Blackberry Storm - An Iphone for the enterprise.
I had my first hands on with the Storm yesterday at a Verizon store. Luckily I was able to play with it for a good half hour. The storm brings in all the goodies of the Blackberry enterprise capability with the additional click-able touch screen. That is , if the touch screen made a really difference to business users. A bit more on the click-able screen. - It seems the LCD is floated on top of four (or more) soft switches underneath, which picks up push made to the screen. This in turn gives a click effect both visually and functionally. I loved the beautiful screen and the high quality finish of the device. Also the fact that it packed a 3.2 Mp camera and a re-movable battery was a plus. The surprise is its add on memory capability, where I can insert a micro SD to increase memory. Or I could carry a 5 or 10 16GB micro SDs to give me capacity to 160GB. This is something iphone cannot boast off. The turn off was a lack of wi-fi feature. But in effect enterprises (like Gov etc) would not want their employs to use free public or a neighbors wi-fi to send data. By getting rid of wi-fi they have removed a potential intrusion point. I am certain Blackberry might soon bring out a Wi-Fi model for the new wanna-be1 Storm users, teens etc featuring a Wi-Fi .All in all I see the Storm and the Iphone as 2 separate animals. But I have seen the media compare them as if they are in direct competition, just like they were comparing PS3 and the Wii when these 2 were released. My recommendation would be to not to go by media review and go out to the nearest Verizon store and check it out, if this is the right phone for you or not
Labels: RIM Blackberry STORM Review APPL APPLE iphone 3G T-Mobile Google G1
Is Microsoft Vista the Last OS to be shipped on a 'Disk' ??
As I write this post , Microsoft Vista Home Premium (Upgrade) is being sold on ebay for $88.00 shipped. Most of the Laptop and Desktop vendors are including Vista OEM shipped in their products with out any noticeable markup in price. This leads me to believe that , even if MS didn't release Vista , it would still be able to sell XP Variants and still make the same money. So much for the time and money spent on making Vista. As an average PC user , my experience remains unchanged since around the time Windows 95 came. Only that the frequency of blue screens of death and system crashes have decreased. It took me the same time to send an email back in 1997 as in 2007. As technology matures , and levels out , more players show up in the scene and innovate the way things are done.
Alright Google , show us your cards ....
Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6800 a big Joke.
Common' man get real here $1200 just for a processor. You are getting unbeatable deals for below $300 for an above average performing system. Now what kind of idiot will buy the QX6800. I admit there are lots of folks here in the US of A with loose cash. But according to Eric Kim - this Processor is meant for gamers for some vaporware games said to take advantage of the 4 processing units and also for some non-existent multithreaded media edition software. With the impending launch of the Barcelona/K10 from AMD, only fools will put $1200 just or a CPU. Now, all this Intel knows pretty well, it is just that they are trying to minimize the big blow of doom they will get when the K10 comes out.
Labels: Quad Core QX 6800 K10 Barcelona
Latest scam from Intel : "Centrino Pro "
It is funny how companies like Intel abuse the meaning of the word 'technology' in descriptions like "Intel Centrino Pro processor technology" . I see this clearly as another way for Intel to scam and extract more money from the customers and the channel. To get to the back ground of the issue , lets take a back step and see what was Centrino all about. Intel takes the Pentium-3 (that was sold as PIII-M) Processor during the P4 -3Ghz days , and start clocking it at 900MHz to decrease power consumption. They then add their crappy wireless radio to it and behold , what do we have ?? "Centrino mobile technology " . There was nothing technology for this technology , since superior IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi) or wireless Internet was pretty much available commonly during that time from several vendors - Broadcom , Atheros etc etc. In Centrino pro , Intel puts a regular (soon to be obselete) Core 2 Processor and sing the song of "remote management".
If you see this logo - run for your life !!!
I clearly do not think , Remote management is the purview of the processor maker. I think it should up to the big vendors like DELL or HP or Lenovo to have a software and process in place to do all the remote stuff and be responsible for maintaining and managing desktop and notebook clients. The proprietary technology soon to be pushed with Centrino Pro will in fact leave clients with no option to move away from it , if they want to and is another attempt by the monopoly giant to leverage its marketing and fool people.Labels: Intel Centrino Pro Mobile Technology
Is DELL going backwards in Technology ??
Here is a cover picture from the latest Dell Catalog for Mar-April 2007. Notice the 'Pentium' Logo laptop that Dell is trying to sell. The last time Dell pushed Pentium chips this aggressively was perhaps 2 years back. Now what does Dell want you to do ? Buy another Pentium Laptop ?? Or could it be that Mikey's god fathers (read 'Paul') asked him to push their crappy inventory onto some Dell Laptops.
As I analyze this further , I realize that the Intel logo doesn't matter anymore. If Dell sells a laptop with no processor logo tomorrow , folks would still by it. The processor in the mobile space has been reduced to some thing that is taken for granted. Why should I care if it is Intel or AMD underneath. Would I care who made the USB host chip ?? If a vendor (Dell in this case) chooses a particular processor for a laptop, I would leave it to their good judgement to find a suitable one. It is extremely hard to believe that brands like SONY and Toshiba have succumbed to the Intel marketing paybacks, and are happy to display the Intel logo. Folks like SONY forget that , people buy SONY just because of the 4 letters ,"SONY" , not because of any crappy Intel logo. Fine if they decide to put the logo of the processor maker , let these laptop makers also display the logos of the other chips that go indside - Wireless, Bluetooth, USB, PCMCIA , DSPs,LCD controller, Hard Drive, DVD Drive chips etc.
Labels: Dell SONY Toshiba Intel AMD Laptop Technology
Maturing of the PC Industry
There was a time from probably 1990 to 1999 when I found myself upgrading my computer every few months. Like clock work .. every six months of so , I was either getting myself more memory or a faster modem or better graphics card , or better still a new box. This began to change around 2001. I have noticed that I haven’t actually done anything to my computer ever since then. Of course , I had to format the system over and over a couple of times.
The Landscape of the PC industry is maturing really fast. and is at a point in time .at this moment ..Where the automobile industry was in the may be 1980’s. Automobiles took the forms of a Sedan, Coupe, a Sports Version, an SUV or a Truck.
If a regular desktop PC is compared to a Family Sedan, than we can easily relate a gamer machine to a sports car and may be a server to a Truck.
The present processing power (between A and B) is mostly an overkill for most common applications of a regular user. Information (WORD,EXCEL, ADOBE),Communication (EMAIL, Browser, Messaging, VOIP) , Entertainment (Music, Video). This limit is often pushed upwards by the demands of gamers and media rich apps like those of Video Editing and perhaps programs like Google Earth.
Widnows VISTA slated to release sometime in 2006 is said to be faster than WINDOWS XP on current x86 architectures. This is definitely bad news for
Companies like Intel …which has been exclusively riding on the wave of a ‘faster” CPU and faster GHz. It is pathetic to see how a large population still believes that more Ghz means more CPU Power.
Let me give you a simple example: - Let’s say I have to do a simple operation like an addition – lets assume that a particular processor from company X does this operation in 5 clock cycles and company Y does this in 3 Clock cycles.
Company X Claims – we are the fastest 3.0Ghz !!!! (actually 600X10^6 additions)
Company Y says - we run at 2Ghz (this is 667 X 10^6 additions)
It is clear from above that the processor from company Y is clearly faster and beats the processor from company X by 12 %
What about the Power Consumption:-
Since Power consumption is proportional to the square of the frequency we have :
Company X : Power = (3.0) ^ 2 = 9 Units
Company Y : Power = (2)^2 = 4 Units
Clearly company Y’s Processor, consumes less than half the power of X and is 12% Faster. But will a population that has been entirely taught that only GHz matters, come to even grasp this???
My Prediction is that the future wave of applications like D and E will need Processing power of 1000’s of times faster than present CPU’s can provide and will deal with things like treating Video files like it were a notepad file and will do Image Recognition and classification and video analysis. in real time. Games will always be there!! But this still represent a clear jump from the levels of (B,C) available today to the Levels of D and E ..where we would ultimately see the death of the general purpose processor.. that’s for later .
But the levels from B to C do not really present an increase to be made in processing power (reason: Maturity) , but presents an opportunity to companies to manufacture processors that do more and consume less energy.
To conclude: Most Applications of today are taking discrete shapes and are being standardized. One important role of this is the hardware below becomes irrelevant. When you go out to buy a car today, what are the factors that you would consider? I am certain that the “TOP SPEED” would be among the bottom of the list or may not even in your list. You would worry about things like gas consumption and safety.
AMD has already realized some of these aspects and this is clearly seen in
their products where we see reduced power consumption , or may be the extra hardware bit for Virus Protection
Coming Next : The Fall of the Microprocessor !!
The Rise of the Microprocessor.........
The microprocessor got into
main stream computing some time in the 70s. Before that microprocessor and its smaller cousins -microcontrollers were used to control electro-mechanical systems, like perhaps the door of a space craft.
Von Neumann/harvard architecture and the Stored Program Concept.
In simple words,what all the processors do is Fetch,Decode,Execute. Fetches an Instruction and data from memory , decodes this instruction - decoding is the step where the processor figures out what it has to do with the data , perhaps the instrution is a simple addition or may be a complex multiplication like in a game.
This sequence of operation looks fairly simple and this is what exactly happens if you are doing a single task - like may be playing an Mp3 on the Computer.
But it is not this simple in todays computer - it has to do a million tasks at the same time.
so what the processor does is sends a chunk of data to your sound card to play that music and goes back an Idle state or perhaps goes back to fetch data from ethernet to display on your browser. When the sound card is done playing the chunk of music..it sends a signal to the processor asking for more sound data, the processor then SUSPENDS all the task that it was doing for you ..goes to throw another chunk of sound data ino the buffer of the sound card.
Ofcourse there is an elaborate mechanism that governs this switching between the tasks.
A Little Test :- If you run Windows Try the following thing. Open the Task Manager and click the performance Tab. Here you will see the Usage of the Processor. The usage when you are doing nothing will be between 0-10%. Now open a simple 'Notepad' window. Put the mouse on the Title bar and drag the Notepad window across the screeen back and forth repeatedly. You will see that the processor usage suddenly shoots to 100% and stays there..till you stop dragging the Notepad Window... Surprised ????....I would call this poor software (MS!!) design..!!
THE General Puspose CPU that runs Windows:-
So far what we have discussed is a processor that has eventually become a Jack of all Trades and Master of none. Most software writers are have no idea of the hardware beneath..that is kept hidden by the 'visual software tools'..These development tools add lines and lines of useless code that decreases the overall perfromance. The more close language to the hardware , the faster will be the performance. C language is more closer to the hardware than Visual C. Assembly Language directly talks to the hardware and is even more closer to the hardware than say C
Coming Next - Is the personal computing Industry Maturing ?????
