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Thursday, February 26, 2009

Windows Washing: Microsoft Talks Up Tweaks Following Public Beta

Microsoft has detailed some of the changes it plans to make following its public beta of the Windows 7 OS. Meanwhile, remarks made by the president of a Taiwan laptop manufacturer suggested the final version of Windows 7 may arrive as soon as this fall. Vista, however, remains the company's flagship product, and as such it needs regular service. An SP2 release candidate has been made available to select parties.


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With its big round of public beta testing out of the way, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) More about Microsoft is apparently moving quickly to the next milestone on the Windows 7 upgrade path. On Thursday, the company revealed some of the changes users can expect to see in the upcoming Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) -- possibly the penultimate stage prior to the release of a final product -- in its Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Looking at feedback garnered during the first round of public beta testing, Microsoft has been working on incorporating some needed changes.

"It should be no surprise, but the Release Candidate for Windows 7 will have quite a few changes, many under the hood, so to speak, but also many visible. The goal of having a fully functional Beta was to make sure we received reliable feedback and not a lot of 'hey this doesn't work at all' sorts of reports. This has allowed us to really focus on delivering a refined RC where the changes we made are all the reflection of feedback we have received," wrote Chaitanya Sareen, senior program manager at Microsoft.

Anyone Up for Another Round?

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"The list and breadth of improvements show that they are receiving and listening to customer's feedback, but by the same token, the number of changes could be a reason to consider a second beta prior to a release candidate. These changes, while making improvements, touched a wide range of Windows systems and sub-systems," Michael Cherry, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, told TechNewsWorld.

The RC stage, according to Cherry, is the point at which a company has basically stopped tinkering with the code aside from minor alterations and is saying that the code is done save for final testing to weed out the last few bugs.

Among these scores of changes, Microsoft has expanded the Aero Peek touch interface so that users can use it with the Windows Flip -- Alt + Tab -- function. The company has added new keyboard shortcut for the taskbar functions that will enable users to launch and switch between programs. Needy window alerts for applications requiring a PC user's attention are now flashier. The software maker has also enhanced the OS's networking feature to make it easier for users to find and connect to networks.

"These will certainly enhance the product. It's sort of like gilding the lily. As Microsoft goes into RC, the concern is that adding a new feature could break something else. When you hit the RC cycle, you want it to be very stable very fast," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

"I've been very pleased with [Windows 7] so far. Aero Peek is a feature that I really like and have been using a lot, and I can't think of any new feature that I would want them to add now," he told TechNewsWorld.

Just in Time for Back to School?

Even as Microsoft gears up to push out the near-final RC for Windows 7, an the president of an OEM partner made news Thursday by reportedly indicating at an investor's meeting that Windows 7 could be released as early as September or October of this year. The comment was made by Ray Chen, president of Compal Electronics, a Taiwan-based laptop maker.

With speculation building that the RC could be launched as early as the second week in April, a fall release that coincides with back-to-school sales and a ramp up to the 2009 holiday season is not impossible, according to Enderle.

"They could probably make it by June. September is the drop-dead date. Remember, they went through a fast beta cycle. They just did one beta, which means that the beta came through very clean. If the beta comes through clean, that means it's likely the RC candidates will also come through clean," he pointed out.

If Microsoft does not have any major issues during the course of the RC testing and does only one RC as opposed to three -- which could push the release date to September -- they could come in early, Enderle continued. "September is drop-dead, but it's very likely they could release this before."

Impressed with the overall stability of the Windows 7 code, Cherry concurred, saying that he can "see no problem with Microsoft meeting its promised dates, or even releasing earlier if things continue to go well."

Many partners, Cherry continued, would be thrilled to see a release in time to offer hardware and software for Windows 7 in time for the 2009 holiday season. "But I don't think Microsoft will release prematurely to meet that target unless the testing shows they have a stable, releasable version," he continued.

Servicing Vista

Meanwhile, Microsoft also announced the upcoming availability of the second service pack (SP2) for its Vista and Windows Server 2008 OSes. Currently available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers for testing prior to its final release, Vista SP2 RC will be made broadly available for testing by the general public in the near future, according to the company.

A compendium of security 10th Annual Online Fraud Report. Online Payment Fraud Trends, Merchant Practices and Benchmarks. Get your copy today., feature and performance updates created since the previous service pack, Vista SP2 will also include support for new types of hardware and emerging standards, Microsoft said.

"It appears to be a more traditional service pack, which is a collection of fixes for security and non-security items, with a few feature changes to accommodate new hardware that most customers will want to install to eliminate having to add many independent patches," Cherry explained

Sunday, February 8, 2009

List of Intel Pentium Dual-Core microprocessors


The intel pentium dual core brand refers to mainstream x86-architecture microprocessors intel. These are based on either the 32-bit(yonah) or 64-bit cores, targeted at mobile or desktop computers respectively. A newer series of mobile Pentium Dual-Core CPUs is a half-cache Merom.

The Intel Pentium Dual-Core processors, E2140, E2160, E2180, E2200, and E2220 use the Allendale core, a stripped-down version of the Conroe core, featuring 1MiB L2 cache natively as compared to the Conroe core which features 4MiB L2 Cache natively. Intel has shifted its product lines having the Core 2 line as Mainstream/Performance, Pentium Dual-Core as Mainstream, and the new Celeron (based on the Conroe-L core) as Budget/Value. The E2xxx processors have half of their L2 cache disabled, from 2MiB to 1MiB.

Multi-core


A multi-core processor (or chip-level multiprocessor, CMP) combines two or more independent cores into a single package composed of a single (IC), or more dies packaged together. A dual-core processor contains two cores, and a quad-core processor contains four cores. A multi-core microprocessor implements in a single physical package. A processor with all cores on a single die is called a monolithic processor. Cores in a multicore device may share a single coherent at the highest on-device cache level ( or may have separate caches (e.g. current dual-core processors). The processors also share the same interconnect to the rest of the system. Each "core" independently implements optimizations such as execution, and . A system with n cores is effective when it is presented with n or more . The most commercially significant (or at least the most 'obvious') multi-core processors are those used in (primarily from Intel and AMD) and game consoles (e.g., the eight-core processor in the and the three-core in the ). In this context, "multi" typically means a relatively small number of cores. However, the technology is widely used in other technology areas, especially those of as and in GUI

The amount of performance gained by the use of a multicore processor depends on the problem being solved and the algorithms used, as well as their implementation in software . For so-called problems, a dual-core processor with two cores at 2GHz may perform very nearly as quickly as a single core of 4GHz. Other problems, though, may not yield so much speedup. This all assumes, however, that the software has been designed to take advantage of available parallelism. If it hasn't, there will not be any speedup at all. However, the processor will better since it can run two programs at once, one on each core.

Intel Core 2


The Core 2 brand refers to a range of intel consumer 64 bit single- and dual-core and 2x2 (Multi-Chip Module) quad-core cpu with the x86-64 instruction set, based on the Intel , derived from the laptop processor. two interconnected cores, each similar to those branded . The 2x2 dual-die quad-core CPU had two separate dual-core dies (CPUs)—next to each other—in one quad-core package. The Core 2 relegated the brand to a , and reunified laptop and desktop CPU lines, which previously had been divided into the Pentium .

The Core microarchitecture returned to lower clock rate and improved processors' usage of both available clock cycles and power compared with preceding Core microarchitecture provides more efficient decoding stages, execution units, , and buses, reducing the Core 2-branded , while increasing their processing capacity. Intel's CPUs have varied very wildly in power consumption according to clock rate, architecture and semiconductor process, shown in the tables.

The Core 2 brand was introduced on July 27, 2006, comprising the Solo (single-core), Duo , Quad and Extreme (dual- or quad-core CPUs for enthusiasts) branches, during 2007. Intel Core 2 processors with vPro technology (designed for businesses) include the dual-core and quad-core branches.

The brand became immediately successful. The processors were introduced into Apple's popular MacBook series of notebooks, at the time Apple CEO justified the entire switch to Intel from IBM's processors by the Core 2 series' ability to provide high performance at low power consumption, renaming the "PowerBook" series to MacBook to note their lowered power consumption. The series of processors reasserted Intel's role in the processor market after a period in which processors began significantly encroaching on Intel's market share. The processor series became so successful that AnandTech Senior Editor Gary Kay coined the phrase "Conroe" as a verb to describe the releasing of a product that eclipses the competition in a previously hotly contested market.

Intel Core


The Core brand refers to intel's 32bit mobile dualcore 86 that derived from the processors. The processor family used a more advanced version of the pentiumintel p6 monoarchitecture It emerged in parallel with the (Intel P68) microarchitecture of the pentium 4 brand, and was a precursor of the Core 2 branded CPUs. The Core brand comprised two branches: the Duo (dual-core) and Solo (Duo with one disabled core, which replaced the Pentium M brand of single-core mobile processor).

The Core brand was launched on jan 5th 2006 by the release - Intel's first mobile (low-power) processor. Its dual-core layout closely resembled two interconnected pentium branded CPUs packaged as a single (piece) silicon chip ((IC) Hence, the 32-bit microarchitecture of Core branded CPUs - contrary to its name - had more in common with Pentium M branded CPUs than with the subsequent of branded CPUs. Despite a major effort by intel starting January 2006, some computers with the Yonah core continued to be marked as Pentium M.

The Core Duo is also famous for being the first Intel processor to ever be used in Apple Macintosh computers. Core Duo signified the beginning of Apple's shift to Intel processors across their entire line.

In 2007, intel began branding the Yonah core intended for mainstream mobile computers as pentium dual-core. These are not to be confused with the desktop CPUs also branded as Pentium Dual-Core.