China's Challenge to Intel !!!

Most of the people like me , know that there is only one major brand of processors are widely used and that is INTEL ... right ?? then then got AMD as their competitor .... and now, like every other markets , china is trying to get in this processor business too !!!

In California last week, Chinese researchers unveiled details of a microprocessor that they hope will bring personal computing to most ordinary people in China by 2010. The chip, code-named Godson-3, was developed with government funding by more than 200 researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology (ICT).

China is making a late entry into chip making, admits Zhiwei Xu, deputy director of ICT. "Twenty years ago in China, we didn't support R&D for microprocessors," he said during a presentation last week at the Hot Chips conference, in Palo Alto. "The decision makers and [Chinese] IT community have come to realize that CPUs [central processing units] are important." Tom Halfhill, an analyst at research firm In-Stat, says that the objective for China is to take control of the design and manufacture of vital technology. "Like America wants to be energy independent, China wants to be technology independent," Halfhill says. "They don't want to be dependent on outside countries for critical technologies like microprocessors, which are, nowadays, a fundamental commodity." Federal laws also prohibit the export of state-of-the-art microprocessors from the United States to China, meaning that microchips shipped to China are usually a few generations behind the newest ones in the West !!!

Despite its late start, China is making rapid progress. The ICT group began designing a single-core CPU in 2001, and by the following year had developed Godson-1, China's first general-purpose CPU. In 2003, 2004, and 2006, the team introduced ever faster versions of a second chip--Godson-2--based on the original design. According to Xu, each new chip tripled the performance of the previous one. Godson chips are manufactured in China by a Swiss company called ST Microelectronics and are available commercially under the brand name Loongson, meaning "dragon chip." Loongson chips already power some personal computers and servers on the Chinese market, which come with the Linux operating system and other open-source software. "They use a lot of open-source software because it's free," says Halfhill. "The Chinese government wants to get as many PCs into schools and as many workplaces as they can." The latest Godson chips will also have a number of advanced features. Godson-3, a chip with four cores--processing units that work in parallel--will appear in 2009, according to Xu, and an eight-core version is also under development !!! ( ... ya , you read it right .. its eight core processor !!! ) , Both versions will be built using 65-nanometer lithography processes, which are a generation older than Intel's current 45-nanometer processes.

Importantly, Godson-3 is scalable, meaning that more cores can be added to future generations without significant redesign. Additionally, the architecture allows engineers to precisely control the amount of power that it uses. For instance, parts of the chip can be shut down when they aren't in use, and cores can operate at various frequencies, depending on the tasks that they need to perform. The four-core Godson-3 will consume 10 watts of power, and the eight-core chip will consume 20 watts, says Xu. This latest chip will also be fundamentally different from those made before. Neither Godson-1 nor -2 is compatible with Intel's so-called x86 architecture, meaning that most commercial software will not run on them. But engineers have added 200 additional instructions to Godson-3 to simulate an x86 chip, which allows Godson-3 to run more software, including the Windows operating system. And because the chip architecture is only simulated, there is no need to obtain a license from Intel.

Erik Metzger, a patent attorney at Intel, says that the chip will only perform at about 80 percent of the speed of an actual x86 chip. "That implies that [the Chinese government] is going after a low-end market," he says. This is the same market that Intel is targeting with its classmate PC and low-power atom microprocessor. Metzger adds that the inner workings of the chip, known as its instruction set, have not yet been disclosed, making it difficult to know if or how any x86 patents may have been breeched. The Chinese team hopes to further boost its chip program through collaboration with other companies and researchers. "We still lag behind the international partners a lot," says Xu. "But we are doing our best to join the international community."


njoy ....

New browser from Google !!!

I am not surprised when i see this browser from google ... they call her "Chrome" ... its really looks cool , and perhaps it look more beautiful then IE7 for Vista ,because of no borders like IE or FF !! ...  take a look at screenshot , all boarders are transparent and minimum numbers of buttons ... and that "Google" symbol on top right corner makes me feel more powerful !!!  ( ... err sounds like badly written dialogue script for some evil character , hehehehe )  ...

Like every google apps , its ultra light and super smooth in functioning ... i am not sure , but i slightly feel like , its flying when i surf .. ( ya.. i really "feel" that searching and browsing speed has been increased a little !!! ) ... another feature is multiple homepages , ( we have that inPOGO too so its not a new thing ) ... the punch line is , there is no seach box in it !!! , you can simply search by typing in address bar itself  .... awesome ... it is the feature that i have been dreaming since i start using google search bar , because its really tiresome to go to seach box everytime when you want to search on internet ...  

But now its only for XP and Vista .... and bad news for FF is that , this girl is in limelight now ... download rate of this browers have been reached at rate more then FF and other browsers !!! But i don't understand only one thing ... why google keep their almost every product in BETA form ??? 

anyways .... be sure to take a look at her ...

njoy ...

MEWU - Scene 2 ... Need some Wine !!!

Well , like many other tools of Ubuntu ... Wine is one very useful application ... basically Wine is an emulator which simulates Windows environment ... In common man .. err .. and woman's language , with help of Wine you can run windows application in Ubuntu ... but i don't think its more advanced then VMware ... but still oki to work around with it for basic applications ...

to Install WINE ....

open synaptic manager and find for WINE ... and make for installation ...

or if you are lazy to find out .. then simply open terminal and ...type ..

sudo apt-get install wine


and it will install it ... then just like installing in windows environment ... double click on exe file that you want to install program .. and its installed ... you can access that installed program via Wine menu that is created in Applications menu ... for example here , i have installed Winamp in UBUNTU ..




njoy ....

Keep Track of your BandWidth ...

Throttling torrent traffic is an old news now ... the news of bandwidth limitation is a bit new and upsetting now !!! ... and again that old boy is in news .. "Comcast" ... they have announced that from month of October there will be restriction of 250Gigs total of downloads per month !!! , which simply means you can not download more then 250Gbs in a month ... gasp ... this step is taken to take down those torrent downloads ... but thing is that , right now they are not even offering any sort of bandwidth usage metering so that user can check their bandwidth usage upto some day ...

So , for unfortunate people who are using Comcast (ah, i am lucky at this moment for being user of AT&T , but i am sure that someday , i will be sharing same feelings ) .. there is one software .. BitMeter .. might be very handy ... thought its not very attractive ... but this little piece of junk has everything that you guys will need ... BitMeter's floating graph with simple text displays for real-time downloads and uploads is easy to follow. You can customize the display's color and transparency. BitMeter provides an impressive amount of options and information. You can view summaries of network activity with hourly, daily, and monthly breakdowns, or receive audio notifications that can be set by transfer size and direction. The built-in calculator is useful for computing the speed and size of download and upload activities. You can create automatic or manual backups of the program to easily restore history and settings, and there's an ISP Restrictions configuration panel that can configured with a minimum of hassle.




This lets you set a limit that can be based on downloads only, or total traffic. It also offers notification based on the percentage of your quota that has been downloaded, and the start date of the quota.

njoy ...