We have spent 3 months testing a new version of Video Management System from our video surveillance technology supplier ACTI in Taipei and we believe to have mastered all its new features over the previous version.  The previous version is 2.3 and the new version is 3.0.0.1.24 as tested.  The new server application has 30MB of footprint and we tested it under Windows 7 Professional 64bit. The Workstation Client requires 89MB minimum storage area.  Web Client for live views does not require anything other than IE9 browser. 

We have installed v2.3 for all projects up to Q4 2012 and we will continue to maintain v2.3 for them.  We will start installing v3.0 for projects acquired from now on.   The new version supports all models of ACTI cameras whereas v2.3 may not support camera models released later than v3.0. 

(Hove Mouse over to enlarge)

Apart from a new graphical user interface which is more efficient and nice to look at (see Slide 1) and being faster in responding to user requests, the new version introduces these new capabilities:

o Display the live views of 64 cameras on one screen obviously with smaller window size for each (see Slide 2 for 16 cameras)

o Play back any one of the cameras that is on live view when prompted by the user (see Slide 3)

o Play back up to 64 cameras simultaneously

o Record with low frame rate for no events and higher frame rate when event is detected as an option to motion detection recording

o Support Microsoft Active Directory® service to provide a more convenient choice for user management

Limitations

o Does not support multicast
o Web client live view is not always stable- version 3.1 will fix this issue

END

SSD (Solid State Drive) as a technology for mass storage use has been under development for 40 years.   It has been discussed widely in the industry for mainstream use within the last 4 years and taken up by Compucon New Zealand for less than 14 months.  This timeline indicates SSD has made a lot of progresses and this article attempts to explain its status as in year 2012 and beyond.

HDD (Hard Disk Drive) has stayed on Winchester technology invented by IBM for about 40 years as well. Its main developments are in storage size and production cost but not in performance.  We are seeing 4TB from a SATA HDD for a retail price of a few hundred NZD only. 

These 2 strengths of HDD (large storage size and low price) happen to be the 2 weaknesses of SSD and the major weakness of HDD (low performance) happens to be the strength of SSD.  SSD has 2 more weaknesses (in reliability and lifespan) than HDD. 

In brief, HDD is based on rotating disk with magnetism for storage and SSD is based on a type of memory called NAND flash that is stationary and uses voltage for storage.   There are 2 ways of storage in NAND flash cells- SLC for single level cell and MLC for multi level cell. SLC refers to one bit per cell and MLC refers to 2 bits per cell.  SLC is more expensive, more reliable, and has a longer lifespan than MLC.  Since MLC SSD is already much more (over 10 times) expensive than HDD, SLC SSD is only used in top end applications and is not for the mainstream. 

(Hover Mouse Over to Enlarge)

A new technology company turned up on the horizon and invented a few technologies on SSD called RAISE (see slide 1), Compression, and Zero Over-Provisioning which were detected on Compucon radars within the last 14 months.  These proprietary technologies have made SSD less expensive, more reliable, lasts longer (see slide 3), and further faster.  The advent of SAS600 or SATA 6Gb/s interface has helped release the full performance potential of SSD (see slide 2).  We are seeing SSD with a continuous Read speed of 550MB/s and continuous Write speed of 530MB/s.  Both speeds are above the last generation interface technology of SATA 3Gbps.  HDD is staying below 3Gbps at present unless RAID is applied. 

Whilst HDD vendors have consolidated into 2 major brands virtually forming a duopoly, many SSD vendors have appeared on the horizon and trying to turn the wave of fortune towards them.  Seagate is a major HDD vendor and they have attempted to join SSD by producing HDD models incorporating several GB of NAND cache additional to the original MB of memory cache inside the HDD enclosure.   According to performance benchmark test results, these hybrid HDD models are no where near SSD. 

It appears that we have to deploy SSD in reasonable storage size such as 128GB and more since size likes 8GB has not shown to be meaningful.   As of 2012, Compucon is promoting SSD for 3 uses.  The first is as the Boot Drive containing all applications leaving HDD for data storage.  The second is as the Cache for HDD RAID sets (this is the topic of a separate article).  The third is tiered storage for large businesses (again a separate article). 

Beyond 2012 are PCI SSD Drive and Enterprise MLC.  Wait for these new articles. 

SSD (Solid State Drive) as a technology for mass storage use has been under development for 40 years.   It has been discussed widely in the industry for mainstream use within the last 4 years and taken up by Compucon New Zealand for less than 14 months.  This timeline indicates SSD has made a lot of progresses and this article attempts to explain its status as in year 2012 and beyond.

HDD (Hard Disk Drive) has stayed on Winchester technology invented by IBM for about 40 years as well. Its main developments are in storage size and production cost but not in performance.  We are seeing 4TB from a SATA HDD for a retail price of a few hundred NZD only. 

These 2 strengths of HDD (large storage size and low price) happen to be the 2 weaknesses of SSD and the major weakness of HDD (low performance) happens to be the strength of SSD.  SSD has 2 more weaknesses (in reliability and lifespan) than HDD. 

In brief, HDD is based on rotating disk with magnetism for storage and SSD is based on a type of memory called NAND flash that is stationary and uses voltage for storage.   There are 2 ways of storage in NAND flash cells- SLC for single level cell and MLC for multi level cell. SLC refers to one bit per cell and MLC refers to 2 bits per cell.  SLC is more expensive, more reliable, and has a longer lifespan than MLC.  Since MLC SSD is already much more (over 10 times) expensive than HDD, SLC SSD is only used in top end applications and is not for the mainstream. 

(Hover Mouse Over to Enlarge)

A new technology company turned up on the horizon and invented a few technologies on SSD called RAISE (see slide 1), Compression, and Zero Over-Provisioning which were detected on Compucon radars within the last 14 months.  These proprietary technologies have made SSD less expensive, more reliable, lasts longer (see slide 3), and further faster.  The advent of SAS600 or SATA 6Gb/s interface has helped release the full performance potential of SSD (see slide 2).  We are seeing SSD with a continuous Read speed of 550MB/s and continuous Write speed of 530MB/s.  Both speeds are above the last generation interface technology of SATA 3Gbps.  HDD is staying below 3Gbps at present unless RAID is applied. 

Whilst HDD vendors have consolidated into 2 major brands virtually forming a duopoly, many SSD vendors have appeared on the horizon and trying to turn the wave of fortune towards them.  Seagate is a major HDD vendor and they have attempted to join SSD by producing HDD models incorporating several GB of NAND cache additional to the original MB of memory cache inside the HDD enclosure.   According to performance benchmark test results, these hybrid HDD models are no where near SSD. 

It appears that we have to deploy SSD in reasonable storage size such as 128GB and more since size likes 8GB has not shown to be meaningful.   As of 2012, Compucon is promoting SSD for 3 uses.  The first is as the Boot Drive containing all applications leaving HDD for data storage.  The second is as the Cache for HDD RAID sets (this is the topic of a separate article).  The third is tiered storage for large businesses (again a separate article). 

Beyond 2012 are PCI SSD Drive and Enterprise MLC.  Wait for these new articles. 

Compucon Thunderbird, a desktop computer model based on AMD processor, will evolve to A85X in November 2012.  This article explains what A85X is about, what the performance we can expect from it, how it compares with its preceding version and contemporary competitions, and why we should choose this model in lieu of others.

A85X is the name of the chipset announced by AMD to support the fastest APU (accelerated processing unit) A10-5700 and A10-5800K.  Compucon Thunderbird will go with A10-5800K and so we will explain about A10 first.

A10 is the 2nd generation APU.  It has 4 CPU cores and 380 streaming cores.  The counts are not impressive at all as the 1st generation A8-3850 APU contains 4 CPU cores and 400 streaming cores.  On this occasion, AMD improves on frequency and algorithm.  A8-3850 has a base frequency of 2.9GHz whereas A10-5800K has 3.8GHz base and 4.2GHz turbo among other improvements.  Various online test reports have said the new APU is faster than the previous APU by about 20% in practically all respects.

How does the new APU compare to Intel 2nd (Sandy Bridge) and 3rd generation (Ivy Bridge) Core processors?  We have reduced various online test report findings or comments to focus on direct comparison with Core i3-3220 which is a 3rd generation Core processor from Intel released quite recently.  We have also reduced various online test report results to 3 charts as shown here. 

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The first 2 charts were reproduced from www.techspot.com and they show the time taken to finish an Excel spreadsheet computation task and a Photoshop processing task respectively- the shorter the better.  A10 is 5% slower than i3 and 30% faster than A8 on Excel tests, but it is 16% faster than i3 and 39% faster than A8 on Photoshop tests.  The 3rd chart was reproduced from www.anandtech.com.  It shows the test results of running a Microsoft sample application on DirectX 11.  A10 is double the performance of i3 and 3 times the performance of A8.  In a nutshell, A10 is average in computational performance (Core i3 class) but excels in graphics performance (better than Core i3, i5 and i7 classes).  When stock is available, we expect Thunderbird A85X system price to be similar to Diamond Plus with Core i3-3220. 

How does this new APU compare with non-APU CPU from AMD?  We ask this question because Thunderbird uses 6-core FX6100 CPU in the interval of transitioning from A8 to A10 (July to October 2012).  We could not do any benchmark testing ourselves and have not found any online.  Therefore we can only express the sentiment that whilst A10 may not be as good in computational performance as FX6100 when all cores are used, A10 will excel in 2 other aspects- graphics and other features.

A10 provides 3 graphics display ports: VGA, DVI and HDMI, and an Eyefinity technology which allows Windows 8 display to span across 3 monitors without using a discrete graphics card. 

Other features include 8 SATA600 ports (1 of which is external), 2 USB3 ports, and a PCIe slot for a discrete graphics card for Dual Graphics as provided for by A85X chipset.  This new model also provides 4 DIMM slot whereas the transitional model provides 2 DIMM slots only.   The positioning of this new model is now clear.  Please raise any question you may have to the Compucon team and we will respond ASAP. 

Contact Us to Enquire about this System