Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3 released
Mozilla have just released another update to their Firefox web browser - As per usual, this latest update fixes a handful of security vulnerabilities within the browser itself, while also urging users to update their Adobe Flash plug-ins via a new update mechanism to help combat security vulnerabilities within that application.
As per usual, Firefox 3.5.3 is now available from the Mozilla web site, while existing Firefox users should find that their browser updates automatically.
Read More ...
Apple revamps iPod line-up, launches iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1
Despite well and truly sitting pretty at the top of the portable audio and video player market, it seems that Apple have no intention of resting on their laurels, with yesterday seeing the launch of a new generation of iPods as well as a new version of iTunes, while on the iPhone side of things iPhone OS 3.1 was also announced.
Leading up to today's announcement, Apple went on a price slashing spree for its current iPod models as witnessed by the second generation 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB iPod touch models dropping from $229, $299, and $399 respectively to $189, $249, and $279 respectively. The lower pricing makes room for Apple third generation iPod touch lineup.
As expected, the 3G iPod touch lineup comes packing the same processing platform (32GB and 64GB models only) as the recently introduced iPhone 3GS. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Apple wants the iPod touch to have a camera just yet. The new iPod touch models start at $199 for the 8GB model, then ramp up to $299 for the 32GB model and $399 for the 64GB model – there is no longer a 16GB model in the lineup.
Apple's iPod nano also got a revamp and is now available in capacities up to 16GB. While the basic design remains unchanged from the previous model, the new iPod nano gains a camera for pictures/video, a microphone, and a speaker for audio playback. And what may be one of the most improbable features added to an iPod (after years of discounting the feature) is the addition of an FM radio tuner on the iPod nano. The 8GB iPod nano is priced at $149 and the 16GB model is priced at $179.
Daily Tech have all of the details in full, while iTunes 9.0 and the iPhone OS 3.1 update are available for download now.آ Beware though, as per usual Apple are trying to slip a Safari install into the iTunes update process. Meanwhile, all of the new iPods announced by Apple should be available to purchase in retail stores.
Read More ...
Computational efficiency in modern processors investigated
We all know that both modern CPUs and GPUs are fast in relative terms, but how efficient are they?آ Real World Technologies investigates just this question in theoretical terms.
These two charts provide some rather interesting insights into the performance efficiency for GPUs and Cell, which tend to be on older 65nm and 55nm processes. ATI nee AMD’s 55nm RV770 is clearly the top of the heap with about 3x better performance/watt and 4x better performance/mm2 than the best high performance CPUs and Nvidia’s GT200b. One advantage for the RV770 is faster GDDR5 memory, which reduces the area used for external interfaces substantially. The architecture of the entire RV770 family (including RV670 as well) emphasizes density. Front-end logic for control flow, instruction fetch and decode and the shared memory is used more sparingly than other GPUs; there are only 10 cores (called SIMDs) – each providing 24 GFLOP/s. Rather than spend hardware resources, almost all scheduling is exposed and pushed to the compiler and programmer; within each SIMD is an array of VLIWs which require a certain degree of instruction level parallelism (ILP). The one downside of this approach is that utilization on real workloads tends to suffer, which is not apparent in our analysis, but worth highlighting. The 55nm RV670 is less impressive, but still very good. The cores are less dense and it uses more die area for GDDR3 memory interfaces.
You can read the full article here.
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment