So I am back , Its been a long hibernation , things have changed a lot, I am now unemployed, broke and 10 kgs overweight . Things are not as bad, I am pursuing my masters at IIITB, I made a bunch of good friends and I am kept busy for most of the day .
I ll try to post more often from now on. but the subject matter will be more specific . I hope the modest user base I had accumulated over time still reads my feed .
Google, Intel and a bunch of other companies have launched the climate savers computing initiative . The main goal of the program is to enhance the power efficiency of PSU’s in desktops and servers to a level of up-to 90-95% and to promote the use of power efficient computing in general . The website states their mission as
By 2010, we seek to reduce global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year, equivalent to the annual output of 11 million cars or 10–20 coal-fired power plants. With your help, this effort will lead to a 50% reduction in power consumption by computers by 2010, and committed participants could collectively save $5.5 billion in energy costs.
While this is a great initiative, making computers more power efficient does make them cost more and the figure ranges from $20 for desktops and $30 for servers , but in the long term it does result in smaller power bills .Except for hardcore enthusiasts no one really cares about what kind of PSU they have, the least we could do is to see that they comply to the latest energy star specifications.
The climate savers Website has some great facts about your PSU and how much energy does it actually waste . Read more about it here.
Visit the site
Intel has already announced that the 45nm Penryn family of CPU’s based on the Core Micro Architecture would be out later this year. keeping in line with their “tick-tock” model of silicon and micro architecture, the company has also revealed some initial details about their brand new micro architecture codenamed ‘Nehalem’ which is expected to be out sometime in 2008 .
According to the Intel Website ” Nehalem is a truly dynamic- and design-scalable microarchitecture. It will deliver both performance on demand and optimal price/performance/energy efficiency for each platform.” The features include dynamically managed cores ,power , memory and interfaces, the new SSE4 and ATA instruction set architecture additions. the new System Architecture also includes a high performance integrated graphics engine for client platforms. The new chips will be manufactured on Intel’s new 32nm silicon process technology which will also make its initial appearance by mid 2008
From the day i have had a PC , i also have data which i just cannot dispose off , a very large collection of MP3’s and a humongous collection of movies and videos , which i have painstakingly organised and then burned on to CD’s and DVD,s . No matter how much disk space you have you always manage to fill it up , installation of a new game always results in some reorganisation , moving files around and deleting a few files to free up some space.
40 or 60 GB especially SCSI drives are now obsolete , no one buys them and they are available for throw away rates at sites like e-Bay etc , so the cheapest viable option for mass storage could be maybe an array 14 of such disks in a RAID configuration, this is an interesting project by Inventgeek which I happened to stumble upon , for those of you who want to ramp up your storage for a low cost, it makes an immensely interesting project , Yes I know RAID is slow and RAID is old , but it does’nt really matter with all those video and audio files which are are rarely used but we just cant part with them plus it has the WOW factor
Multicore - it is the most significant word in the CPU market today , Ever since Intel launched their Core2 Duo range of microprocessors , AMD’s competetive advantage has gone up in smoke , Intel’s processors seem better , cooler and deliver more bang for the buck , That probably explains the aggresive pricing by AMD to try and boost sales , Moreover Intel has already announced that quad core CPU’s will soon be joining the linup , for the uninitiated that means four cores on a single chip , Intel also has a large manufacturing advantage with thier 65nm fabrication process while until recently all AMD cpu’s were made on the 90nm fab process , this rules out a new quad core CPU from AMD anywhere until mid of 2007 becuase at 90nm a quad core chip will be just too big and would need an industrial strength cooling solution, it should be possible around mid 2007 when AMD announces thier new Microarchitecture
Till that day we have the AMD quad FX platform- two dual core AMD FX processors running on the same board , apparently AMD has also promised compatiability when the new quad core processors come out , which translates to 8 cores on a single board , jus thinking about is enough to give the most casual of enthusiasts goosebumps , the only board available at launch was the NVIDIA 680a which is quite surprising considering AMD’s recent aqqusition of ATI . check out this review of the quad FX platform and you ‘ll know what i am talking about
One more thing Quad FX has to offer is absolute eye candy .. just take a look at this rig (Yes those are two processor slots)
A lot has been said about Vista and DirectX 10 over the last few months , and Microsoft has claimed that DX 10 is the future of computer graphics , in many ways this is quite true considering that DX 10 has been written anew right from scratch and addresses a lot of the problems that developers face while developing applications which use the DX9 API. The most substantial of these is lessening the object overhead,
what this means is that the API is using the CPU to achieve specific tasks before using the GPU for rendering ,this translates into the application calling the DX API which in turn calls the GPU drivers, thus every 3D application has a CPU overhead.. this is one of the main reasons for wanting a good processor when building a gaming rig.
Another remarkable improvement is the way vertex and pixel processing is handled by the GPU , the topic itself needs a lot of explanation and those interested can look at
http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_tech_briefs.html
DX 10 includes a completely new shader model and two new HDR formats as well and has many features which lack in the DX9 API
The bottom line is that with DX10 computer graphics is going to change , it will be faster ,richer and more immersive and since DX10 will only be available with VISTA , like it or not- those interested in experiencing true next gen will have to go buy the OS .
