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Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition and Athlon II X2 250 target the mainstream

AMD’s Athlon II CPU die

Intel and AMD have both been touting their capabilities in the multi-core race. Each semiconductor company has been showing four core, six core, and even eight core CPUs in their bids to impress the buying public. Decreased manufacturing costs due to smaller process geometries means that they can make these multi-core CPUs cheaply, but still charge large markups for these extra cores.

Unfortunately, Windows XP and Windows Vista don’t handle all these cores efficiently. Most software is still single-threaded, which means often means that only two or three cores are fully utilized, if that. Multi-threaded games and software that is designed for four or more cores is on its way, but right now dual core processors are the way to go for most users.

This has been reflected in each company’s sales strategies and their successes. Although Intel talks a lot about quad-core CPUs, over eighty percent of Intel’s sales are dual core or single core CPUs. AMD, on the other hand, has bet heavily on quad-core CPUs with the original Phenom launch and now the Phenom II series of CPUs. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel’s Core 2 Duo lineup is still incredibly popular, as consumers are choosing higher-clocked dual core CPUs versus AMD’s quad-cores.

AMD has been working hard on their 45nm Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) transition, and they are now ready to take on Intel in the mainstream dual core marketplace. AMD is launching two new Phenom II X2 dual core processors, as well as a more affordable Athlon II X2 dual core processor.

The AMD Athlon II X2 250 has two cores running at 3GHz with a 65W Thermal Design Power (TDP), a reduction of 30W from the Athlon X2 CPUs built on the 65nm process. It has 2MB of L2 cache, but will not have any L3 cache in order to differentiate it from the Phenom II X2 CPUs. It is manufactured using the AM3 package and designed for DDR3, but will use AM2+ motherboards with DDR2. Memory support includes DDR2 DIMMs up to 800MHz (PC2-6400) and DDR3 DIMMS up to 1066MHz (PC3-8500). AMD did this specifically to reduce the upgrade costs for its customers who don’t want to change their platform completely. All that is needed is a BIOS upgrade from the motherboard manufacturer.

The Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition runs at 3.1GHz, but the multiplier is unlocked. Each core will have 512KB of L2 cache, but will have access to a large L3 cache. It will have an 80W TDP and use the AM3 socket. A Phenom II X2 545 clocked at 3GHz is supposed to come later with a 65W TDP. Both will support DDR2 DIMMs up to 1066MHz (PC2-8500) and DDR3 DIMMS up to 1333MHz (PC3-10600).

Key to AMD’s success will be pricing and positioning. Instead of going for Intel’s high end dual core processors such as the top selling Core 2 Duo E8400, AMD is positioning the Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition at $102 against the Intel Core 2 Duo E7400. Likewise, the Athlon II X2 250 will be priced at $87, against the Core 2 Duo E5400 at $113.

Higher end models such as the Phenom II X3 720 at $125 and the Phenom II X4 810 at $175 will continue to compete against Intel’s high-end dual core CPUS such as the Core 2 Duo E8400, which sells for $163.

All prices listed are either MSRP or OEM pricing. Street prices at retail stores and at online e-tailers are likely to be lower.

Source: Dailytech.com

AMD beat its time to market estimates for “Istanbul”

The sluggish global economy has meant that not only were consumer computer sales down, but sales in the enterprise computing space for servers and data center computers were down significantly as well. The only thing for chipmakers like AMD and Intel to move ahead with new processors that offer more performance with power savings that help offset the cost of upgrading to new hardware.

Last week, Intel previewed its 8-core Nehalem EX server CPUs set to launch in the second half of 2009. AMD is now hitting the market with its new high-end 6-core x86 server processors codenamed Istanbul. The Istanbul Opteron processor is aimed at server markets with four or more sockets. AMD points out that the Istanbul processors are ready to go now, months before Intel is expected to begin shipping its Nehalem EX CPUs.

AMD’s Istanbul CPUs are expected to start shipping this week and many of the top OEMs will be rolling out server systems powered by Istanbul processors. AMD was able to beat its original time to market estimation for Istanbul, something that will go a long way towards erasing memories of the troubled launch of the AMD Barcelona line of processors.

AMD reports that the Istanbul processors will give users a 30% increase in performance per watt with an overall performance improvement of 40 to 50% all within the same price and thermal envelope of its predecessor.

The Istanbul processors also come with other new technologies like HT Assist. AMD’s John Fruehe wrote in a blog post, “[HT Assist] can give you much better throughput over the HyperTransport technology connections by reducing the amount of traffic generated by the processors in seeking the shortest path to data that they need.”

HT Assist is a feature eWeek reports will make servers using the new technology more appealing to companies in the high performance computing space.

Analyst John Spooner from Technology Business research said, “The trend we’re seeing is that there is a certain percentage of customers who are looking to scale down from a RISC/Itanium/mainframe-type machines to the high end of the x86 market. These customers are moving into top-of-the-line four-way and higher x86 servers.”

Source: Dailytech.com

Intel has released some details of the next-generation Atom platform, code-named Pine Trail.

One of the most interesting revelation (apart from the late 2009 launch date) is that Intel is packing more into the CPU (code-named Pineview). The Pineview CPU will incorporate both the GPU and memory controller onto the CPU, which means that the number of chips on a Pine Trail board will go from three (CPU, a GPU/memory controller chip and I/O chip) for Atom to two (CPU/GPU/memory controller chip and an I/O chip) on Pine Trail. This means that Pine Trail will not only cheaper to produce and assemble, but also more power efficient. This means longer battery life for netbooks and less heat to dissipate for nettop devices. The Pineview CPU is, as expected, a 45nm part.

Where’s Intel going with this? Well, it’s clear that this competes directly with NVIDIA’s Ion platform. Ion will have more power, but Pine Trail will be more power efficient and also cheaper.

This sounds like a very interesting platform.

Source: zdnet.com

Smaller transistors mean lower prices are coming

Samsung Electronics has announced that it is shipping its 32GB moviNAND embedded memory card, built using a 30nm-class NAND manufacturing process. High density embedded memory cards are used to improve the performance of high-end multimedia phones and other mobile consumer electronics, especially when processing and storing large amounts of multimedia content such as videos, video games, and TV broadcasts.

Samsung is the world’s largest producer of NAND flash, accounting for approximately forty percent of global NAND production. Unfortunately, this means that open standards can easily be ignored in favor of their own proprietary solutions.

The proprietary moviNAND embedded memory card uses eight 32Gb NAND chips together with a multimedia card controller and specialized firmware to create a 32GB device. It is also available in 16GB, 8GB, and 4GB capacities.

While Samsung claims that its 32Gb chips are built around a 30nm-class process, they declined to disclose specifics. DailyTech previously reported that Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk were preparing for 32nm NAND flash production. Samsung has now stepped ahead of most of the industry and its competitors.

However, IM Flash Technologies, an Intel joint venture with Micron, has been ramping up 34nm NAND flash production since November of last year, mostly for use in the embedded market. Intel is expected to use 34nm NAND flash chips in new SSD models to be introduced later this year.

Although it will take some time to ramp up to full production, eventually these new NAND chips from Samsung will find their way into other products such as netbooks, music players, digital cameras, SD cards, and SSDs, enabling higher densities and lower prices for consumers.

For example, OCZ Technology uses Samsung NAND flash in most of its SSD products, and will integrate it along with a Samsung flash controller in its new Summit series of performance SSDs.

Source: Dailytech.com

Prior to this application, there were several attempts at making WM 6.1 to work with Facebook. Sadly, most applications break and were highly unstable causing lots of frustrations. Therefore, users had to rely on opera to access mobile Facebook webpages which have very limited functionality.

Just recently, Microsoft released a Facebook application which is available in the “App store” of the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5. Although this application is designed for WM 6.5, it works perfectly on WM 6.1 devices. It provides the users with options to upload pictures and videos from the mobile phone (unlike previously) and it allows seemless surfing one’s Facebook account. Below are just a few screenshots of the Facebook application.

You can download the Facebook Application here. To install it, just upload the .cab file into your internal storage and run it in your mobile phone. When the installation finishes, remember to do a soft-reset. The initial loading of the Facebook application will be slow due to the caching process that is taking place in the background. Have fun with this application! Something that lots of WM users like me are waiting anxiously for!

Download app here

If you happen to have a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone, you would have realized how bad the memory leakage problem is. Prior to this application (which I will introduce in a while), one will either have to soft-reset their WM phone every few/several days or to use a less-superior memory release program. The former is not a solution at all and the later does not release the correct amount of memory loss due to leakage (at least not on my HTC Touch Diamond).

Hence, CleanRam v1.1.8 (by HTC Addicts) is a God-sent to most WM users facing this memory leak problem. Gone will be the days where memory leak will creep and lag your phones. So far, I managed to keep my memory utilization to less than 60% (4th day now) by using this application. And it’s quite easy to use too!

To install this application,

1. Download the zip file and unzip the contents to your device memory.
2. Install the .cab file (preferably in your phone memory and not your external card).
3. To run the program, go to your program folder to run either cleanRAM or cleanRAM config. The former is the program to free your ram while the later is the configuration program for cleanRAM.

There are a few options on how deep you want cleanRAM to access your device. The higher the level chosen, the deeper the memory fix will be and more memory will be released/freed. The downside is that the more memory it cleans, the longer it takes for the process to complete. But from experience, it doesn’t take that long to fully clean your device memory on a HTC Diamond.
Although this is just a workaround of the real problem, I hope the memory leak issue is dealt with in the next version of Windows Mobile 6.5.

You can download the program from here.

While there’s no doubt that Intel’s Core i7 CPUs lead the field when it comes to performance, that power comes at a price. Performance enthusiasts on a budget have been patiently waiting for the cheaper Nehalem derivative Core i5 pieces to be officially announced.

The Core i5 (codenamed Lynnfield) is basically a Core i7 part with the third memory channel removed and the QuickPath interconnect dumped and replaced by a cheaper Direct Media Interface. These parts aren’t far off now given that we saw plenty of P55 chipset motherboards (which feature the LGA1156 socket) at CeBit this year but Intel is still tight-lipped. However, tech site HKEPC has what is claimed to be speeds and pricing for the first batch of Core i5 processors.

There’s three pieces listed:

• 2.66GHz, $196
• 2.80GHz, $284
• 2.93GHz, $562

For comparison, the Core i7 920 which ticks along at 2.66GHz retails for about $290 while the 2.93GHz 940 sells for $560. Given that the prices for the i5 parts quoted here seems rather high.

Like the Core i7 silicon, these pieces pack 8MB of L3 cache, and feature both HyperThreading and TurboBoost technology. The TDP is down from 130W that was standard for the i7 to a cooler 90W.

Source: zdnet.com

Intel says parallel software is more important for many-core CPUs like “Larrabee”
Multi-core processors have been in the consumer market for several years now. However, despite having access to CPUs with two, three, four, and more cores, there are still relatively few applications available that can take advantage of multiple cores. Intel is hoping to change that and is urging developers of software to think parallel.

Intel director and chief evangelist for software development products talked about thinking parallel in a keynote speech he delivered at the SD West conference recently. James Reinders said, “One of the phrases I’ve used in some talks is, it’s time for us as software developers to really figure out how to think parallel.” He also says that the developer who doesn’t think parallel will see their career options limited.

Reinders gave the attendees eight rules for thinking parallel from a paper he published in 2007 reports ComputerWorld. The eight rules include — Think parallel; program using abstraction; program tasks, not threads; design with the option of turning off concurrency; avoid locks when possible; use tools and libraries designed to help with concurrency; use scalable memory; and design to scale through increased workloads.

He says that after half a decade of shipping multi-core CPUs, Intel is still struggling with how to use the available cores. The chipmaker is under increasing pressure from NVIDIA who is leveraging a network of developers to program parallel applications to run on its family of GPUs. NVIDIA and Intel are embroiled in a battle to determine if the GPU or CPU will be the heart of future computer systems.

Programming for processors with 16 or 32 cores takes a different approach according to Reinders. He said, “It’s very important to make sure, if at all possible, that your program can run in a single thread with concurrency off. You shouldn’t design your program so it has to have parallelism. It makes it much more difficult to debug.”

Reinders talked about the Intel Parallel Studio tool kit in the speech, a tool kit for developing parallel applications in C/C++, which is currently in its beta release. Reinders added, “The idea here [with] this project was to add parallelism support to [Microsoft’s] Visual Studio in a big way.”

Intel says that it plans to offer the parallel development kit to Linux programmers this year or early next year. The CPU Reinders is talking about when he says many-core is the Larrabee processor. Intel provided some details on Larrabee in August of 2008.

One of the key features of Larrabee is that it will be the heart of a line of discrete graphics cards, a market Intel has not participated in. Larrabee is said to contain ten of more cores inside the discrete package. If Larrabee comes to be in the form Intel talked about last year it will be competing directly against NVIDIA and ATI in the discrete graphics market.

NVIDIA is also rumored to be eyeing an entry into the x86 market as well. Larrabee will be programmable in the C/C++ languages, just as NVIDIA’s GPUs are via the firms CUDA architecture.

Source:  Dailytech.com

A new paradigm for using web applications has emerged. The landing page looks similar to Google, with a simple layout and that familiar search box. But what lies beneath this new search engine is something powerful and breath-taking. Meet Wolfram Alpha - Brings search engines to a whole new level. The algorithm sounds extremely smart to a certain extent, it sounds just as scary too!

Unlike your normal search via keywords, Wolfram Alpha uses what they call a Knowledge Engine to churn out search results that are not keyword-based but rather, question-based strings. For example, instead of searching “Google+birth date”, a typical search on this search engine would be “When Google was born?” The algorithm is a combination of natural language and powerful mathematics.  You can search for something like “What is the 99th digit of Pi” and it’ll give you the right answers!

But science is just one of the domains it knows about — it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.

The algorithm is written by Wolfram, who at the age of 20, got his first Ph.D. in theoretical physics. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems.

This site is a must read. It describes the functions and capabilities of this new search engine. However, Wolfram Alpha will not be like HAL9000 or even a real-life Skynet. It will not be able to recognize feelings or even tones in a sentence. However, I don’t see that such an implementation (at least the latter) would be far from the near future. However scary it may seem, it is far from being able to cause any harm.

I took some time out of my busy schedule to attend a talk by Mario Behling. The talk was organized by the people from LinuxNus. A short intro of Mario taken from the LinuxNus website:

Mario Behling is a FOSS advocate known in the international (Free and Open Source Software) FOSS community through his work for FOSS Bridge, Freifunk and LXDE. Mario, originally from Berlin, has lived in different countries in Asia, Europe and in Australia. He works with business and educational projects like the OLPC project in Afghanistan or FOSS Bridge in Vietnam, where he advises companies on open source business and internationalization strategies and organizes matchmaking events for SMEs. Mario was elected as the president of the LXDE Foundation in 2008. As an active community manager he promotes the LXDE community and coordinates the work of projects like the LXDE Translation Project. As part of his engagement in the free wireless freifunk community he maintains freifunk websites like the wiki (wiki.freifunk.net) and the global free wireless newswire (global.freifunk.net).

The talk was motivational and very inspirational. It is really amazing how people are able to take time out of their daily lives to contribute to the open source community as developers and even non-developer positions such as open source event organizers. I felt rather inspired, to the extent of wanting to develop a new distro (a long unfulfilled dream). Thus, I did a rather short thinking session on my walk home.

There’s a Linux distribution for almost any and every situation you can think of. From full-fledge application-heavy developer’s distros to a small operating system that can fit in your thumb drive. But I realized (maybe I might be wrong) that there isn’t actually a Linux operating system ditribution streamlined for “smart-home” embedded systems (then again, maybe there might not be a need for one). Hence, I began listing some functional and non-functional requirements for such an operating system.

Functional Requirements:

1. Able to communicate with any household interface through wired/wireless interfaces.
2. Handle a lot of unpredictive events (event triggered applications).
3. Nice touch-screen GUI.
4. Possible NAS-to-OS interface for storage/streaming of multimedia.
5. Ability to detect and prevent intrusions.
6. Will be connected to almost everything in the house (Fridge, kettle, TV, printers, multimedia box, consoles, etc).
7. Robust with very small context switching delays of tasks.
8. Small memory footprint. Lightweight and require < 4Gb space.
9. Good handle of I/O operations.
10. …..

Non-functional requirements:

1. Processor with excellent I/O capabilities (x86 compatible?).
2. Ethernet and Wifi (802.11 b/g/n) connections.
3. Touch screen (haptic).
4. Compatible with some smart home interface and standards (if any?).
5. …
6. …

Well, these are just the lists of requirements that came from the top of my mind while walking back home. It’ll definitely need refinements and research. Just imagine being able to control the temperature of your fridge from your office, stock-check your foodstuffs from school, record your favourite TV show from overseas, monitor your house remotely, switch on/off the lights or any connected electrical appliances for that matter from anywhere, VoIP from a remote location via your house phone and lots more! A geek heaven I must say!

Anyone keen to take on the challenge? haha.. Well, maybe after I hand in my Final Year Project. boo!