Technology – Page 20

Intel’s Upcoming Processors With Integrated GPU

January 23, 2011 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

UPCOMING TECHNOLOGY – Following the Moore’s law and keeping it consistent with time, Intel is ready to ship the next generation of processors on the Mobile, Desktop and Notebook platforms. Code named Sandy bridge, this processor is packed with fully integrated GPU(Graphic Processing Unit), LLC(last level cache), media controllers and processor cores onto one silicon chip.

intel sandy bridge — Paul Otellini, the CEO at Intel holding a wafer of Sandy bridge chips

Sandy Bridge is not to be considered as an innovation in the x86 family, it’s rather an extension of the first generation of core processors “Nehalem“, includes a graphics core on the same silicon piece of the i3/5/7 CPUs. Sandy bridge is based on the 32nm manufacturing process and built to squeeze out more energy and performance improvements over the current range of Intel chipsets. Sandy Bridge is more about it’s architecture and the integration of GPU. With integrating the GPU onto the processor, it’s a significant improvement to Intel’s current line of processor architecture boosting performance and better energy consumption habits. Intel also plans to target the mainstream market first before catering the other market niches.

MaximumPC provided a table of benchmarks comparing the application load time on Sandy Bridge’s variants with the AMD’s Phenom processor. (As tested on 64-bit Windows 7 Professional, 4GB of RAM DDR3/1333 (for the dual-core chips) or 6GB of DDR3/1333 (for the tri-channel chips), a Western Digital Raptor 150 10,000rpm hard drive, a GeForce GTX 285, and the same graphics driver for all of the test configurations):

	3.4GHz Core i7-2600K	2.66GHz Core i5-750	2.8GHz Core i7-860	2.93GHz Core i7-870	3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition	3.33GHz Core i7-980X	3.2GHz Phenom II X6 1090T
Premiere Pro CS3 (sec)	453	615	581	539	504	453	749
Sony Vegas Pro 9.0c (sec)	3,007	4,899	3,863	3,531	3,244	2,675	5,010
HandBrake DVD to iPhone (sec)	1,298	1,702	1,360	1,247	1,170	941	1,580
MainConcept 1.6 (sec)	2,134	3,092	2,735	2,486	2,308	1,827	2,816
Cinebench 10 64-bit	23,259	14,455	17,516	19,197	20,147	27,479	17,892
Cinebench 11.5 64-bit	6.87	3.83	5.15	5.54	5.99	8.92	5.67
POV Ray 3.7	4,979	2,810	3,883	4,497	4,236	6,557	4,656.5
Photoshop CS3 (sec)	89	118	123	100	91	89	130
Adobe Lightroom 2.6 (sec)	394	603	469	422	418	419	426
ProShow Producer 4 (sec)	1,007	1,425	1,382	1,290	1,208	1,092	1,669
Bibble 5.02 (sec)	121	186	142	122	120	97.2	145
PCMark Vantage 64-bit Overall	11,250	8,504	8,903	9,120	9,260	10,470	7,481
Fritz Chess Benchmark (KiloNodes/s)	13,017	8,407	10,997	11,995	12,738	12,733	11,219
Valve Map Compilation (sec)	76	110	116	106	100	99	132
Everest Ultimate MEM Copy (MB/s)	16,994	15,445	15,372	14,693	17,712	13,086	11,043
Everest Ultimate MEM Latency (ns)	36	54.3	49.5	52.5	59.8	61.3	51.6
SiSoft Sandra RAM Bandwidth (GB/s)	16	17	17	17	23	20	13
3DMark Vantage CPU	53,599	44,594	46,064	48,816	51,321	62,893	44,587
Valve Particle test (fps)	180	111	148	159	174	259	120
Resident Evil 5 / low-res (fps)	132	110.3	115.9	126.6	130.7	134.1	100.3
World in Conflict / low-res (fps)	306	256	253	253	317	358	162
Dirt 2 / low-res (fps)	162	155	94	153.3	157	155.7	121
Far Cry 2 / low-res (fps)	165	146.53	150.2	153.3	158.2	158.6	99

Clearly, the benchmarks announce Intel Cores as winners.

Here is the catch. When the gaming side of Sandy Bridge is considered, Intel has cleverly setup the processor architecture to not abuse the over-clocking entsusiasts on a tight budget. Intel has split the Sandy Bridge variants into two categories, the K series and the non-K series. Processors that fall into the K series which are also relatively expensive, have the potential to be over-clocked to a 6GHz limit which is better than on non-k series and the cheaper have more cover-clocking limitations t.us rendering the full fledged over-clocking phenomenon on Intel’s platform a thing of the past.

Intel is yet to go full fledged with the sales of Sandy bridge powered computers. It’s fair to consider “Sandy Bridge” as the next obvious move by Intel in it’s chipset development timeline. Something not to be considered very impressive. It offers outstanding performance and better energy efficiency with lesser number of hardware dependencies as compared to it’s previous generation. A quirky move by Intel to its second generation of core processors will definitely have a unpleasant effect on the Intel worshipping-over-clocker community.

We Have Evolved, We Are The Cyborgs

January 16, 2011 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Cyborg Anthropologist talks about the new generation of Homo Sapiens.

Superman Cyborg — Cyborg Superman, a fictional character from DC Comics

We’ve made it to the year 2011 and it’s fair to think “so, where are the cyborgs?”. If you think closer and try connecting the dots of human evolution with the greatest inventions of all time, it won’t be hard to realize that over the years we’ve made a huge leap from what we were thousands of years ago to what we have become now. This has been possible because of the existence of technology since the primitive times.

The traditional definition of a Cyborg is “an organism to which exogen.us components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments”. Our consistent reliance on external brains a.k.a the machines have helped us communicate, remember and lead second lives successfully. So by definition, we are all Cyborgs.

Amber Case, a Cyborg Anthropologist talked about us being Cyborgs and now being a new species of Homo Sapiens:
So let’s look at the concept of traditional anthropology. Somebody goes to another country, says, “How fascinating these people are, how interesting their tools are, how curi.us their culture is.” And then they write a paper, and maybe a few other anthropologists read it, and we think it’s very exotic. Well, what’s happening is that we’ve suddenly found a new species. I, as a cyborg anthropologist, have suddenly said, “Oh, wow. Now suddenly we’re a new form of homo sapiens. And look at these fascinating cultures. And look at these curi.us rituals that everybody’s doing around this technology. They’re clicking on things and staring at screens.”
We are constantly evolving with technologies like bionic lenses, communication devices, development of superior weapons and what not. It’s exciting and scary while thinking for how long will the advancement of technology continue to feed us with convenience or maybe someday, feed on us.

Stay Fully Protected Without Using An Anti-Virus Program – Part II

September 13, 2010 by Raj Agrawal 2 Comments

This article covers on How To Stay Completely Safe from Malware Infections when Offline.

Previously, I had written and shared a tutorial for you on how to use the Sandboxing technique to easily and safely avoid being infected on the internet. I had revised the tutorials several times to make them clear, precise and simple enough to allow each and every reader grasp the concept and it’s implementation process. This being the second part of the “main idea”, take your time to read this article on how you can avoid and even ‘safely’ play around/ test malware infected programs. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, dishonest adware, crimeware, most rootkits, and other malicious and unwanted software.|Wiki|

We all know that malware can intrude our computer from USB drives and disks. You insert your colleague’s pen drive not knowing that it’s infected and you soon realize that your computer is no longer working as it should. Or you want to try out a software/ game that you aren’t sure if it is infected or not. These two scenarios is usually encountered by almost every Windows user.

Downland and install these freeware tools in order to make the entire concept work:

Sandboxie
Malwarebytes (this anti-malware program does not run as a background process and is very useful to check and confirm the safety of your computer after you have done using the infected program in the sandbox)

Points to Remember before we start:

Use this method for experimental purpose. If you are not comfortable implementing it then stop using this method right away and use an anti-virus program to stay safe.
Take responsibility for websites you visit, links you click on and things you download, if you wish to stay safe.
No virus can harm your system unless it is executed and running.
This article has nothing to do with using a firewall. If your computer is connected to any network like the internet itself, then it is 100% important to use a firewall.
Smarter techniques always require some effort for implementation.
Use Malwarebytes freeware as it does not run in the background thus saving your resources and use it to scan new media like USB drives, CDs, DVDs, e.t.c
Skills required to understand and implement this guide: Intermediate to Experienced user.
This tutorial is suitable only for Windows Operating Systems: Windows XP and later.
This tutorial will teach you to set up your computer to “not use anti-virus protection is background” and in such a way that you run applications, whether infected or not, in a safe and fake environment and whenever your end up executing a infected program, you can easily stop and reverse the actions of the program with just closing it.

Benefits of implementing this method:

You won’t have to buy anti-virus, anti-malware programs.
Your computer would be much safer than what you would get with the anti-malware programs.
Your computer will run faster as more RAM will be available without the anti-virus running in the background.

The Tutorial:

Select and run any suspicious file/ program by using the right click option as shown in the illustration,

Sandboxie will run the selected program in a safe and “isolated” environment,
When you are done using the concerned program, right click on the program name in the Sandboxed list and click ‘terminate’,

This will terminate the program and remove all the files and infections (if any) that the program had created from the ‘isolated’ environment.
Using program like paint/ photoshop requires project files to be saved after the work is done. Using these programs sandboxed will give you a message asking to ‘recover’ the saved file from the sandbox or to ‘keep’ them inside the sandbox. Recovering will get your project work safely out of the sandbox and thus avoid getting deleted. Keeping it inside will of course, get deleted once the program is terminated.

If you want to make sure if your computer is really safe after all this, you should scan your computer with Malwatebytes program or any anti-virus program you prefer. I suggest you to use Malwarebytes since as said before, does not run as a background process thus reducing the possibility of your computer getting slowed down.

This technique will require patience and practice initially. But, it is a nice experiment to try out. 😀

So, what are your thoughts on this?