AMD Phenom™ Processor

I was trying to decide what to write: the already way-to-late article on Browsers, or an article on the great and fabulous Adobe Creative Suite 3 at which I finally got a look last week, when suddenly I decided not to write about any of them ( that Browsers article will probably become my own goal in life :P ). So this week I'm writing about the (almost) All New AMD Phenom™ Quad-Core Processor.

The news about it started pouring as early as July when AMD unveiled it at its 2007 Technology Analyst Day and ever since then, there's been much anticipation. Well it is ( or has been for a few days now ) out on the market, and it does have a complete tech profile on their site here .

What I can quickly say about it ( I haven't had the chance to actually use it yet ) is that it sounds absolutely great. AMD took a fresh start on this one, abandoning their classical chip architecture. Instead the Phenom is based on the new k10 microarchitecture technology. This results in excellent performance and you can actually see a list of all the features and benefits here.

Phenom processors will use the same X2 and X4 suffixes used in the Athlon line to differentiate between dual- and quad-core processor variants, and the flagship FX moniker will move over to the top-performing Phenom processor.

The perfect combination ( or at least the one AMD put out for the Technology Analyst Day event) is a 3GHz Phenom FX system running three Radeo HD 2900XT GPU's everything working on the RD790 Chipset, which can support up to 4 , yes that's 4, GPU's in Crossfire. That was just in case you had some money and you were wandering how you could spend it to play Crysis as smoothly as you can play Starcraft 1 now :)). By the way Phenom supports AM2 sockets so no need to worry about that.

The last thing ( and this is probably one of the greatest ) that I will say is about the price. AMD promised to cut down ( a lot )on it, and they kept that promise. The Phenom 9600 processor is at about 245$, which is a reasonable price for it.

Now what I am really wondering is if there will be a response from Intel. I really am waiting on some giant battle between the two that will result in Quad-Core processors to cost less than 20$ :)). Oh well I can always keep dreaming. But seriously Intel will probably respond somehow and everyone's expecting a new extraordinary processor from them.

Disclaimer: Yes yes it's true. I prefer Intel to AMD and Nvidia to Ati :D

Cheers, Geeky.

Yahoo Again

   Finally I found the time to write this. I promised I'd write the Browsers article, but before I had the chance to do that something extraordinary happened. A few weeks ago I wrote an article, Yahoo Depression, and I was saying that Yahoo has yet to release the long awaited Vista Messenger, nor had they given any news on it's development. Well after reading my bad reviews about them Yahoo decided it was finally time to give us a preview of the product. So they launched the beta version of the program. You can download it here! I downloaded it as quickly as I heard, because I was really curious how it will look and what it can do. So here are the features:  (* Remember this is just a beta version so the full one will probably have more cool and interesting stuff)

   First of all the design. Yes, it really is great. The color schemes integrate very nice, and the whole program has that cool, stylish, Vista look to it.Plus the contacts now arange themselves according to your window size. One smiley face for Yahoo till now.

   Second, we have the big avatars, and the adjustable display mode for the friends list. That works out really nice, but unfortunately I have found some bugs and some things that could be improved. For example the program seems to randomly choose when to display a web adress as a link ..or just as a normal status. And if the status is really long there's no other way of seeing it than opening an IM window with the person and stretching it out as long as you need to. That's why I sent Yahoo a suggestion ( using the very nice Feedback link in the program) to simply maximize contacts in the list ,regardless of the display setting, whenever they are selected. That would really make things easy and smooth.

   Third feature, and this one is probably the nicest : Tabbed IMs. As it was said in the demo video ( yes that very old one that i was complaining about ) whenever you talk to multiple people you now need only one IM window. You have tabs, and choose from the different people you are talking to. As i said this is a very nice feature ( and just in case you don't like you can always expand the windows) because it helps keep your desktop clean.

   Another feature, you can actually take one or more contacts and post them on your Vista Sidebar so you can monitor them directly without having to check the Yahoo window everytime.Now I don't use this ( because for some reason it doesn't work), but it's still a nice feature.

   The last added nice thing that I want to mention is they increased the transferable file size even more. It now reaches 2gb of data. This is actually great as I send lots of edited clips that can take up a lot of space, and thus this helps a lot.

   Now as this is still a beta version I'm not sure what right I have to complain about this but I will do it anyway. Certain , very nice features, seem to have disappeared, such as Photo Share. That is completely gone and there's no mention of it anywhere. Also voice chat, audibles and some other stuff are also gone. I hope , and I believe that these features will be back in the full version, which will probably be released some time in Q2 of 2008.
   Oh and as a last bug thingy : I noticed the memory usage of the program fluctuates a lot sometimes as low as 2mb and sometimes as much as 200 mb. Still haven't figured out why it's doing that and if this only happens to me or to everybody. Well besides this, the program is very nice overall and I do recommend it, at least for a go.I'll let you discover new features on your own.
Have fun with it!

Sorry...

   Well I was supposed to write an article about the most used web browsers today. I've actually been planning to write that for some time. But the truth is I'm quite lazy and tired right now.

   I decided some time ago that if I do waste at least 6-7 hours a day on the computer might as well use them for doing something useful. To be more precise I decided to learn coding. Not HTML, but C++, and while that's still on my To Do list I quickly drifted to Java, and to Flash from there. Flash Action Script is actually a really nice coding language. Of course anyone with a little knowledge of any coding language would find it very familiar. Yeah .. dot syntax and all of that ..really like it. Unfortunately I don't really have a "coder's eye" so I sometimes have big problems debugging my projects. That's why I'm so tired right now ( and listening to Pearl Jam) because it took me 1 hour to find a missing underscore.
Anyway this whole post is just an excuse for not writing anything else. I promise I will write the Browsers article as soon as possible. Until then, have a great week, and check out the other articles already written.   

PS: Nike put up a bid to buy Adidas! ( Yes I know this is in no way related to computers but I find it an interesting business merger. )