News and Views of a Technical Nomad

May

29

On top of my previous article on EDN’s article on X86 prcessors, I have just noticed that the Logic Supply Blog has news that the VIA Isaiah was officially launched today.

They have a full overview of the new design.

Click here for more information.

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May

29

EDN magazine have an interesting overview of the current state of the X86 processor world on their website which compares Intel, AMD and VIA technologies.

The article has a good overview of the C3 and C7 architectures and discusses the upcoming Isaiah architecture which is apparently VIA’s response to the Atom from Intel.

The mini-ITX form factor, which Via unveiled in 2001, is the most mature of the three options, and the company’s success in promoting it as an industry standard has attracted competitive attention. Third-party partners sell mini-ITX boards based on both AMD and Intel CPUs, and Intel also manufactures its own mini-ITX products. Notably, the company has shown several Atom-based mini-ITX designs at numerous public forums in recent months.

And speaking of Atom, Via’s competitive CPU response, Isaiah, is key to the company’s future viability. Ironically, as Intel has stripped out-of-order execution and other superfluous features from its previous architectures, thereby resulting in an approach somewhat reminiscent of Centaur’s nearly decade-old vision, Glenn Henry, president of Via’s Centaur subsidiary, and his design team are poised to unleash Via’s first three-way superscalar out-of-order architecture. The company formally unveiled Isaiah in late January. It also adds support for 64-bit instructions, hardware virtualization, and other much-needed features of modern competitive CPUs. Via will initially fabricate Isaiah on a 65-nm foundry lithography, in which design targets include doubling the integer performance and quadrupling the floating-point performance over that of the Via C7 at equivalent clock speed.

Isaiah’s 65-nm power-consumption target is a 25W TDP at 2 GHz. Via is currently scheduling first Isaiah-based products for production in the second quarter, marking a one-quarter slip from the original publicly stated schedule. The company should be shipping the chips by the time you read this or soon thereafter. Via will provide companion core-logic chip sets for the CPU. And, in an interesting partnership perhaps reflecting the company’s shrinking market share in the AMD- and Intel-targeted core-logic markets, Nvidia will sell Isaiah-tailored chip sets, too. 

Source: EDN

May

26

Well, I now have the HTC Touch Cruise finally in my hands and I have been using it for about a couple of weeks now.

On the whole, my impressions have been very positive. I am running it with a SDHC 8 GB card which gives it plenty of space.

It’s user-interface is pretty intuitive, the touch-flow interface works well, its performance has been quite responsive and it has not locked up once.

So far, I have installed some music, Resco File Explorer (a must), Google Maps and Skype for the Pocket PC.

I am using it with a Pay as you go SIM card here in Belgium so I cannot experience the joys of mobile data which is a bit frustrating (does anyone know a mobile provider in Belgium who provides data as well as voice on a pay as you go basis?).

I had some doubts about Skype on the HTC but it works very well and I have not noticed any lack of quality during calls compared to Skype on my laptop over an ethernet cable.

I was pretty chuffed when I got FTP client on Resco File Explorer connected with my FTP Server (Filezilla) in Canada!

The Radio is a mixed blessing, it works well but sound quality can vary according to the position of the headphone cable which acts as the antenna.

The Media Player sound quality is good, but I have noticed that the sound sometimes “jumps” when I am playing MP3 files and walking which is annoying. I am not sure if it is the HTC itself or the mini-USB connector playing up.

The cameras both work well and I have taken some decent pictures with the main camera.

I also really like the weather forecast app which I refresh every time I am near a WiFi connection!!

In the future, I hope to get SQL Server running on it along with a mobile version of my Orders of Battle windows client. I will try and use MSMQ over HTTP to manage the integration with my central database in Canada. That will be a bit of a challenge!

To conclude, I am pretty happy with it and wholeheartedly recommend it.

May

24

First off, please accept our deepest apologies for the last few weeks when the site has been down.

The System Administrator has been given a show trial and shot! (That would be me!).

Unfortunately, my web server which was about 6 years old suffered some sort of hardware failure and would not boot. As I am in Belgium right now I have not been able to see what the problem is and possibly fix it. It is probably a hard drive failure.

Therefore, as an stop-gap solution, I have setup the database server to act as a web server for now and when I get home, I will build a new web server and see what I can salvage from the old machine.

The fact is, I was planning on replacing that server this year anyway, so this failure has just brought that operation forward.

The failure of the web server meant that five public and private web sites had to be setup again on the db server, so the ordersofbattle.com website had top priority.

Unfortunately, while I was setting up Filezilla Server on the machine, I somehow managed to prevent remote access to the machine and that is not a good thing when you are 3000 miles or so from said server!

So, it took me a day or two to get back in and rejig the firewall and get Filezilla Server up and running. I then had to upload a recent copy of the ASP.NET code in order to recreate the website.

Fortunately no data was lost.

Having done that, I restored the Vault website which I use for version control.

That is where things rested for a few weeks as my wife came to see me here so I did not have much time to spend restoring the other sites.

I have spent the last few days trying to install and configure PHP and Wordpress and I finally managed to get it all working today on IIS. In the processs, I have upgraded my version of Wordpress to the latest version 2.5.1 .

I have also restored my Asrep web site which also uses PHP which I use to monitor my adsense clicks, so all that remains is my Orders of Battle Web Log which should not take too long.

To cap it all, in the same week that my web server went down, my wife’s laptop hard disk crashed and I had major problems with the windows profiles of my own laptop so that I could only login in safe mode! This meant that I had to reimage my laptop’s harddrive so that I could get all the tablet functionality on it working again.

So, I need to build at least two new computers this summer and they will both probably be Mini-ITX boxes.

Anyway, once again, I am very sorry for the downtime and it’s very good to finally get the Tech-CRM weblog back up.

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