addition to wi-fi only. And of course they come with a stylus, presumably because the touch interface is so poor there is no alternative.

And this from a manufacturer whose experience in hardware is largely limited to making mice and has little skill in complex hardware supply chain management.

Oops, did I mention applications? Ummm, no, there are none as of the time of writing.

Worst of all, the Surface Mk.2 runs Windows. Two different versions, no less. That spells DOA to me. And by the time these things hit the stores, if they ever do, iPad4 will have been released, instantly obsoleting whatever claims to currency Surface2 may have made.

So thanks, Microsoft, for reinforcing my disgust in you and confirming my decade old decision never to touch one of your foul products again. Apple may make mediocre, overpriced PC and laptop hardware, but OS X and iOS are robust as they come, the iPad is insanely great, and the whole ecosystem linking the two hardware platforms is not something that the dysfunctional corner suite in Redmond is remotely capable of disciplining into a functional whole.

Kudos to Bill Gates, however. He got out at the top and is doing truly wonderful things with his fortune. I would prefer to see a fool like Ballmer running MSFT into the ground than have Gates return and leave behind his groundbreaking philanthropic work. The only thing which mystifies is that Gates allows this Boob to continue running the business.

A little more speed for the HP100

Hackintosh

A little tweak ….

The other day the Hackintosh HP100 got a nice performance boost when the boot+applications SSD was upgraded from SATA2 to SATA3. Fast disk I/O is essential for best Lightroom and Photoshop performance. Now it’s the CPU’s turn.

Geekbench is a test of CPU speed. It’s a simple and quick comparator of great use to photographers as apps like Photoshop and Lightroom are far more dependent on CPU speed than on the latest in GPUs. Little is to be gained, data suggest, from using a high-end gaming GPU.

Cinebench framing rates are a measure of GPU speed. My Hackintosh HP100 (Sandy Bridge Core i5, 16gB RAM) uses a three year old, low power draw, Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU, yet returns a very high Cinebench framing rate.

One of the beauties of the Sandy Bridge and later Ivy Bridge CPUs is that overclocking is trivially simple, unless you go crazy. Clock speed is a near-linear indicator of effective speed for like CPUs. Double the clock speed and you should see an almost identical change in the Geebench score. In summary, the Sandy Bridge i5-2500K overclocks from 3.3gHz stock to 4.4gHz with one key entry in the BIOS. The i7-2600K goes from 3.4gHz to 4.5gHz for the same effort. As long as you dispense with the inept stock Intel fan and fit a Coolermaster 212 ($27) or similar, you will be thermally protected. Further, the BIOS has many failsafes to turn things off if heat rises too much.

I have been running my Sandy Bridge i5 at 4.0gHz since inception, or 21% over the 3.3gHz stock, but the new Geekbench Ivy Bridge data for the just released MacBook Pros spurred me to action. Here are those data:

Meanwhile, HP100, perking along at 4.0gHz, records the following in Geekbench 64:

Actual speed with several apps running. 4.0gHz is correct, GB states it incorrectly.

Hmmm. Not good enough, even if my environment measures ‘real world’ results with Mail, Finder, Safari, Firefox, etc. running. You can also bet that the above MacPro data are in an ideal setting with no other apps running. That’s how Apple does data.

So I hopped into the BIOS on the Gigabyte motherboard, changed the ‘Frequency Multiplier’ from 40x to 44x, meaning the clock speed is now 4.4gHz, and restarted. Two minutes later I had the following result:

Core i5 Sandy Bridge at 4.4gHz. 42% faster than stock.

That’s more like it. A 10% clock frequency increase realizes a 9.4% CPU speed gain, and equalling the fastest, latest and greatest from Apple, at no incremental cost to me.

Heat, that bugbear of all computers, remains unchanged.

Temperature graph at 4.4gHz.

The above graph reports the temperature of the four CPU cores from restart. The usual start-up spike quickly disappears to settle at 109F, indistinguishable from the reading at 4.0gHz. The CPU cooler is set in BIOS as a variable speed device, meaning it cranks up only when needed. It sounds just a little louder than at 4.0, meaning it’s working harder but just as effectively. On the other hand, when I was running this test, ambient temperature was a high 85F (we have no air conditioning as it rarely gets that warm in the SF Bay Area) so there’s little to worry about. Things can only get cooler on regular days. The spike toward the right results from starting Lightroom 4. Starting Photoshop CS5 does not make any discernible difference. I have had no stability issues so far.

The Cinebench tests for GPU speed are outstanding. Brown (#5) is for HP100 at 4.0gHz, Orange (#4) is at 4.4gHz (not 4.0 as shown) – 13.3% faster. The highest reading here (#1) is for a Xeon equipped machine with a high end gaming GPU – meaning $1,400 more for the CPU and $1,300 more for the GPU – for a 25% speed increase. Goodness, the all in cost of HP100 is less than one of those components! And PS and LR do a very poor job of multi-threading so a 12 thread CPU is money wasted. Those economics do not solve for me nor does any photographer need to spend that sort of money. #3 is for HP100 running at stock GPU speed but with all other apps closed – hardly realistic, but impressive if you are a marketer. Marketing, after all, is lying for a living.

GPU results from Cinebench.

And when Apple gets faster, you can bet on one thing. With a tweak or two, HP100 will be right there at very little or zero cost.

Looking forward:

If you accept that CPU speed increases are leveling off, and that the focus will increasingly be on lowering power consumption, then simply dropping an i7 in place of the i5 will yield a 25-30% speed increase, for a net upgrade cost of maybe $150 after reselling your i5. I doubt Intel will be able to increase its CPUs’ speeds by more than 5% annually henceforth.

GPUs are already so far ahead of anything photographers need that spending lavishly here makes little sense. Any conceivable pixel density is already supported.

In the case of both, Adobe’s software is a long way behind what the hardware can do. Poor use of multi-core, multi-threading technologies means that far greater gains are to be had from software design than from hardware upgrades. Lightroom, in particular, is showing massive code bloat, with no improvement in operating speed. LR4 is some ten times the size of LR3.

The next frontier is peripheral I/O, where Intel’s LightPeak (we keep hearing that Apple’s Thunderbolt is the latest invention from Cupertino, when in reality it is simply LightPeak on which Apple’s 1 year wasted exclusive has now expired). LightPeak promises disk read/writes ten time faster than USB2, maybe three times faster than USB3. Whether it succeeds like USB2 did, or fails like Firewire has, remains to be seen. Very slow adoption is not encouraging, and I suspect it’s simply not a mass-market selling point. External drives are hardly the norm in the average home. If it does succeed, you can bet cheap PCIe cards will become available and that photographers’ Hackintoshes will be adding these for a few dollars.

Update:

As I’m not about to be beaten by Apple’s poor hardware, I set about adding a little more fire to the pot by tweaking the i5’s frequency multiplier from 44x to 45x, for a CPU frequency of 4.5gHz, and increased the VCore voltage to 1.385volts for stability. Nothing else was changed. System ambient temperature remains at 113F (45C) and is stable. At stock VCore it kernel panics. Intel specifies the maximum safe VCore at 1.52 volts so it’s not like I’m really puashing it here. This is the result – faster than the Core i7 in the fastest MacBook Pro:

Intel Core i5 – 2500K at 4.5gHz CPU speed.
1.4% faster than the fastest MacBook Pro, with more to come.

Cinebench GPU data remain unchanged.

I have shutdown failsafes in the BIOS set at a CPU temperature of 176F (190F is the danger point for the i5 2500K) so everything remains conservatively specified.
These data suggest that a modestly overclocked i7 – 2600K Sandy Bridge should be good for 16,000 or more. But you do need proper cooling to do this sort of thing, not Intel’s stock cooler.

The Z68 chipset on the motherboard does not work happily with OS 10.7.4, and while there are workarounds, it’s not worth the effort. (It slows to a crawl). H67 and P67 chipsets have no issues with 10.7.4. So on the HP100 I’m sticking with 10.7.3 for now. Only P and Z motherboards support overclocking.

Another 25% in speed?

Sure. Get a Core i7-2600k. Look here.