Quad Core Chip Technology

In a cool new hi-tech exhibit “Creating the United States,” visitors can take a look at the proposed Bill of Rights and George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, which includes the first president’s notes on the debate during the Constitutional Convention.  Each document has a dedicated, interactive kiosk that allows students and researchers to closely examine the library’s treasures and to trace the origins of the country’s founding ideas. For example, they might learn that the Bill of Rights was initially created as a diversion to prevent the anti-Federalists from rehashing the entire Constitution.

The high-tech offerings are a big leap for the world’s largest library, which has sought to give visitors more ways to access its books, documents, audio and film resources. Interactive elements from the exhibit will also be available on the library’s new Web site.

The changes come as the library anticipates a surge in annual visitors when the underground Capitol Visitors Center opens in late 2008. The library will be connected to the visitors centre by tunnel, which could double or triple the library’s 1.4 million annual visitors, according to current estimates. Officials expect visitors to meander between the buildings as they wait for a tour of the Capitol.  The library has invested $23 million - all private funding - to create new exhibits as part of the Library of Congress Experience, including about $3 million in software and services from Microsoft Corp.

Technical advances at the library ultimately could include posting digital copies of entire books online, including volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s collection that served as the foundation for the Library of Congress.  The high-tech changes also come as the library opens a tribute to its roots. It is unveiling a re-creation of the original library from Jefferson, which is catalogued by subject areas - memory, reason and imagination - which Jefferson interpreted as history, philosophy and fine arts. He sold his 6,487 volumes to Congress for less than $24,000 in 1815 - a meagre sum even for that day, library experts said.

But most of Jefferson’s books were eventually lost. About two-thirds of the original collection was destroyed in an 1851 fire at the Capitol.  Rare book experts at the library, which holds 138 million items, have spent the last decade trying to piece the collection back together with copies of the books Jefferson prized. Many were found within the library’s vast collection, but the staff also travelled around the world to find copies. Out of the 4,000 volumes lost, about 300 copies are left to be found, said Mark Dimunation, chief of the library’s rare books and special collections division. Boxes on the shelves mark the spaces where books are missing. This type of exhibit really adds a lot to the desirability of young kids learning about U.S history.

These days flash memory rules: it’s small and rugged, and it keeps getting cheaper. But on the heels of flash comes faster, even more robust technology called phase-change memory, which is just starting to come out of the lab. Now Numonyx, a joint venture that combines the flash and phase-change memory efforts of Intel and STMicroelectronics, has officially launched its operations. In doing so, the company has taken a leading spot in the burgeoning phase-change memory industry. By the end of this year, Numonyx expects to commercialize phase-change memory, and by the middle of the next decade, the company hopes to make it increase its storage capacity to render it competitive with flash as a solid-state drive replacement.

Phase-change memory, which uses a glassy material, stores information via a change in its physical state, rather than using electrical charges, as in flash. A tiny electrode heats each memory cell; the cell’s state depends on the manner in which it is heated, and it subsequently represents either a 1 or a 0.

At a press conference in San Francisco on Monday, Brian Harrison, CEO of Numonyx, said that phase-change memory has all the benefits of NOR and NAND flash technologies. (NOR is used in cell phones to execute code, and NAND has been used as a storage memory.) For instance, said Harrison, phase-change memory can have data read from it quickly like NOR flash, and data can be written to it as quickly as in NAND flash. In addition, phase-change memory doesn’t wear out, losing bits of data over time, as flash memory does.

In the near term, phase-change memory could replace the expensive and energy-consuming random access memory in cell phones, and in a few more years, it could potentially become a cost-effective alternative to flash. A customer who uses a phone with phase-change memory might notice extended battery life, said Harrison. “Intel and STMicroelectronics have been working [together] on phase-change memory for more than five years,” he said. “We have a product today that we are sampling, and expect to bring it to market this year. Personally I can’t wait.

I was thinking back today about some of the first websites I created in 2001. I had some very unique and interesting ideas back then and one of my favourites, which I wish I still had today was RFIDStatus.com. Most people would think that it sold all types of fancy 2.4 GHz, ISO 15693 RFID hardware or something like that but actually it was a humor spoof site.

The idea was that you could track famous folks through special RFID components installed inside them without their knowledge.

My favourite was an animated GIF of Michael Moore, of Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11 fame. It portrayed him in his bathroom sitting on his knees playing with two action figures on top of the toilet, George Bush and Osama Bin Laden. The site now has just a page of giberrish up I wish I kept that one intact.

Check out this pre-cursor to the laptop.

Digi-Log Systems, Inc.  “Briefcase Portability” (1976)

Intel will increase its market share by the end of 2007 to 12.5 percent, keeping its place as the world’s top chipmaker, while rival Advanced Micro Devices will drop out of the top 10, research firm iSuppli predicted.

Samsung Electronics will remain the world’s second-biggest chipmaker with 7.4 percent of the market, while Toshiba will rise to third place, pushing Texas Instruments to number No. 4, iSuppli said.  Total semiconductor revenue is expected to reach $271 billion, up 4.1 percent from 2006. In September, iSuppli had said it expected the market to grow by 3.5 percent.

Sony has moved into eighth place from 14th in 2006 with a 57 percent increase in revenue, thanks to sales of chips for its PlayStation 3 game console. Toshiba’s higher revenue is also seen partly due to PlayStation 3 chip sales.  Infineon was expected to benefit from a booming market in mobile phones to rise to 10th place from 15th, thanks to its own strengthening wireless business.

Very cool laptop battery hack.

Laptop Battery Hack! Don’t Buy A New One! -

Video Conferencing and Webinars from MegaMeeting

The advance in the communication sphere have made it possible to communicate and develop projects online. This introduced a new word to modern English – a “webinar”. With the help of specialized software that enables you to hold an web meeting, web conference, VoIP real time audio and video communication and so on. What are the benefits of such a modern approach to business strategy and business process? What can the new conferencing software from MegaMeeting offer?

First of all, this all is real-time. No need to root in a long chain of emails, study the technical details of any kind of projects offline – you can discuss any tiny detail with a client online and suggest solutions and steps that are to be taken at once. Moreover, webinar software allows you to see your client or a co-worker and grasp mimics, mood – everything else that a face-to-face communication provides. You can install this desktop software wherever you want and let the webinar or files that have been transfered be hosted on your Linux server and start a web conference practically everywhere. It saves time and money – the communication through the Internet is considered the least expensive and more efficient than any other type of transmitting voice and video information. The best benefit of MegaMeeting webinar software is their flexibility and the possibility to share all the materials. File sharing saves you much time and energy with guaranteed secure webinar hosting on Linux powered servers. Additionally, our remote desktop control software allows you to operate any kind of information and restrict access to different users!

This quad core technology blog is being claimed at technorati.com

Technorati Profile

AMD has decided to take a small step back in the race for quad-core supremacy.  On Monday, AMD executives confirmed this weekend’s rumors and admitted that the company will indeed introduce a triple-core microprocessor sometime during the first quarter of 2008. “We believe that triple core is the right product at the right time to serve a broad swatch of market,” said AMD vice president Bob Brewer, at Monday’s briefing in San Francisco.

AMD stressed the update does not affect its planned launch date for a consumer-oriented quad-core chip, codenamed Phenom, which is slated for Q4 of this year.  According to AMD, the the tri-core processor makes sense from both a marketing and retail point of view. Due to the slow adoption rate of quad-core, as well as the lack of multi-threaded apps that take advantage of such processors, AMD is banking on the fact that a tri-core processor will offer desktop consumers an attractive middle-of-the-road option.

In particular, Brewer and other AMD executives cited a recent study from Mercury Research pointing out that quad-core processors represented less than two percent of desktop shipments during the second quarter, while dual-core took up the remaining 98 percent. Until demand ramps up for quad-core, triple core will serve as something of an intermediary, according to AMD. At the same time, the company hopes it will also stimulate broader multi-core adoption.

“We left the megahertz race for the core race,” said John Taylor, product communications director at AMD. “The sweet spot is now four (cores) and down … and there are a lot of scenarios where three cores outperforms dual core,” he said.

In terms of architecture, Brewer also confirmed on Monday that the yet-to-be named processor will basically be a quad-core processor with one core disabled, and that it will feature the company’s Direct Connect architecture, as well as a shared L3 cache, and other architectural selling points that Intel currently lacks.  “It’s simply a better intermediate step,” Brewer said, adding that triple core is about product management and design flexibility.

Conveniently enough, it’s also something AMD’s larger competitor, Intel, can’t do at the moment — or at least do well. “Do I rub my hands together a little about that fact? Sure,” said Brewer, “but ultimately this is about scaling.”

Another potential benefit Brookwood points to is production efficiency. If AMD finds it is having many of its quad-core Opteron processors coming off the production line with only three of the four cores fully functioning, then it can still market those as tri-core instead of chucking them into the trash can.

Of course, pricing will be crucial to the success or failure of AMD’s tri-core processors. On that topic, company executives wouldn’t comment other than to say that prices would be competitive.   They better, especially if Intel decides to drop the price of its quad-core processors to match or beat AMD tri-core chips.

Regardless of Intel’s reaction, AMD seems to be using its core strengths — namely, the five years of research and development that went into its Opteron line (formerly codenamed Barcelona) — to its advantage.  AMD executives promised last week that core features from the new quad-core architecture would trickle down to the consumer level. It’s now making good on that promise.  Sometimes slow-and-steady wins the race and it might be the case here.

That’s right. It’s time to clear the air: most people will not even slightly benefit from the quad-core monstrosity when it becomes available.

For those of you looking at upgrading, you may have yourself in a knot deciding when and what to purchase. There are now extremely fast and viciously-priced dual-core processors on the market — this is, ordinarily, a damn good thing. However, you seemingly can’t ignore the quad-core CPUs on the horizon coming from both AMD and Intel. Surely these upcoming beasts will make roadkill of the existing line?

My unconcealed answer is no. There’s an elephant disguised as a lampshade in this room and it stinks.

Above is a quote from an article in August of 2006 and it has been proven very, very wrong.  I think many techies are sick of having to upgrade every six months to keep up with the cpu curve but with faster cpu’s comes better and more useful software, so stop your whining and get with the program.