Rise Against Intel

Microprocessors wars have gained interest in me since 4 years ago. Watching two giants in microprocessor technology advancing each other in their field.

My first pc was powered by intel celeron. It was only capable of running windows 98 and ME smoothly while was a little hick-up running windows xp. Then a year later i bought myself and amd athlon xp powered pc. At that time i had no choice but to buy a cheaper processor when i was studying in university. The computer sales person offered me athlon xp 1600+ instead of a superior processor Intel Pentium 4 that was all only a marketing hype.

Athlon XP 1600 feed me enough performance for my task. I was very pleasant to use it for my daily task and equipped with Nvidia Geforce 4 Ti 4200, gaming was great. After a while after reading reviews about pentium 4 performance vs Athlon xp, i was again felt very lucky that i bought the amd product.

Pentium 4 architecture was so flawed by its long pipeline. Pipeline is a list of all stages a given instruction must go thru in order to be fully executed. Compared to the last Generation of Pentium 3 that has only 11 stages, the initial release of Pentium 4 has 20 Stages. In another word it takes longer to execute an instruction compared to Pentium 3 in the same clock cycle. Regardless the weak architecture, it can pump more gigahertz than other architecture. Pentium 4 was made for gigahertz advance instead of instructions per clock. As s result,it can work in higher gigahertz than any other processors but actually slower at the same clock speed.

In marketing view, it had made intel better in performance than its competitor. This marketing hype had won most regular users heart. Such hype like 'more gigahertz more performance'. It sounded like true but inaccurate. Pentium 4 was made to achieve higher gigahertz. It was all its advantage.

Gigahertz consumes more power and it draws more heat. Equipped with Thermal Throttling mechanism, Pentium 4 still managed to survive whenever it gets overheated. This is what was lack in Athlon XP line at that time, making it was labeled as hot processor. But heat and power still become an issues when Intel tried to achieve higher gigahertz with it's pentium 4 line. Such issues have made Pentium 4 discontinued products and later was replaced by new CORE 2 DUO architecture that was developed from Pentium 3 architecture.

Amd was a smaller company with a smaller revenue. They focused in delivering lower costs processors. AMD however was going to the IPC (instruction per clock) path instead. It leads AMD towards producing energy efficient processors. Old heat issues however had made amd products seems inferior compared to pentium 4 that has better manufacturing process.

Sometimes these processor perform much better than earlier release of pentium 4. Palomino generation was released to compete with williamete that was clocked 1.5-1.7 Ghz . Then Throughbred was released to compete with Northwood generation. The latter Northwood was advanced in gigahertz as well as bus speed. It reached 800 mt/s compared to thoroughbred that was only able to reach 400mt/s. Then amd barton was release with larger l2 cache to compete. Larger cache did not affect its performance compare its thoroughbred sibling. But still it was a competitive product. But at that time price / performance ratio had made it a steal. Priced lower than pentium 4 but performing competitively againts pentium 4.

The limitation in Athlon xp architecure did not stop amd from innovating. And about a year after barton they release Opteron processor with 64 bit technology. The first x86 processor that has 64bit capability. It surprised Intel engineers. This gave Intel hard time to copy the technology into their existing Netburst line. The award winning server processor later had been adopted to desktop computing resulting a superior product compared to Netburst architecture (Pentium 4). In the next post i will discuss more about this.

Tab-browsing experience on Windows Explorer

Well now you can have mozilla firefox experience on your Windows Explorer! Well tab-browsing in internet browser is getting common as it's much easier, time saving and use less system resources compared to opening a new window whenever u want to view a different page or website.

How about having tab on your windows explorer? im sure this approach will be as efficient as tab -browsing on today's internet browser. You only have to download and install QT TabBar.

Steps:

1. Download the QT TabBar on your desktop or on your download folder.
2. Create a folder with a suitable name. Like QTTabbar.
3. Copy all the extracted file into the folder.
5. Copy the folder into C:\Program Files or anywhere like to put it.
4. Install Microsoft Net Framework 2.0 or 3.0. (Skip this step if you already have installed Net Framework)
5. open the folder. Run the file InstallerQTTabBar.exe
6. Click Install then exit.
7. Log off windows and log on again.
8. Open windows explorer. Right click on the toolbar, check QT TabBar.
9. Done. Right click on the tab, you can open new tab and you have many more functions.


Now you can view more folders and file on the same windows explorer without having to open a new window.

Safari is hacked!

I just downloaded Safari Public Beta 3, and the next thing i know it got some vulnerability and security flaw. Having safari in windows is like a dream comes true. i don't have to skin my firefox to look like safari like i did before. I hope the bug is fixed as soon as possible.

I read from other blog on a guy found the flaw

safari hacked