Tag Archive for 'multicore'

BitStories 2008-06-27: Intel and Vista, Firefox 3, Snow Leopard, SSDs, FriendFeed, and More

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 27, 2008
. 3 Comments

Here’s this week’s show! Have a listen, and check out the download/subscribe links and detailed show notes below.

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This week’s show is about 47 minutes long and weighs about 42MB (it’s a 128kbps MP3). You can download the file directly, listen using the streaming player above, or (BEST OPTION!!1!) subscribe to the Bit Stories podcast feed in your favorite podcast aggregator (like iTunes). If you subscribe to the feed, you’ll get each show delivered automatically as it becomes available - probably once a week or so, with the occasional bonus video or audio segment thrown in for fun. Plus, we’ll love you forever if you subscribe! :-)

Here are some free-form notes and links for the stuff we talked about this week:

  • Intel’s JF1 Workplace of the future. It isn’t soundproof.
    Josh is not leaving Yahoo.

  • Intel’s Not Deploying Vista (NYTimes).
  • It’s more complex and subtle than “Vista Sucks”. Really.
  • Vista’s not really that bad - we’ve both used it. Stability, tablet features, etc. are much better than XP.
  • Why is Josh not using Vista today? Because he switched to Mac. It’s not that he doesn’t like Vista, it’s that he doesn’t like Windows. :-)
  • Conspiracy Theory #1: Intel is creating a Linux distro for employees. All the big companies are doing it!
  • Conspiracy Theory #2: Does Intel’s processor technology come from aliens? Did they tell us NOT to use Vista?
  • Firefox 3 was released! It set the Guinness record for software downloads in a day - 8+ million. Their servers were smoking craters for a while. Speed, stability, new UI, and memory footprint are much improved?
  • Is Firefox 3 threaded for multicore processors? We don’t know. Tell us!
  • The use of the term “you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting…” Swinging a dead cat is not endorsed by Bit Stories. Besdies, Josh is allergic to cats, except Serious Cat.
  • Snow Leopard news - GrandCentral, OpenCL, LLVM, and smaller app footprints.
  • Is Snow Leopard still going to have Rosetta emulation for PowerPC binaries?
  • Hard drives are only getting bigger and cheaper (can you even BUY a Mac with a drive smaller than 250GB?). So why reduce footprint? SSD (solid state disks).
  • Pay more for Windows on a netbook, or keep the price the same and make the SSD bigger?
  • SSDs are The Future, but they’re still WAY expensive (it’s a $999 option on the MacBook Air).
  • How few moving parts there really are in a laptop (HD and fan)
  • Where do you draw the line for legacy hardware support? Apple pushes the envelope because they control the whole stack. Microsoft has it a LOT harder, because they have to support such a wide variety of hardware.
  • Are Mac users more forgiving when Apple drops legacy support (smacks us around) than when Microsoft does it?
  • Josh cops to being an Apple fanboy
  • It’s a miracle that Windows even works at all, given how many different hardware drivers (of varying quality) that it needs to support.
  • Intel motherboards have finally dropped support for PS/2 ports. Josh is surprised in two directions - that they finally dropped them, and that they’re still around.
  • Incompatibility doesn’t happen as much on Apple, because they control the whole stack. But control comes at the expense of competition.
  • It’s amazing that Apple has let Psystar live for so long.
  • Twitter and Friendfeed
  • Twitter has problems.
  • The term “Plurk-up” is just GROSS.
  • Josh explains how FriendFeed sucks up and aggregates what your friends share, and let you have conversations around any of those things.
  • Josh had been resisting FriendFeed, but two things pulled him in - the conversations that were happening, that he was missing out on, and social gravity. Josh goes where his friends, his network, are. Enough of them are on FriendFeed now to make it worth it.
  • The joy you feel when you discover a new, efficient way to connect with people and read (RSS, Twitter, now FriendFeed)
  • FFToGo.com - nice mobile version
    FriendFeed is the source of all joy in the universe?

  • The addiction factor - isn’t FriendFeed just one more time sink?
  • It’s a balancing act - you have to be judicious on what you follow - feeds, Twitter, or FriendFeed. But the social aspect (things bubble up) of FriendFeed make it more efficient/potent, so you don’t have to search and dig for the interesting/important stuff.
  • The other obstacle - the “real time factor”. Interruptions - tweets pop up, distract.
  • Josh and Brian both have major FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out.
  • You have to train yourself to ignore, and to be compelled to read every. single. thing.
  • Use tools like Summize to track your name, topics, so you don’t miss the REALLY important stuff, and then be OK with the fact that most of the rest of it is a river. Stand in the middle, let it flow by, grab what’s interesting when you have time/attention.
  • FriendFeed helps with FOMO, because the interesting stuff bubbles up
  • Brian and Josh argue about which of us is more ADD.
  • Unread Item Syndrome - all these made up dysfunctions that we have…
  • Use a client like Twhirl or Twitterrific.
  • Be the boss of the tools, not the other way around
  • Training for “social media tools for software engineers” that Josh is working on, Brian to be a Guinea Pig
  • We can geek out over anything - never had a problem filling time. :-)

Are you thrilled that the show is back? Mad that we changed something? Think we suck for being gone so long? Just want to say hi? Post a comment, and let us know! Seriously. We crave the validation that your feedback brings. You have no idea how fragile our self esteem really is… :-)


Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Reading from the Intel Cookbook

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 10, 2008
. 0 Comments

The Apple WWDC 2008 keynote has come and gone, and my wild speculation about what Apple might say about the next version of OS X, 10.6 code named “Snow Leopard” (and affectionately christened “Snot Leopard” thanks to a typo during my WWDC liveblogging ;-) ), that it would be announced as the operating system for a “netbook” or Mobile Internet Device powered by the Intel Atom processor, didn’t come true. In fact, besides a brief reference to an after-lunch WWDC session (under NDA), Steve Jobs didn’t say much about Snow Leopard at all. Since then, a few more details have become available, and Apple has put up a page with the (limited) info:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

Much has been written about the more controversial questions - are they really not adding any new features? Are they going to drop PPC support? Is it going to be 64-bit only (and if so, what about early Intel Core Duo chips that aren’t fully 64-bit capable?). I’ll leave all that to the people who know what they’re talking about. But what strikes me as interesting is that the few fundamental technologies they HAVE discussed looks like a mirror image of the technologies Intel, and specifically, my group Intel Software Network (we’re Intel’s developer community), have been promoting and evangelizing to software developers for quite a while now.

First, I have to cling to my hope and dream that one day, Apple will release something along the lines of a “netbook”, like the Asus Eee PC or the MSI Wind. Something like the MacBook Air, but much smaller. Apple’s throwing fuel on that particular speculative fire with statements like this:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Having recently paved and done a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I can tell you that the operating system itself only takes up about 5.5 GB of hard drive space. Hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price at an astounding rate (did you ever dream you’d be able to pick up a terabyte of disk space for a couple hundred bucks?). So why would Apple care about reducing that 5-6 GB footprint, when drives are huge and cheap? Think SSD. Solid State Disks. Like the ones in the netbook devices. The Asus Eee PC I got to play with a while ago had a 4 GB SSD. Current models have 12 or 20GB. Fast, efficient, and no moving parts. Perfect for mobile devices. But still really expensive - you can get a 64GB SSD in a MacBook Air instead of the much slower 80GB hard drive, but it will cost you a cool $999 for the upgrade. SSDs are coming down in price, but they’re still going to be expensive in any really large sizes for a while. So, if Apple was thinking of doing a Mobile Internet Device or netbook, it makes sense to squeeze OS X down as much as they can, to make, say, an affordable 16GB SSD a viable option that won’t get hogged by just the OS.

Next, there’s the new “Grand Central” technology, that focuses on taking full advantage of multicore processors:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Emphasis mine. Intel Software Network has been banging on the multicore drum for quite a while now, ever since it became clear that the future of processor performance was more and more cores working in parallel, rather than ever-increasing clock speeds. In fact, we have a whole multicore developer community (hosted by my awesome colleague, Aaron Tersteeg) dedicated to multicore programming resources, tools, learning, and access to the Intel experts who literally wrote the book on this stuff. I’m sure as Snow Leopard gets closer, you Mac developers will (hopefully) be seeing a lot more details from both Apple and Intel on how to make your apps sing on many-core processors. It’s the biggest fundamental shift in computing since, say, the x86 architecture became the standard. I can’t wait to see this gain broader acceptance and implementation.

Finally, Apple teases us with this little tidbit on the vaguely-named Open CL (Open Computing Language), apparently aimed at taking advantage of upcoming super-powerful GPUs for other computing tasks:

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

They don’t name any one company’s products or technologies, but it’s well known that Nvidia and Intel are both working on many-core GPUs that support “GPGPU” - General Purpose (Computing) on the GPU. And again, my group, Intel Software Network, has a whole community (this one just freshly minted!) dedicated to what we call Visual Computing. Steve Pitzel hosts this community (Steve has more interesting stories than ANYONE I know - ask him some time!), and the super swanky page design came from our resident web development wizard, Kevin Pirkl. Intel has a little upcoming product called Larrabee that we think is going to really turn the notion of what a GPU is for on its head. Have you noticed how Nvidia has been getting very aggressive towards Intel, some might say even attacking? Yeah, it’s because of Larrabee. And knowing Apple, they’ll be right there, ready to take advantage of all of the advances in the visual computing world. Competition is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s dose of idle speculation, and listening to me play armchair industry analyst. I have to say it feels pretty cool to work for a company (Intel) that has such influence over the world of technology. I get to see SO MANY COOL THINGS in the course of my job, I feel spoiled. And I try to share as much with you as I can - like tomorrow, I’ll be filming demos at the Research@Intel event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. From the previews I’ve seen, some of this stuff is just freaky sci-fi cool. I can’t wait to see it, shoot it, and get it out to you. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if all you have to say is how wrong you think I am. Leave it in a comment! :-)
Crossposted on the Intel Software Network blog