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Many quad-core processors are composed of two separate dies, which means some cached data has to travel outside the processor to get from core to core. That’s an inefficient way to access information. Enter the Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor. Its single-die, 64-bit architecture makes 8MB of fully shared L3 cache readily available to each of the four processor cores. The result is fast access to cache data and greater application performance. Combine that with the other technological advances and you get a Mac Pro that’s up to 1.9x faster than the previous generation.1 System memory is often connected to a processor through a separate I/O controller. But each Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor features an integrated memory controller — another leap forward for workstation system architecture. By connecting memory directly to the processor, the new Mac Pro processors have faster access to data stored in memory, and memory latency is reduced by up to 40 percent. The integrated memory controller, along with fast 1066MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, also gives Mac Pro up to a 2.4x increase in memory bandwidth over previous generations.2 More bandwidth allows for more data to be fed to the processor faster, helping each core spend its time processing data, not waiting for information to arrive. And Error Correction Code (ECC) corrects single-bit errors and detects multiple-bit errors automatically. That’s especially important in mission-critical and compute-intensive environments. The new Mac Pro introduces Turbo Boost: a dynamic performance technology that automatically boosts the processor clock speed based on workload. If you’re using an application that doesn’t need every core, Turbo Boost shuts off the idle cores while simultaneously increasing the speed of the active ones, up to 3.33GHz on a 2.93GHz Mac Pro. The new Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processors support Hyper-Threading, which allows two threads to run simultaneously on each core. So an 8-core Mac Pro presents 16 virtual cores that are recognized by Mac OS X. Performance is enhanced because Hyper-Threading enables the processor to take better advantage of the execution resources available in each core. A new bidirectional, point-to-point connection — called QuickPath Interconnect — gives the Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor quick access to the disk, I/O, and other Mac Pro subsystems. In the new 8-core Mac Pro, there’s a QuickPath Interconnect between the two quad-core processors as well. This connection acts as a direct pipeline, so processor-to-processor data doesn’t need to travel to the I/O hub first. It’s another way the new Mac Pro boosts performance across the board. Based on an industry-leading 45-nm process technology and combined with improved power management capabilities, the new Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processors are more energy efficient than before. So the Mac Pro is faster than ever, while using less energy when idle.
The “Nehalem” advantage.
Memory bottlenecks begone.
Power when (and where) you need it.
The virtue of virtual cores.
Path of least resistance.
Powerfully efficient.
STREAM. Memory throughput.
CINT2006 Rate and CFP2006 Rate.
Integer and floating-point calculation results.
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Monday, April 6, 2009
the Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor
mac book
To build something truly different, you need to work in a truly different way. Apple designers and engineers work together through every stage of product development. It’s a partnership that makes innovation possible. And it’s exactly how the new DSI MacBook Pro Crystal Cover Case Red, 15.4 " Until now, all notebooks were designed the same way. By assembling multiple pieces to create a single enclosure. But once you include all the necessary parts, you add size, weight, complexity, and more opportunities for failure. Solving a problem like this required more than an incremental change. It required a breakthrough. To create the new DSI MacBook Pro Crystal Cover Case Red, 15.4 " Every MacBook starts its life as a single piece of aluminum. View Of course, building only one part creates its own set of challenges. When you have multiple parts that are fastened together, tolerances don’t need to be perfect. You have wiggle room, both literally and figuratively. But when one part is responsible for many functions, it’s critical to manufacture that part with absolute precision, down to the micron. Every time. Millions of times over. There was only one way to achieve this level of precision: mill the unibody from a solid block of aluminum using computer numerical control, or CNC, machines — the kind used by the aerospace industry to build mission-critical spacecraft components. When you pick up a new MacBook, you immediately notice the difference. The entire enclosure is thinner and lighter. It looks polished and refined. And it feels strong and durable — perfect for life inside (and outside) your briefcase or backpack. The thickness of a notebook depends on the technology inside. LCD displays typically use cold cathode fluorescent lamps, or CCFLs, to create light and project a picture onto a screen. But that poses two problems. First, these lamps require more space, so the display can be only so thin. Second, just like the fluorescent lights in your home or office, the ones inside a CCFL display take time to warm up before they reach full brightness. That’s a lose-lose situation. And it’s why Apple engineers chose LED backlight technology for the new DSI MacBook Pro Crystal Cover Case Red, 15.4 " An LED backlight creates the same amount of brightness in less space. So you can make the structure that houses an LED display much thinner. And unlike fluorescent lamps, an LED backlight reaches maximum brightness instantly. Look at the DSI MacBook Pro Crystal Cover Case Red, 15.4 " The new MacBook trackpad has no button because it is the button. That means there’s more room to track, more room to click — left, right, center, and everywhere in between — and one less part. Apple designers and engineers spent countless hours considering things like sensitivity (how much pressure triggers a click?), audio feedback (what does the click sound like?), and friction over the smooth glass surface (what does it feel like?). And that’s just the hardware. Apple software engineers had a large part to play in the development of the trackpad, too. They incorporated Multi-Touch gestures, including swipe, pinch, rotate, and the new four-finger swipe. The result is the largest, smartest, most ergonomic MacBook trackpad ever. It’s one of many details considered and reconsidered during the design process.
Redesigned. Reengineered. Re-everythinged.
Unibody Enclosure
There’s a story behind each part. Take the thumbscoop, for example. It’s the indentation that allows you to open the display. If the scoop is too deep, you put too much pressure on the display to open it. If it’s too shallow, you struggle to open the display. It may seem incidental, but if the thumbscoop is well designed, it makes the difference between a bad experience and a good one. The challenge of the thumbscoop was to create a crisply machined scoop that was still comfortable to use. The designers at Apple worked on hundreds of versions of the thumbscoop — even examining them under an electron microscope — to get it right.
Then there’s the sleep indicator light. An indicator is functional only when it’s indicating something. Look to the right of the thumbscoop. You see nothing. Until you close the display and your MacBook goes to sleep. Then an LED glow appears from inside the enclosure. How? During the CNC process, a machine first thins out the aluminum. Then a laser drill creates small perforations for the LED light to shine through. These holes are so tiny that the aluminum appears seamless when the light is off.
The marriage of electronics and mechanical design makes the new MacBook as advanced on the inside as it is on the outside. The internal architecture has been reengineered from the silicon up. There’s a new logic board. A new chipset. And a new integrated graphics processor — a feat of engineering in itself.
Many notebook computers sacrifice graphics performance in order to save battery life. The new MacBook offers the best of both worlds. The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor provides up to five times the performance of the previous-generation MacBook without draining your battery. So you can experience high-performance graphics ideal for playing 3D games or watching video.
Because Apple designs both the hardware and the software for the new MacBook, it’s easier to improve things like energy efficiency. Software tells the hard drive to spin down when it’s not in use. It tells the display and battery indicator lights to dim in low-light conditions. And it helps decide whether the CPU or the graphics processor would be best suited to the task at hand. That’s the kind of smart, integrated design that sets MacBook apart from other notebooks.
A Greener Notebook
Made from recyclable aluminum and glass, the new MacBook is greener than ever. View
Top-to-bottom integration also makes MacBook greener than other notebooks. Complete control over how the new MacBook is designed, how it’s manufactured, and how it’s packaged gives Apple an environmental edge. Take the MacBook display, for instance. Conventional CCFL displays use mercury to create a backlight and arsenic to prevent irregularities in the glass. The LED-backlit display on the new MacBook, on the other hand, is both mercury- and arsenic-free. LED backlight technology also conserves energy: This display requires 30 percent less power than a CCFL display.
Mercury and arsenic aren’t the only toxins absent from the new MacBook. Many computer manufacturers have only pledged to eliminate polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from their enclosures and circuit boards. Apple is removing not only PVC and BFRs, but all forms of bromine and chlorine throughout the entire MacBook.
Just how green is the new MacBook? It’s ENERGY STAR compliant, which means it meets the government standard for energy efficiency. It’s also earned EPEAT Gold status, the highest standard for environmental performance in the electronics industry. And every new MacBook is shipped in packaging that’s 41 percent smaller than any previous generation. That translates to fewer trees used for boxes and less fuel used to transport more MacBooks on fewer planes. And at the end of its long, productive life, you can recycle almost all of your MacBook.
Only Apple could make a notebook like this. Hardware and software. Design and engineering. Production and manufacturing. They’re all part of a single process at Apple. When you start using your new MacBook, you’ll discover what that means. The light and sturdy unibody protects the components inside. The LED-backlit display — along with the graphics processor that helps power it — gives you faster games and a brilliant canvas for your photos, movies, and more. The glass Multi-Touch trackpad feels as good as it functions. From the smallest detail to the biggest engineering breakthrough, the new MacBook truly is the next generation of notebooks.
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Monday, March 30, 2009
Black In News - Blackberry Curve 8900
Black In News. Popularity "Balckberry (BB)" seem more crowded only in the country. But for the Blackberry Curve 8900, make this step for the fans well as users. Ditelinga fact that the Blackberry is not separated from the words of a PIN, the PIN BB-its ...? Words - words that often sounded more everyday, the material at Bang Ir deliberately to seek Handphone 3G for IndosatM2, the sales center in Bandung, Handphone, the more often a word is heard. Not a luxury anymore.Blackberry Curve 8900 is the entry tag in Black Bang Ir Blog News. Because the view from the BB dibalut with all this dark and chrome, crystal clear screen, no video vocalist John Mayer, the key ingredients of atomic trackball. But unfortunately this is not a BB Bang Ir search, soalnya not have 3G technology is only 2.5 G, which have the support network Quad-Band EDGE, WiFi, GPS, Prosesornya 512Mhz and 3.2 megapixel camera. But see QWERTYnya keyboard, more likely another type of thin. And slots for memory cards up to 16GB can digeber. Wah also advanced. Hopefully Black In News this can serve as reference for the purchase akan Blackberry Curve 8900 this type. But if interested in the design of the fold, there are a Blackberry Pearl 8200 that type 2 megapixel berkamera. In addition Black News In this news also spread that Indosat has issued a product over the two new products monthly Blackberry On Demand Bonus Pulsa Mentari for the user. Contact CS-nya . Nb: BlackBerry operating system OS 4.6 more.... Want to see a picture just click the zoom though its great!    | ||
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
90 seconds from catastrophe
- 23 March 2009 by Michael Brooks
- Magazine issue 2700. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
- For similar stories, visit the Solar System Topic Guide
Related editorial: We must heed the threat of solar storms
A fierce solar storm could lead to a global disaster on an unprecedented scale (Image: SOHO Consortium / ESA / NASA)
IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.
It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
Worse than Katrina
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.
There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.
Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. "From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive." However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.
There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.
The second problem is the grid's interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. "It's just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters," says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. "Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions."
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A licence to print gadgets
Video: See printed circuits in action (Credits: Guido Aelbers, Richard Kirk) This gadget's fold out screen is possible thanks to being able to print flexible electronics (Image: Readius) Innovation is our new column that highlights the latest emerging technological ideas and where they may lead Wallpaper with changing designs, bulbless lamps that shed light from their shades, mediaeval-looking scrolls that unroll to become flexible full-colour displays… These are just a few of the new devices the approaching era of printed electronics could bring. Conventional electronics is somewhat like chipping a sculpture from a block of marble – a large volume of material is laboriously etched away and wasted on the way to the final, rigid design. But squirting out circuits using polymer "ink" from an inkjet print head produces electronics that are less wasteful, flexible and very cheap. Polymer transistors, organic LEDs (OLEDs) and other printed components can already be combined into displays, lights, sensors, batteries, RFID tags and more. But much more is to come. I got a glimpse of the inkjet-printed future last week at a new research centre in Sedgefield, UK, set up to test the potential of exotic printable materials. "Printed electronics potentially has tremendous advantages in terms of costs – perhaps up to three orders of magnitude cheaper than silicon," says Vivek Subramanian of the University of California at Berkeley. What's more, when electronics are no longer rigid and delicate, it is possible to put them into entirely new places. Subramanian and colleagues are working on putting sensors inside wine bottles that radio the content's chemical condition to the checkout. The flexible, thin displays that feature in the ebook readers made by Dutch firm Polymer Vision are another example (see video, top). One version of the Readius prototype unrolls scroll-like from the cellphone-sized gadget, while another has a screen that, when not in use, is wrapped around the device. Impressive, but still only black and white, just like the upcoming printed ebook reader from Plastic Logic we wrote about recently. Similarly the exhibition of the latest printed electronics at the centre in Sedgefield was impressive, but also demonstrated there is clearly more development work to be done. On show were colourful patterned wall panels that provide illumination as well as decoration, and an "active dinner table" with decorative displays beneath each place setting. However, they won't be on sale just yet – the displays currently use high alternating voltages that create radio interference for wireless computing systems. Light-emitting textiles for lampshades and clothing were also on show, but are not yet very bright and were displayed only in a darkened room. Dutch electronics firm Philips says it will be three to five years before the first lamps based on thin sheets of printed polymer LEDs rather than bulbs make it into homes. Between now and then, the "inks" used to print electronic screens and other devices need to improve. But it's already clear that printing will change our idea of what electronics can do, and where they can go. Paul Marks' visit to Sedgefield was funded by the UK's Centre for Process Innovation, a government-supported not-for-profit organisation that owns and operates the Printable Electronics Technology Centre.
Flexible future
Best to come
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