Sunday, February 17, 2008

The Missing Perfect Processor

On the 23rd of January, I sent an email to the editor of PC Magazine Middle & Near East. Well, I like the content of this letter, so I decided that I would post it as a blog entry here, so here you go.

I read your February issue article on the "CPU Road Map 2008", and I started thinking about how far we are from the perfect processor. I'm not talking about future processors that are going to have gazillion cores and do everything from simple arithmetics to 3D graphics processing. I'm speaking about the processors that we could have this day with today's technology.

Intel is better in developing transistors; they keep producing smaller transistors each day, giving the possibility of putting more cores on the same chip and reducing power consumption and heat (especially after they created the High-k metal transistor). Another thing is that Intel supports DDR3 with it's greater speed (even though the FSB is still slower than the fastest DDR3) and lower power, while AMD moved to DDR2 recently.

AMD is, and was always, better in their processor architecture. They created the 64 bit PC processor more than a year before Intel adopting it to make it's own EM64T, AMD is not using an FSB to access memory, which is a great advantage and finally, AMD's Phenom processor is going to be a real Quad-Core processor, and not two dual cores glued together.

With the technology available from both manufacturers, we (the consumers) could have had better processors than we have today, especially that each of the two companies is excelling in something totally different from the other. Unfortunately, since they are competitors, and it's impossible to convince any of the companies of sharing their secrets with the other company, then we are never going to have the perfect processor, because there will always be great differences, that if combined would have produced a far more greater processor.

Well, this was the end of my letter to the editor, and I hope that you like it.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Finally, I won something!!!

Did you know that java ranch is one of the best java communities with one of the best forums around? I'm not saying this because I won a book from them, but because it's one of the largest java communities on the web, where you would find nearly the answer of any java question you want an answer for.

OK, did you know that they have a book promotion that runs nearly every week, where the author of the book goes online to answer users' questions (and of course promote his book)? This promotion runs from Tuesday to Friday, and people who post eligible posts (real questions, answers to questions, discussing the book, etc.) are eligible for winning a copy of that book. Every promotion, there are four winners, and this weeks promotion was on Struts 2 Design and Programming: A Tutorial.

Guess who's one of the winners? IT'S ME!!! Finally I won something, and I'm really glad, to the extent that I'm blogging about it, at the time where the project I'm working in is on crisis, and with more than 8 (yes eight) draft blog posts that I want to still write. Any how, I'm happy, and I thought of letting you know :D.