Dual Core? Quad Core? Try 80 Core!
Intel researchers recently announced they've produced an 80-core chip that uses less energy than a quad-core processor and has teraflop performance capabilities.
According to Manny Vara, a technology strategist with Intel's R&D labs the chip is just for research purposes and lacks some necessary functionality at this point, but Vara says Intel will be able to produce a chip with 80 cores in five to eight years.
The chip, called the Tera-Scale Teraflop Prototype, is the subject of a research project that Intel will present at the 2007 International Solid State Circuits Conference in early February.
Vara says the 80-core chip uses less than 100 watts of energy, compared to a dual-core chip using 60 to 70 watts or a quad-core using 105 to 130 watts.
Apparently, the approach is to use a larger number of simpler cores of varying types. So one core might be optimized for one kind of processing while another core is optimized for a different type of processing.
Read some early details
here.
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3 Must Haves for Road Warriors
If you travel at all, here's a few tools to make life on the road more livable:
- Orb - I just discovered this. It is essentially a personal Web server that lets you access your files, audio, video, and even TV as streaming data. So last week in Los Angeles, I watched Battlestar Gallatica from my hotel room. If you have a MPEG in hardware TV card, this thing will work like a remote control TiVo -- you can record your shows on your PC while you are at any Web Browser and then watch the shows from anywhere -- including many mobile phones, PDAs, etc. You could set up your own streaming server, of course, but this is point and click and works great. Oh, and it is free!
- Thinkfree Office Online - I've written about this before. Still my favorite online text editor, presentation maker, and spreadsheet. Very Office compatible and it is great to always have the latest version of a document at your fingertips online. Also free.
- UltraVNC - My favorite of the VNC programs let you access your desktop computer from anywhere. Unlike many VNC derivities, this one makes it simple to use high security and transfer files. It also uses a video driver for good performance on screen updates.
Orb is hard to explain but priceless once you've used it for about 10 minutes. But with these tools you can get to all of your data and applications with a minimum of fuss as long as you have an internet connection.
Labels: PC, software, Tips
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Wireless USB on the Way
I've always wanted to build a USB hub that had a wireless connection to the PC. That would let you have, for example, a laptop connected to a printer and hard drive across the room from you. Or -- a good example in my case -- a USB TV box could sit near the cable TV jack while your computer is across the room.
Looks like my wishes are going to be answered soon:
http://www.belkin.com/pressroom/releases/uploads/01_03_06CableFreeUSB.html. Well... maybe... apparently my wish should have been answered in July, and then September, and here it is October and I still couldn't find one to buy! Hmmmm.... But it will be cool if it does arrive.
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You Can Take It With You (Your Data, That Is)
I use a lot of different computers, and sadly most of them run Windows. However, I recently purchased a 8GB pocket-sized USB 2.0 hard drive from Memorex. I had been carrying around a 1GB flash device, and had found a few good "portable" applications (applications that will run entirely from a flash drive). But the 8GB lets you carry
everything.
This isn't a flash drive, by the way. It is a real rotating hard disk (a tiny one though). It was the smallest one I could find. I hook it to my keychain (and yeah, its a little large compared to a regular USB drive, but not so large that you can't do it). I was worried the "leather" case might not hold up to holding it on a carbiner, but it has done nicely for about 6 months.
Sure these are a bit more expensive than a 1GB flash drive (I paid around $150 for mine, and they are usually less now days), but keep it mind that this holds 8 times the data and does not wear out with repeated writes like a flash memory.
I currently have the following on my drive:
- A "menu" (pstart)
- Firefox
- Thunderbird (reads IMAP mail from my main server)
- Gaim
- Open Office
- The Gimp
- NVU
- Foxit PDF
- VLC (for viewing videos)
- An HP41C emulator
- Cygwin
- Cryptainer (makes encrypted drives)
- A tiddlywiki for keeping notes
- My home page
- Lots of documents, videos, mp3s, bookmark URLs, etc.
- Puppy Linux
Try getting all that on a flash drive!
You can find
travel drives here. The best portable apps are Firefox and Thunderbird from
www.portableapps.com and you can also find a large list at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_portable_applications or others at my bookmarks:
del.icio.us/wd5gnr/usbapps.
Labels: gadgets, PC
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