Are the days of Intel numbered (part II) ….

While continuing from where I left of the last time , I will make sure that this this post (unlike the last one) is not too huge . i believe that serving small peices of cucumber is always better than stuffing the turkey all at once !!! Once again I must say that I am neither a supporter of Intel nor of AMD .
Working out the economics ::

Intel recently got rid of 10 % of it’s worforce (about 10k workers . ) As part of their policy , they had to pay the severance costs (severance cost :: the amount paid to an emplyee as part of a renumeration package when he is fired for no fault of his .) and it cost them a whopping $ 0.2 billion dollars . If Intel has to avoid Bankruptcy , it has to fire the rest of the workforce and for that it needs about $ 1.6 billion , a sum which is hard to come by for Intel in such hard times .

Moral of the story —> Is the bankruptcy of Intel inevitable ??

AMD coming of age or the “janazaa” of Intel ::

The chief architects of opteron , alpha , power , MIPS , Itanium …. all today are in AMD camp .

Mr. Sharikou on various occasions has pointed out this fact — take any intel employee and ask him to tell honestly what he feels ….. and this what he will say , “I wish I could put the hyper transport technology in Intel , but I cannot , for I work in a company which is today driven by commercialism and not technology . “

AMD had recently taken over ATi . ATi is to Intel in the same as nVidia is to AMD . In other words , by taking over ATi , AMD will flex it’s muscles and get a killer enterprise out of ATi + AMD

Are the days of Intel numbered ??

A word of note :: I have neither been a fan of AMD nor of Intel . It is said that AMD and Intel processors have always been an intrigue for any seasoned computer architecture teacher or student or researcher . In what follows I present a small interpretation of what is happening in the world of Intel , a world which is steadily shrinking ….. inch by inch …In order to make the whole thing more readable I have decided to break the whole article into parts and publish them one at a time . Hope everyone likes reading it !!!

It is a known fact that the last few months have been nothing short of tragic for Intel . Plummeting stock prices , fast vanishing profits and severe thrashing at the hands of AMD . But of late , more and more things are surfacing , which have only raised doubts on Intel , their working , their so called “cutting edge research” etc .. etc .. Let us look at some of the these factors , some in detail .

1. Stock prices AMD Vs Intel :: Anyone who made an investment in AMD an year and a half ago would be happy beyond his wildest dreams and those who made a similar investment in Intel would be “brooding” at ways to average their investment and to get out of the stock as soon as possible .

2 . The opteron variant of AMD processor , pitted against Xeon of Intel (both targetted for the high end server segment) has some really neat features (I read this peice of news on a hardware review site and I really don’t have any idea what these “neat features” are ) which in addition to obediently completeting all the work given to them also do some serious “whipping the ass” of Intel’s Xeon processor . Recently Intel announced a few changes in Xeon which has made it a clone of the AMD processor . A clone which is priced at a higher price than it’s parent (AMD) !!!!

3. Till recently the mobile segment was the only saving grace for Intel . But in it’s rush to monopolise the wireless market with the introdution of Wi-Max , it has done more harm than good . The news of exploding dells and ibms have been splashed in newspapers across the world and while many people put the blame squarely on the batteries , some people say that the Intel’s core duo processor may have been responsible for the explosion . A guy actually presented an article in which he talked about pins in the processors melting . With the help of a graph (plotted with heat produced Vs time) he showed that core duo processors register a spike after some hours which would melt the pins and stuff and eventually cause explosion .

More information ::: google , anandtech review , etc .. etc …

I personally have a dell laptop with an Intel core duo processor (with the added fact that I live in a tropical country) and frankly speaking i have decided to play safe rather than be sorry by ensuring that laptop doesnot stay switched on for more than 3 hrs. at a stretch ……..

4. Centrino’s wireless chipsets donot take any precautionary measure against infiltrations . This was demonstrated by a hacker who managed to hack into a centrino laptop and tried to run a rogue program , which caused the processor to jump to 100 % usage and would not respond anymore . All these happened to a guy travelling on a flight . The laptop had literally become a furnace and he had to call the stewards and take their help in dumping the laptop . Moral :: Most airlines have made it manadatory for centrino and core duo owners to keep their laptops switched off while flying .

Result :: Centrino and core duo owners have become second class citizens . With their laptops exploding , causing fire in trucks , homes and putting passengers aboard a flight at risk . It would take a lot to redeem the ir lost pride …….

To be continued …….

Looking at life the OS way

Ok … every now and then I get into this vogue of seeing things around me in a different way …… Let me take up one such incident .

Situation ::

After attending the Signals and systems class , I went to the coffee shop (a small stall in front of my hostel selling tea , coffee and some arbit eatables ) to grab a samosa or a puff ( but definitely not a kachori ) and saw that there were already quite a few guys there (ok … before u jump to conclusions , let me tell you my college has both boys and girls and I refer to both as guys ; in short guys in my definition includes girls too …..) . Let us look at what is happening there .

People are queueing up and try to force a 10 rupee note into the hands of the shopkeeper and ask him to give this , that and what not and suddenly this person who sits in the server room comes up and asks for a cup of coffee . Immediately the coffee shop guy goes about making a cup of coffee . In other words , the person from the server room has got a higher priority ….. thus we see Dynamic scheduling of active processes in action here .

A person takes out Rs.50 and asks the coffee shop guy to pass out 4 puffs and 4 teas . So while the coffee shop guy is taking out each puff and putting it on the paper plate , one more person turns up , takes a look at the situation , keeps a 5 rupee coin at the counter and takes one of those plates . In other words this is what I call Cycle stealing ….. the guy took advantage of the two processes waiting for a signal and scampered away with the puff !!!!

So when the guy took the plate (with a smirk on his face) , what did the shopkeeper do ?? ….. He stopped his activity to take a look at that person and collect that 5 rupee coin , well no prizes for guessing (not because the answer is trivial but because I don’t have any prizes to offer now !!!!) he raised an interrupt …. how ingenious of him !!!!

What would the shopkeeper do when when there is too much junta around the shop ??? He would take 2 more people and do the job together …… multicore processing !!! ….. I just went to his shop about 20 min. back and saw that it was running as a dual core machine !!!

When there are many people at the counter repeatedly shouting (in a very graceful manner …. ) what they need , some people use hindi and some people ( like me ) use telugu (though I don’t talk in telugu generally , being very poor in it ….. ) in the hope that he would listen and comprhend telugu much before doing so for hindi . In other words we are trying to use an architecture friendly language …. much like using NASM for intel and SPIM for mips microprocessers …….

Oh oh !!! …….. time to kill all the processes

sashidhar@localhost ~] kill -9 0

(mis)Interpretations of “The Matrix”

Frustrated by the fact that I had no decent topic to write on , I have decided to talk about this movie in my first blog entry . Having watched the movie for the nth time , with some research (call it “googling”) and my own thinking (I too can think , man !!! 8)) , I have gathered these facts . I must say that these facts pertain only to the first part and the discussion of the second and the third part might surface later ……. later depends on how often I would actually blog , and it is too early to speculate

The directors , “the wachowski brothers” are strong supporters of jews . What else could have inspired them to keep the name of the last human settlement “Zion” . Zion here is equalled to Isreal and the dark forces around Zion are equalled to the arab countries around it .

Neo “one” Anderson :: Okay the next point was not my original thought and I had come across it while surfing through Greek mythology sites . Andros in greek means god and neo is for new . Thus the name Neo Anderson would mean “new son of god” which speaks tons and possibilly quintals about why the duo chose that name .

Trinity :: Here Trinity has no direct relation with the trinity of jesus ; god , the holy spirit and god , the holy father . The new testament in order to show jesus in a much greater aura started the concept of the trinity and just like jesus (the god) is nothing without bible and new testament which really “brought him back to the world” , Neo (the god) is nothing without Trinity who actually brings him back to the world .

Morpheus :: Morphe is the greek god of dreams . Here Morpheus brings Neo to the real world from a “dream land” and thus his name is justified .

Nebuchadnezzer :: I’m not too sure about this , but this is all I can think of …… Nebuchadnezzar was the same king of Baylonia who built “the hanging gardens of baylonia” for his wife and who is projected as a cruel person in most scriptures

Cypher :: The guy who killed half the crew is probably derived from “cipher” —> difficult to decode . A bit of googling also told me cipher in arabic means zero , which for some reasons the directors thought best fits the description of Cypher .

It would be great if someone tells me the fundaa behind the other names in the movie , and point out mistakes ( if any …… which I seriously doubt )

Farah Khan to choreograph Shakira !!!!

Farah khan will choreograph shakira when she performs “Hips don’t lie” in “bollywoodized” style on the eve of MTV Video music awards . Everybody right from shakira to the chorus dancers wil be dressed in ghagra-cholis . Hope this one doesn’t become another Kajra-re . The original one in which shakira shakes her hips in the latino style is simply too superb (even my mom says so …..) Shakira will be in contention for quite a few awards . If you want to have your say in these matters you can always go to MTV’s site and vote for your fav artiste . Make sure you have the flash plugins installed . The nominees for the video of the year are ::

Christina Aguilera, “Ain’t No Other Man”
“Back To Basics”

Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Dani California”
“Stadium Arcadium”
Madonna, “Hung Up”
“Confessions On A Dance Floor”

Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean, “Hips Don’t Lie”
“Oral Fixation Vol. 2″
Panic! At The Disco, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”
A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!