AMD to ship its six-core Opteron server CPU
At a press conference from its Round Rock headquarters this morning, AMD made good on one of its most important promised milestones: It's preparing to deliver its six-core Opteron server processors, which will beat Intel to market with the first drop-in six-cores for 4P and 8P configurations. Shipping, according to executives, begins now. Intel isn't expected to have Nehalem generation EP- and EX-class Xeon processors in configurations other than 2P until sometime next year.
As the company's server business director John Fruehe told reporters this afternoon, this new class of six-core Opteron will feature a new element of its HyperTransport bus, called HT Assist. As Fruehe explained, this feature will enable all the processors in a multi-way configuration to share portions of their L3 cache as a pooled lookup table. This way, calls to the table are directed to the appropriate processor, even across processors. The promise here is to dramatically reduce crosstalk and traffic, and cut stream memory bandwidth by as much as 30%.
Bing vs. Google face-off, round 1
Easily the biggest single change to the way I do business over the past quarter-century -- bigger than the ubiquitousness of e-mail, bigger than the mouse, bigger than push-button piracy -- is the search engine. Google is an invaluable research tool that my colleagues and I might have invested literally thousands in to be able to use, were it available two decades ago; though in all fairness, the search engine that truly blazed the trail in functionality in the early days of the Web was AltaVista.
Even AltaVista has some unique linguistic tricks that, if they could be applied to Google's colossal index, would yield mind-boggling results; so the notion that Google cannot be bested is probably false. But this time it's Microsoft once again that's laying down the gauntlet. This time, its search engine's latest revamp sheds what some had seen as its biggest liability: its brand name's ties to Windows, as if using Windows Live Search had anything to do with using Windows. The choice of Bing as the final title indicates that most of the good dot-com names really have already been taken; but that criticism aside, Bing deserves a fair shake.
On second thought, Microsoft lifts Windows 7's three-app limit for netbooks
If it's a counter that's determining arbitrarily how many applications your limited edition of Windows 7 should be allowed to run, how much precious system resources does that counter consume? And couldn't that memory and space be put to better use, say, running an app? Where and how should netbook manufacturers tell customers they can only run three Windows apps at a time? These were the kinds of questions Microsoft's engineers have been fielding with regard to a limitation in the company's forthcoming Windows 7 Starter Edition, a SKU of the operating system it wants netbook manufacturers to pre-install.
In an indication this afternoon that all this listening to consumers' wishes may be giving Microsoft's people a headache, the company's Win7 evangelist Brandon LeBlanc announced this afternoon the addition to Starter Edition of a kind of feature, if not in fact the subtraction of a feature that nobody wanted: The three-app counter will be gone.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #2: Device Stage
If the strange feeling that Vista was less secure than XP was topmost on critics' gripe lists over the last three years -- regardless of the facts which contra-indicate that feeling -- running a close second was the feeling that very little, if anything, outside of the PC worked with Vista when you plugged it in.
Here, the facts aren't all there to compensate for the feeling. Even in recent months, Palm Centro users complained about the lack of a Vista driver for connecting Centro to the PC outside of a very slow Bluetooth; Minolta scanner users were advised to hack their own .INF files with Notepad in order to get Vista to recognize their brands; and Canon digital camera owners are being told by that company's tech support staff that Microsoft was supposed to make the Vista drivers for their cameras, but didn't.
How sparse is US rural broadband? FCC admits it doesn't know
With a national plan for broadband Internet deployment due in just nine months, a report published Wednesday by FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps -- still serving as Acting Chairman until the confirmation of Julius Genachowski gets back on track -- admits that the data on just how sparse broadband service is in the nation's rural areas has yet to be compiled. Less than a year before the deadline on action, the government literally doesn't know.
"Our efforts to bring robust and affordable broadband to rural America begin with a simple question: What is the current state of broadband in rural America?" Commissioner Copps writes (PDF available here). "We would like to answer this question definitively, and detail where broadband facilities are deployed, their speeds, and the number of broadband subscribers throughout rural America. Regrettably, we cannot. The Commission and other federal agencies simply have not collected the comprehensive and reliable data needed to answer this question. As the Commission has indicated, more needs to be done to obtain an accurate picture of broadband deployment and usage in America, including its rural areas."
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity
It's not unusual to see something emerging from Google's laboratories that folks in the general press fail to understand, and the company's marketing is partly to blame there. The public introduction during this morning's I/O Developers' conference of a Web programming construct called Google Wave generated headlines ranging in scope from a new competitor for Microsoft SharePoint, to a next generation social network, to a series of browser extensions for Chrome to rival the Mozilla Jetpack project, and finally to the company's evil plan to conquer and corrupt HTML 5.
Excluding the latter, it could very well be all of these items. Essentially, Wave is an architecture, and not really a very new one. It's an old solution to a very old problem: that of synchronicity in distributed applications. As database architects know better than anyone, the problem with maintaining a distributed database is that multiple users may make changes that conflict with each other, leading to disparity and multiple versions. Currently, transactional modeling solves that problem, but a more direct and simpler approach from a mathematical standpoint would be simply to translate every operation, or every change a user requests to a database -- every command from client to server -- into a figurative mathematical language so that the terms of the command take into account the changes simultaneously being ordered by all the others.
Chrome, Firefox, IE8 accelerate 12% or more in Windows 7 over Vista
If you've been testing the final Windows 7 Release Candidate on your own physical platforms, and you wonder what's giving you that feeling that it's just a bit peppier, a tad zippier, it's not an illusion. Betanews tests all this week, concluding today, comparing all the major stable release and development Windows-based Web browsers, running on exactly the same physical computer with fresh Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 RC partitions, confirmed what our eyes and gut feelings were telling us: On average, most browsers ran 11.9% faster in Windows 7 than on the same machine running Vista SP2, with most speed gains falling right around that mark.
Internet Explorer 8, for example, runs 15% faster in Windows 7 than in Vista SP2, in multiple tests whose results were within one another by a hundredth of a point. Using our performance index as a guide, if you consider the relatively slow Internet Explorer 7 in Vista SP2 as a 1.00, then in a fresh test of IE8 on the same platform, the newer browser in Vista SP2 scored a 2.03 -- performing generally better than double its predecessor. But in Windows 7, the score for IE8 rises to a 2.27.
A word about our Windows Web browser test suite
Since March 2009, our Windows Web browser performance test suite has utilized four components which score different aspects of the browser engine: the HowToCreate.uk CSS rendering test, the Celtic Kane basic speed comparison, the Web Standards Project's Acid3 standards compliance test, and the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. We've received approximately equivalent numbers of praises and complaints for our having chosen all four of these independent analyses for our suite, though we see no reason at present to discredit any of them.
We did have to modify the HowToCreate.uk test internally, because the way it typically accounts for its own speed does not take into account how the onLoad event fires differently with various browsers' JavaScript interpreters. Our modifications account for the discrepancy, and we applied those modifications to all the browsers we test, not just those (Google Chrome, Apple Safari) which fire differently.
How soon will AOL become Google's prime competitor?
It's time to stop with all the "I told you so's" and the gloating and the self-congratulation, on the part of everyone (myself included) who never saw synergies between the former America Online and Time Warner, who are just as capable of reading the big, fluorescent handwriting on the wall as anyone else. We knew it wouldn't work. End of part one.
The task before Tim Armstrong -- minted as CEO of AOL in March -- and his team is to define the company. It has some very old parts and some very big assets, but other than that, it's a startup. If you "Google" Tim Armstrong (a number of ironies latent in that phrase), you discover almost instantly the type of independent CEO he will be. He helped build Google into the advertising sales giant it is today (its merger with DoubleClick notwithstanding), and he takes the knowledge of that blueprint with him to AOL. He is an ad man, and AOL will be an advertising platform.
Psystar promises bankruptcy court it will rethink its business plan
It isn't Psystar's legal tangle with Apple Inc. that led to its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in a Florida federal court last Thursday. Rather, seven of the independent PC maker's top 10 creditors were credit card processing services, making up about 44% of its outstanding debt to those top 10 creditors. The IRS accounted for less than 5% of that debt. This according to court documents obtained by Betanews from the US Bankruptcy Court for Southern Florida.
Although Psystar also didn't blame Apple in its petition for an emergency relief hearing the following day, it did mention the company as the developer of the operating system on which its Open-brand PCs are based. Instead, the story Psystar told is one that could apply to a thousand independent PC makers across the country, except for one important element: It's almost impossible for an OEM of Psystar's size to compete in the PC market on price alone, while still maintaining profitability.
6 Gbps SATA transfer speed is on its way
The solid-state disk drive is supposed to be fast. After all, it's mostly made of memory -- and last we checked, flash RAM was fast. In practice, however, some applications with SSDs can be slower than with HDDs, the reason being the way data is cached as it's collected and moved through I/O channels into system RAM.
The transfer interface is the bottleneck, and the engineers that contribute to the Serial ATA (SATA) transfer specification admit that fact openly. Just a few years ago, you might never have thought that 3 gigabits per second (Gbps) would end up causing problems; but as it turned out, the faster SATA 2.0 maximum transfer rate enabled new applications, which ended up introducing users to those bottlenecks for the first time.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #3: XP Mode
In some ways, Steve Ballmer is proving to be a more capable Microsoft CEO than Bill Gates, especially recently. Whereas Gates' strategies have typically been associated with playing unfair, rewriting the rules, and being blatantly defiant about it in the process, Ballmer's strategy of taking away the argument -- eliminating the appearance of advantage and then still winning -- has been more effective, and more difficult to combat in both the marketplace and the courtroom.
Nowhere does the "Playing Too Fair" strategy make a bigger display of itself in Microsoft's favor than in its latest permutation of virtualization technology -- a move that many individuals (myself included) directly suggested the company should do, and the company then did. Since 2004, Microsoft has offered a no-cost way for users to run Windows XP in a kind of hosted envelope, one which users were delighted to discover worked fairly well in Windows Vista. But it didn't offer any real advantages -- to use a program that relied on XP, you had to work within that envelope, using networking tools to associate two machines running on the same CPU.
Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2 go live
To Bing or not to Bing?
Focusing on Microsoft's dilemma over how it can compete against Google in a market that Google now solidly owns, blinds one to the bigger problem facing anyone trying to do business on the Internet today, including Microsoft: No one really has a clue as to how the damned thing works.
Arguably, Google may be closer to discovering the clue than anyone. But its clever marketing tactics, which lead the technology press to cover color changes to the Gmail toolbar and the shifting of department names from the bottom to the right side of the corporate logo as strike-up-the-band events, indicate to me that Google is just as indecisive about a viable long-term business plan as everyone else. It's just better at masking that fact.
Google Chrome 2 is 20% faster than Chrome 1 in physical speed tests
Yesterday, Google traded development track 1 of its Chrome Web browser for track 2, making the latter effectively the "stable" edition of the browser, even though it's still officially under development and not yet feature-complete. Many users of version 1 found themselves automatically upgraded to version 2, and may very well have noticed a subsequent speed increase from the JavaScript interpreter.
In a blog post yesterday, Google said that speed increase would be about 30%. But is that an accurate assessment, especially given that Google's V8 JavaScript benchmark was devised by Google to test its V8 JavaScript interpreter?
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