Saturday, September 29, 2007

Downgrade Rather Than Upgrade!!!!

Microsoft is obviously pushing Windows Vista very hard. Vista Business and Ultimate versions must be the ultimate in Vista flavors on offer. Then how come MS is making it easy for business users to downgrade to known and dependable XP flavor of the last generation of Windows family!

MS is making it easy for PC box shippers with prepackaged Vista PC's to ship XP discs along with the sytem. They are preactivated, i.e even a call to support to get an activation code would be necessary.Apparently the EULA, end user license agreement has always had that provision. Fujitsu has been the most aggressive among the box movers so far. now others are going to do it too.

Is it just resistance to change? Does not look like though. Looks more like an attempt by enterprises to stick with an old faithful. So what's at stake here! Is it that Vista would need more training time? Or there are reliability, availability related issues? Who knows! Only thing one could be sure of is that MS is being pragmatic about it, though the expected protestation that this does not mean any admission that Vista has any shortcoming is being repeated.

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Interesting 64 core Processors

Sun recently announced the T2 CPU. It has 8 cores, each capable of running 8 threads simultaneously. That’s like 64 processing threads running in parallel! All that happens with only 95W energy consumption!! That translates into a awesome processing power in servers helped my Solaris that makes development easier.
Now if we had a true 64 core processor that worked for less than 20 watts!! Hat would be amazing!!!!!!!!!!!
Tilera announced recently that they have such a chip called the Tile 64. Please read detailed story here. One of the major problems with multi core chips( I have blooged about this before) is the main system bus on the chip which starts to saturate with data flow despite multi level caches in the architecture. Tilera claims that they have overcome this problem so that truly massively parallel chips would now be possible. CPU cores in the Tile 64 chip exchange data through a mesh architecture and no such bottleneck exists. A switching matrix interconnects processors and there are separate memory controllers.


The Tile 64 processor has a RISC architecture and offered at clock speeds of 600 MHz and 1GHz speeds. He switches can transmit data to 4 of its neighbors at 500 Gbps rates. These processors are positioned for usage in routers, switches, appliances, video conferencing and Set top boxes.