AMD’s Bulldozer Processors

Processor Company AMD has announced shipments of its first processor based on its Bulldozer architecture.

AMD’s Bulldozer is it’s answer to Intel’s high end i7 processor. The first chips, codenamed “Interlagos”, have been in production since August, and are compatible with AMD’s Opteron 6100 Series platforms and architecture.

The chips are the world’s first 16-core x86 processor, and are part of AMD’s complete product refresh. Rather than being upgrades to AMD’s rather tired architecture, the chips have been designed from the ground up by the world’s second most important processor company.

“The flexible new ‘Bulldozer’ architecture will give Web and datacenter customers the scalability they need to handle emerging cloud and virtualization workloads.”

 Bulldozer Design Breakdown

* Two tightly coupled x86 Processing Engines Per Module

(1 x Module = Dual-Core, 2 x Module(s) = Quad-Core, 4 x Module(s) = Octa-Core etc…)

* Advanced Multi-Threading Technology

* Two 128-bit FMAM Floating Point Units Per Module

(Can be combined into one 256-bit FPU per module)

* Shared L2 Cache among each module

* Shared L3 Cache among all cores

* Advanced Quad-Channel Memory Sub-System

(IMC – Integrated Memory Controller)

* Higher Memory Level Parallelism

* Two Integer Cores each w\ 4 pipelines Per Module

* DDR3-1866

* 8MB of L3 Cache (L2 Cache unknown)

* 32nm SOI w/ High-K Metal Gate (HKMG)

* Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)

(Supports 256-Bit FP Operations via AVX)

* Hyper Transport Technology 3.1

(3.20 GHz, 6.4 GT/s, 51.6 GB/s, 32-channel link)

* Socket AM3r2 (Socket AM2, AM2+ & AM3 compatible)

* Min-Max Power Usage – 10-100 watts

* and so on…

installing Windows 7 from USB Drive

To do away with extra weight and to make netbooks/notebooks thinner, manufacturers are coming up with models that do not contain an optical drive. So, what to do if you have one of these and want to reinstall or upgrade your OS? Well how about creating a bootable USB drive! There are two perquisites for this process.

First, you need a 1 GB or more USB drive, and second, you need OS installation files (CD/DVD or .iso image). Start by plugging in the USB drive and then open command prompt (run command prompt as an administrator). Write ‘diskpart’ and hit Enter. This will open a new command prompt window. In this window, type ‘list disk’ and then note down disk number of your USB drive (disk 1). Next, run the following commands in sequence:

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs
assign
exit

Once you have assigned a drive letter for your USB drive (i: in this case), open a new window for command prompt. Insert Windows DVD in an optical drive or mount an image of the same in a virtual drive (f:), and run the following commands:

f:
cd boot
bootsect.exe /nt60 i:
exit

Copy all files from Windows installation media (DVD) or image on the USB drive (i:). Now you can use this drive to install Windows on any machine. Simply change the boot sequence of the machine you plan to install Windows 7 on to USB and off you go.

Now Upload and View Videos in Google Docs

Google Docs is becoming a more robust cloud-based productivity suite, and the addition of uploading, storing and viewing videos is a boon for sharing corporate presentations and the like.

It’s also a slick way to skirt your company’s firewall on streaming video sites such as YouTube.

Google started allowing users to upload any type of file to Google Docs in January 2010, but until recently you couldn’t watch the videos you stored in-browser. Now a built-in player supports video files up to 1 GB with a maximum resolution of 1920×1080. Flash is required to stream the following supported files:

• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files – (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
• .AVI (many cameras use this format – typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
• .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
• .WMV
• .FLV (Adobe – FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

Uploading to Google Docs may not have too many advantages over doing the same via YouTube. However–and far be it for me to suggest doing something unwholesome–I have yet to read anywhere that Google runs its smut filter past uploaded content, so take that for what it’s

worth.

Facebook Users get McAfee security

McAfee security software for Facebook users

Facebook’s 350 million users will now get six months of free McAfee Internet Security Suite, Computer-security giant McAfee and Facebook are taking a big step of bring up necessary security for millions of Facebook users. They announced McAfee will create a complimentary six-month subscription of its Internet Security Suite software available to Facebook users.

After completion of six months free subscription, Facebook users will be entitled for a special discounted subscription for the McAfee Internet Security Suite, which offers PCs security from viruses, spyware and other online threats.

In order to use this offer, which extends to one’s complete PC, Facebook users have to become fans of McAfee’s Facebook page.

Separately, Facebook has created a new procedure that needs users to take steps to re-secure their account in the event it is hacked. In addition, the both the companies are together developing educational content for the Facebook Security Page.

The companies are teaming up since nearly 80% of users of Facebook don’t have an updated anti-virus program, a functioning firewall and anti-spyware software, according to McAfee. What is more, half of consumers have an expired anti-virus program, it says.

McAfee Internet Security Suite will primarily be offered to Facebook users in the U.S., UK, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.

Google’s Online News Story

Google, NY Times and Wash Post come together To Develop Online News Story

Search engine giant Google is teaming up with The Washington Post and The New York Times to create a new online tool that is intended to rank articles on major news stories as they develop. The feature, named as Living Stories, is proposed to offer a varied online news experience by creating a particular page where readers can tag on one story line in the news as new developments happen.

Living Stories groups coverage of a particular subject matter from a news organization under a single URL, or Web address.
The terrorist attack on Mumbai, India last year, for instance, is presented on a single Web page with links to news articles, opinion columns, photos, video, graphics and other material.

The page includes a synopsis of important developments with links to Times stories, a timeline of significant events, profiles of important players and links to archived stories such as coverage of the recent developments regarding the same.

“A regular newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with added information of decreasing importance,” says Google. “Information from earlier reporting is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories makes a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.”

Users can sign up for e-mail alerts that will go out when a given page is updated. They can also select how they prefer to view the articles on the page — by “most important,” “newest first” or “oldest first” — and scroll up or down through a list of stories.
Living Stories are currently only available in English, and are not designed to necessarily support mobile devices yet.

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Google Unveils Real-Time Results With Photo Search Features

Starting today, Google has made some changes to its search engine by “officially” adding support for real-time search results. This new addition comes in the wake of sites like Twitter and Facebook that are updated with posts and tweets, by the second.

The service will be introduced gradually to all Google users and over the next few days, you will be able to see “new” updates that have been posted seconds ago, in Google Search results. The search results will include items from recently updated blogs, news articles and of course tweets and status updates. This is a step up from Google’s earlier option where news and articles from only “a few minutes” ago only appeared in search results by default. The new option will work in a way that is similar to Twitter’s existing search feature – albeit on a larger and broader scale. Twitter and Facebook, both have confirmed that they have signed a deal with Google to make real time results a reality. Earlier, Twitter had also struck a separate deal with Microsoft to make live updates available in the Bing search engine.

Real time search results will prove useful during situations when people need updated information constantly, and aggregate them from various sources.

YouTube makes videos “Feather” light

YouTube launched an experimental “Feather” feature on Thursday that slims down online videos for delivery to places where the Internet is unable to handle heavy data traffic.

“One of our priorities is ensuring that videos always load and playback quickly,” YouTube engineer Chris Zacharias said in a blog post.

“Let’s face it: in this age of instant gratification, even several seconds of loading time can feel like an eternity.”

YouTube recently began serving high-definition videos rich with data that could slow play if Internet bandwidth or computer processing power is low.

The world’s most popular online video sharing service pointed out that there are countries where Internet bandwidth is tight, slowing downloads.

YouTube Feather is an “ultra-light watch page” launched at the Google-owned firm’s TestTube “ideas incubator.” Feather limits features available to viewers and trims the amount of data downloaded by computer browsers.

“All of this results in a user experience that aims to keep things simple and the videos loading and playing quickly,” Zacharias said.

“If we see adoption go up along with improvements in latency, we’ll look to roll this out of TestTube and make it more widely available.”

People were invited to try Feather at youtube.com/feather_beta.

At last Gmail gets Offline Attachment Support

Google has sat up and listened to users griping about the lack of an attachments feature in its offline version of Gmail by finally adding the option.

Users who have Offline Gmail enabled (it’s not a default feature) will now see all their mail flowing through the outbox whether on or offline, said Google.

The only thing offline Gmailers won’t be able to do with attachments is to include “inline images”.

Mountain View is dead excited about its latest feature, and the world’s largest ad broker is calling on Gmail users to send pictures of themselves sat in igloos or at airports using the web mail client when offline.

Google finally added offline support to Gmail in January this year, when the firm rolled out an “experimental feature in Gmail Labs” to US and UK users.

Before then, many had been patiently waiting for the manacles to come off of Gmail, because it had been limited by the fact that messages could only be accessed online.

Google entered the offline web app market in May 2007 with the release of its browser add-on project Gears.

At the time the firm marked out clear intentions to enter territory dominated by Microsoft by offering free, open source apps such as docs and spreadsheets that work without an internet connection.

However, it took Google over 18 months to include email in its Gears project. In that time the company suffered several major outages in Gmail that perhaps best illustrated the limitations of storing users data up in the cloud

Virtual Desktop Solutions from VMware

VMware Inc, a global leader in virtualization solutions, today announced new initiatives around its core products – VMware View, the VMware vCenter Product Family, and VMware vSphere.

“We are offering our customers one platform for all of their IT and virtualization needs, from deployment to management and support. With new offerings VMWare hopes to drive ‘business infrastructure virtualization’ adoption in India and help enterprises to shift focus from maintenance to enhancing efficiency and innovation”said,  T Srinivasan, managing director, VMware India and SAARC.

Business infrastructure virtualization enables organizations to virtualize all IT assets – from desktop, through the data center and extending out to the cloud – by leveraging a common virtualization platform and set automated management processes. This effective remove boundaries both within the data center, as well as across the operating infrastructure of the businesses.

The VMware MD said that in order to make virtualization complete across all the departments, VMware has worked with a number partners companies how include right from chip makers to server manufactures and also networking companies.

According to Srinivasan, most businesses today equate virtualization with capital expenditure savings that results from server consolidation. With a broader vitalization strategy, as defined by business infrastructure virtualization, Indian businesses increasingly realize that they can achieve even more, through saving from financial,human and the energy.

On the virtualization adoption by Indian enterprises, Srinivasan said though the enterprises had been initially reluctant to adopt virtualization, “the time has come for virtualization. Today, we are at a  maturity curve, he added.

Google news for mobile

Google Introduces new rich and personalize version of ‘Google News’ for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. Google always try to deliver consistent user experience across products and devices and acts upon according to the feedback. Google News for mobile is now available in 29 languages and 70 editions.

Google has come up with an entire new version of Google News for mobile. Google Introduces new version of News for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users.

Google has already introduced a mobile-optimized version of Google News for other phones, such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, and trying to fuse more improvements to those in the near future

Google new version of ‘News ‘ anticipates the same richness and personalization on your phone as Google News provides on desktop.

The application’s homepage presents more stories, sources, and images. The new version not only promises to keep a familiar look and feel for users but also allows the users to search favorite sections, discover new ones, search articles and play videos in fewer clicks.

Google this new version also delivers all the personalization of Google News reader on desktop to mobile phone.

*(The information is shared by Google official mobile blog post)