Computer Tech Blog

Nvidia touts power, efficiency of 200M GPUs

2009-09-01T00:32:00.000-07:00

Nvidia today lifts the lid off five laptop graphics processors that will grace everything from cost-conscious computers to enthusiast gamer machines, promising its new 200M series laptop GPUs will deliver twice the power and half the battery drain of last year's GPU.

While the GeForce GTX 280M and GTX 260M remain Nvidia's top dogs, you're now going to find a whole bunch of flavors filling out the line. They range from the GTS 260M (with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM) down to the G210M (with 512MB of GDDR3 RAM). These new 40nm chips support DirectX 10.1 and run CUDA applications, and all except the G210M offer built-in Nvidia PhysX tech for GPU-bound physics calculations. For a full breakdown of what these new GPUs offer, look below.

But rather than get razzle-dazzled by the spokespeople, let's cut to the chase. These GPUs, certainly the lower-powered ones, could make a big difference in cracking the mainstream market. That is, we're already hearing about Ion-based notebooks coming out later this summer, but how about something with a little more oomph? You could soon see an affordable all-purpose laptop that's capable of running an HD movie without breaking a sweat. And, yeah, playing more than solitaire or a game from 16 years ago (not that there's anything wrong with X-Com) wouldn't hurt, either.

Who will provide those laptops down the line, and how much will they cost? Expect the usual suspects--Nvidia claims "100 new design wins." Matt Wuebbling, senior product manager for notebooks GPUs at Nvidia, says that we should "imagine a notebook in the $600-to-$700 price range six months ago with a discrete GPU [the G210M] that now has twice the graphics power versus the G110M." But the price, obviously, is up to the laptop maker. Wuebbling expects to see notebooks showing up as early as July; Asus and Acer are confirmed to be the first players bringing the 200M series to market in new notebooks. While I can't extol the performance virtues of these chips just yet, I can at least eyeball the specs below and look forward to kicking the tires on a couple of 200M-fueled laptops soon enough.

By the Numbers

GTS 260M396 gigaflops; 96 processor cores; 550MHz graphics clock; 1375MHz processor clock; 1800MHz; 1GB GDDR5 RAM; 128-bit memory width; 38-watt TDP

GTS 250M360 gigaflops; 96 processor cores; 500MHz graphics clock; 1250MHz processor clock; 1600MHz; 1GB GDDR5 RAM; 128-bit memory width; 28-watt TDP

GT 240M174 gigaflops; 48 processor cores; 550MHz graphics clock; 1210MHz processor clock; 800MHz; 1GB GDDR3 RAM; 128-bit memory width; 23-watt TDP

GT 230M158 gigaflops; 48 processor cores; 500MHz graphics clock; 1100MHz processor clock; 800MHz; 1GB GDDR3 RAM; 128-bit memory width; 23-watt TDP

GT 210M72 gigaflops; 16 processor cores; 625MHz graphics clock; 1500MHz processor clock; 800MHz; 512MB GDDR3 RAM; 64-bit memory width; 14-watt TDP

AMD to drop clock speed in 12-core chips

2009-09-01T00:31:00.000-07:00

Advanced Micro Devices' upcoming 12-core chips will draw the same power as its six-core chips, but will have reduced clock speeds, a company official said today.

The company's upcoming 12-core server chips, code-named Magny-Cours, put two six-core chips in one package. The same silicon is used in its six-core chips, code-named Istanbul, which are part of the Opteron line of server processors. AMD designed Magny-Cours chips to draw the same power as Istanbul chips, said Pat Conway, a member of AMD's technical staff, in a presentation at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.

Responding to an audience question about how Magny-Cours, with two chips, will use the same power as one Istanbul chip, Conway said that AMD is reducing the clock speeds of the Magny-Cours and added that power management features are being added.

However, Conway declined to comment on potential clock speeds of 12-core chips in response to a question. "That's a detail we're going to save for the product launch," Conway said. The chips are aimed at servers and are due out in the first quarter of 2010.

Chip makers like Intel and AMD reverted to adding cores to boost chip performance earlier in the decade, as cranking up clock speed led to excessive heat dissipation and power consumption.

Even though the clock frequencies will fall, Magny-Cours chips will pack more performance compared to existing Opteron chips, Conway said. The larger cache and increased cores will make servers faster, Conway said. For example, a server will be able to execute tasks faster in virtualized environments with a larger number of cores, enabling servers to host a larger number of virtual machines.

Conway also talked about finer details in the Magny-Cours chip. Two six-core chips are connected by four hyperthreaded interconnects and are targeted at two- and four-socket servers, Conway said. It includes a total of 12MB of L3 cache, with each core supporting 512KB of L2 cache. The chips will be manufactured by AMD's spinoff, GlobalFoundries, using existing 45-nanometer technology.

AMD is also working on a new x86 chip architecture code-named Bulldozer. The architecture will be used in chips manufactured using the 32-nm process in 2011. The company has scheduled a 16-core chip code-named Interlagos for release in 2011.

Intel sees PCs spreading, becoming more desirable in future

2009-09-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

The PC market is likely to see steep growth in the years ahead, similar to the growth witnessed in the phone market after the introduction of mobile phones, an Intel executive said on Thursday.

In the same way telephones moved from one per house to one per room to one for each person, PCs are also becoming personalized devices, said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager, of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, at a meeting in Bangalore.

"It could be a notebook or a netbook or a mobile Internet device (MID)," Eden said.

Selling PCs has become a "consumer game", focused as much on the elegance and sleekness of the device, as its performance and other specifications, Eden said.

In most markets, affordability is not an issue for marketers of PCs, but the "desirability" of the computers, Eden said. To become desirable to a large segment of potential users who can afford PCs, the devices have to have content, user interface, and applications that they can relate to, he added.

This optimistic view of the market may hold true for mature markets, but not in emerging markets like India where 10,000 rupees (US$200) is seen as the magic price level for a reasonably configured PC to take off in large volumes.

Netbook prices are likely to come down because of economies of scale, said Eden, but he was not willing to forecast when the price would be below US$200.

Eden expects that demand in emerging markets could get a push through subsidies, for example if telecommunications service providers offer netbooks at a discount or free as part of a service plan.

Intel originally thought demand for netbooks powered by its Atom processor would first ramp up in emerging markets, because of the low-cost of these devices, Eden said. Currently about 85 percent of the sales of netbooks are in mature markets, Eden said.

A lot of netbook customers in these markets want to go beyond basic browsing and communications to applications like storing movies, which led vendors to include large hard-disk drives, and in some cases Microsoft's Windows operating system, Eden said.

To cut netbook prices, vendors in emerging markets can, for example, use the Moblin Linux operating system, backed by Intel, which is good enough for basic applications like browsing and communications, he added.

IBM zooms into molecule for power-efficient chip research

2009-09-01T00:29:00.000-07:00

IBM has for the first time taken an image of a molecule's surface, which could lead to the construction of cheaper, more power-efficient chips, the company said today.

The image maps the anatomy of a molecule at an atomic scale, which could help researchers understand and manipulate molecules and atoms in chips.

"Basically it's a pioneering science achievement that helps open up exciting new possibilities for exploring electronic building blocks and devices at the ultimate atomic and molecular scale -- devices that might be vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today's processors and memory devices," said an IBM spokeswoman in an e-mail.

For decades chip makers have been etching smaller patterns on chip surfaces to speed up performance and reduce power consumption. But as chips get smaller, the assembly and fabrication of chips becomes far more difficult and expensive. Many experiments in IBM's nanotechnology research initiative focus on technology that could make chips smaller, faster and more power-efficient in the future.

In the experiment, IBM scientists were able to map the chemical structure of a pentacene molecule using atomic force microscopy (AFM). The probe microscope was able to provide scientists with an atomic-level view of the molecule as viewed in chemistry textbooks, which could be an important step in understanding future chip structures. Pentacene molecules could be deposited in transistors that are used in semiconductors, according to IBM researchers.

The role of individual molecules is still not fully known when it comes to developing chips, said Gerhard Meyer, a scientist at IBM Research in Zurich, in an e-mail. There are examples of using a single molecule as a memory element, and there is a larger question surrounding how a large number of molecules contact and connect to form molecular networks.

With this development, IBM is making progress in studying the transport of individual electrons in molecules or across molecular networks. The study also helps better understand how a charge distribution occurs across the molecular networks, which is an essential element in building smaller and more power-efficient chips.

"It will, for example, help us to understand how the molecular geometry changes if we change the charge of the molecule," Meyer said. "What we want is an atomic/molecular level understanding of these processes."

Fully understanding molecules for basic chip research could be 10 to 20 years away, Meyer said.

Earlier this month, IBM made a research breakthrough when researchers said they were experimenting with the use of DNA -- one of the body's building blocks -- as a way to create tiny circuits that could form the basis of smaller, more powerful computer chips.

Parallelism needs killer app for mass adoption

2009-09-01T00:28:00.000-07:00

The addition of multiple cores to microprocessors has created a significant opportunity for parallel programming, but a killer application is needed to push the concept into the mainstream, researchers said during a panel discussion at the Hot Chips conference.

Most software today is still being written for sequential execution, and programming models need to change to take advantage of faster hardware and an increasing number of cores on chips, panelists said. Programmers need to write code in a way that enables tasks to be divided up and executed simultaneously across multiple cores and threads.

A lot of focus and money have gone into building fast machines and better programming languages, said David Patterson, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at the conference in Stanford on Monday. Comparatively little attention has been paid to writing desktop programs in parallel, but applications such as gaming and music could change that. Users of such programs demand the best real-time performance, so programmers may have to adopt models that break up tasks over multiple threads and cores.

For example, novel forms of parallelism could improve the quality of music played back on PCs and smartphones, Patterson said. Code that does a better job of separating channels and instruments could ultimately generate sound through parallel interaction.

UC-Berkeley has a parallel computing lab where researchers are trying to understand how applications are used, which could help optimize code for handheld devices. One project aims to bring desktop-quality browsing to handheld devices by optimizing code based on specific tasks like rendering and parsing of pages. Another project involves optimizing code for faster retrieval of health information. The lab is funded primarily by Intel and Microsoft.

Berkeley researchers are trying to bring in parallelism by replacing bits of code originally written using scripting languages like Python and Ruby on Rails with new low-level C code. The new code specifically focuses on particular tasks like analyzing a specific voice pattern in a speech recognition application, Patterson said in an interview Wednesday. The code is written using OpenMP or MPI, application programming interfaces designed to write machine-level parallel applications.

Experts are needed to write this highly specialized parallel code, Patterson said. It reduces development time for programmers who would otherwise use Python and Ruby on Rails, which make application development easier, but do not focus on parallelism, Patterson said in the interview. The lab has shown specific task execution jump by a factor of 20 with the low-level machine code.

The concept of parallelism is not new, and has been mostly the domain of high-performance computing. Low levels of parallelism have always been possible, but programmers have faced a daunting task with a lack of software tools and ever-changing hardware environments.

"Threads have to synchronize correctly," said Christos Kozyrakis, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University, during a presentation prior to the panel discussion. Code needs to be written in a form that behaves predictably and scales as more cores become available.

Compilers also need to be made smarter and be perceptive enough to break up threads on time so outputs are received in a correct sequence, Kozyrakis said. Faulty attempts to build parallelism into code could create buggy software if specific calculations are not executed in a certain order. That is a problem commonly referred to as race conditions. Coders may also need to learn how to use multiple programming tools to achieve finer levels of parallelism, panelists said.

"There's no lazy-boy approach to programming," Patterson said at the conference.

Memory and network latency have created bottlenecks in data throughput, which could negate the performance achieved by parallel task execution. There are also different programming tools for different architectures, which make it difficult to take advantage of all the hardware available.

Many parallelism tools available today are designed to harness the parallel processing capabilities of CPUs and graphics processing units to improve system performance. Apple, Intel, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are among the companies promoting OpenCL, a parallel programming environment that will be supported in Apple's upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 operating system, also called Snow Leopard, which is due for release Friday. OpenCL competes with Microsoft, which is promoting its proprietary DirectX parallel programming tools, and Nvidia, which offers the CUDA framework.

OpenCL includes a C-like programming language with APIs (application programming interfaces) to manage distribution of kernels across hardware such as processor cores and other resources. OpenCL could help Mac OS decode video faster by distributing pixel processing across multiple CPU and graphics processing units in a system.

All the existing tools are geared toward different software environments and take advantage of different resources, Patterson said. OpenCL, for example, is geared more toward execution of tasks on GPUs. Proprietary models like DirectX are hard to deploy across heterogeneous computing environments, while some models like OpenCL adapt to only specific environments that rely on GPUs.

"I don't think [OpenCL] is going to be embraced across all architectures." Patterson said. "We need in the meantime to be trying other things," like trying to improve on the programming models with commonly used development tools, like Ruby on Rails, he said.

While audience members pointed out that parallelism has been a problem for decades, the panelists said that universities are now taking a fresh approach to working on multiple programming tools to enable parallelism. After years of funding chip development, the government is also paying more attention to parallel processing by funding related programs.

Kozyrakis said Stanford has established a lab that aims to "make parallel application development practical for [the] masses," by 2012. The researchers are working with companies like Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard and Nvidia.

An immediate task test for developers could be to try to convert existing legacy code in parallel for execution on modern chips, Berkeley's Patterson said. A couple of companies are offering automatic parallelization, but rewriting and compiling the legacy code originally written for sequential execution could be a big challenge.

"There's money to be made in those areas," Patterson said.

Fujitsu aims for 10-petaflop supercomputer

2009-09-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

Fujitsu aims to deliver by early 2011 a 10-petaflop supercomputer, which would be almost 10 times more powerful than today's fastest system.

Fujitsu is building the supercomputer for Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, known as RIKEN, said Takumi Maruyama, head of Fujitsu's processor development department, on the sidelines of the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Tuesday.

The system will be based on Fujitsu's upcoming Sparc64 VIIIfx processor, which has eight processor cores and will be an update to the four-core Sparc64 VII chip that Fujitsu released two years ago, Maruyama said.

It remains to be seen if Fujitsu can achieve its goal, and it's likely that other system builders are plotting similarly powerful machines. IBM has said it will build a "petascale" supercomputer based on its upcoming Power7 processor for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That machine, dubbed Blue Waters, is also due in 2011.

Today's fastest machine is IBM's Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was rated at 1.105 petaflops on June's Top500 list of supercomputers. A petaflop is equal to one thousand trillion calculations per second.

Maruyama gave the first in-depth look at the Sparc64 VIIIfx on Tuesday. Each of its eight cores runs at 2GHz and accesses 5MB of L2 cache memory. The processor can achieve 128 Gflops performance while drawing 58 watts of power, he said.

It's based on the same Sparc9 instruction set as other Sparc processors, but adds a set of supercomputing extensions known as HPC-ACE, Maruyama said.

While Fujitsu is already planning for the RIKEN machine, it isn't saying yet when the new Sparc64 chip will be available for other systems.

Fujitsu's current Sparc64 chip, the four-core Sparc64 VII, is sold in Unix servers from Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems. It would be "technically possible" to put the eight-core chip in those machines, but Fujitsu has no plans yet to do so, Maruyama said.

Several chip vendors are presenting papers at Hot Chips about eight-core server processors. IBM is due to discuss its Power7 processor later Tuesday afternoon. That product is due in systems in the first half of next year.

Intel details power-savings features on Moorestown

2009-09-01T00:25:00.000-07:00

Intel Corp. has made a number of power-saving enhancements to its Atom architecture that will be included in its upcoming Moorestown platform for smartphones, a company official said Monday.

The platform draws up to half the power in active mode and up to 50 times less power in idle mode compared to its predecessors, said Rajesh Patel, lead architect for the Lincroft system-on-chip at Intel during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. Intel currently ships the Menlow platform, which is targeted at handheld computers called mobile Internet devices (MIDs).

Moorestown is a chip platform that Intel is targeting at smartphones and MIDs. The platform includes a more power-efficient version of the Atom processor, codenamed Lincroft, which is paired with a chipset called Langwell. Lincroft is described by Intel as a system-on-chip (SoC), which includes a 3D graphics accelerator, integrated memory controller and other components on a single chip.

Lincroft includes new power management features to bring energy efficiency when devices like smartphones are idle, Patel said. For example, the processor can completely shut off when a device is in idle mode, Patel said. The company also reduces clock speed to predefined thresholds depending on device usage.

The SoC has also been partitioned into multiple power "islands," where components can be individually shut off when not in use. The fine-grained power management is enabled through hardware and software enhancements, Patel said.

The power-gating technology can shut off almost all components when a device is in idle mode, with the only active parts being the components necessary to activate the processor.

"We went after idle power because it is the most common usage," Patel said. Devices like smartphones remain in idle mode longer during average daily usage, he said.

Patel did not disclose how long it takes for the processor to recover from sleep to active mode.

The chip will be made using the 45-nanometer process, which brings more energy efficiency compared to its predecessor. The Moorestown platform chip package is close to half the size of the Menlow platform.

USB 3 chip will bring RAID to external drives

2009-09-01T00:17:00.000-07:00

Symwave, one of the first companies to design silicon for USB 3.0, is revealing more details about its SOC (system on a chip) using the high-speed standard at the Hot Chips conference on Monday.

USB 3.0, which debuted last November, is designed to provide throughput as high as 5Gb per second (Gbps), up from just 480Mbps for USB 2.0. Symwave says its USB 3.0 SOC can be used in external storage devices that ship data as fast as 500MB per second.

Symwave is trying to tackle the same problem plaguing many consumers and enterprises as they use more high-definition multimedia content and have to save more data in general. Demand for storage capacity continues to rise, and backing up that data from a laptop or desktop to an external drive can take hours. USB 2.0, nearly ubiquitous on PCs and portable consumer electronics today, can be a barrier.

"You're pretty much communicating through a straw," said Gideon Intrater, Symwave's vice president of solutions architecture. The SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) I/O protocol used with most hard drives can transport about 300MB per second, while USB 2.0 typically delivers just 20MB or 30MB per second, he said. "USB 2 was good as long as you had 100GB on your hard drive, but now it's just way too slow."

By way of comparison, a 25GB high-definition movie would take 13.9 minutes to transport over USB 2.0 and just 70 seconds with the new standard, according to the USB Implementers Forum. The contents of a 1GB thumb drive could be transferred in 3.3 seconds, versus 33 seconds previously.

The SOC that Intrater will discuss on Monday will boost that performance up to and beyond the top speed of SATA. It's a chip for external storage devices that includes several key functions for either HDD (hard disk drive) or SSD (solid-state drive) units. The chip will allow OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) of storage devices and enclosures to offer speeds as high as 500MB per second because it includes support for RAID 0 configurations. Using RAID, the system maker can build an enclosure with two drives and either feed data faster by addressing both drives at once, or feed the same data to both drives so one is a mirror of the other, Intrater said.

RAID hasn't been a realistic option with USB 2.0 because just one SATA drive can easily saturate the USB connection, according to Intrater. In addition, USB 2.0 has been limited in the kinds of devices it can power by itself. USB 3.0 can carry as much as 900 milliamps, up from just 500 milliamps for USB 2.0, he said. That will make it easier to power a portable RAID array of two drives, as well as to power faster-spinning HDDs than before and to charge some smartphones and other devices that the older standard couldn't fill up, Intrater said.

USB 3.0 was also designed to put fewer demands on a system's CPU during backup operations, he said. Products that support the new standard will be backward compatible with USB 2.0, so if any component in a set of linked devices isn't made for the USB 3.0, the connection will fall back to the older standard.

In addition to supporting RAID and the protocol conversion from SATA to USB 3.0, the Symwave chip can perform authentication and encryption. It uses the recently approved IEEE 1667 standard for authentication, which Microsoft has said it will include in Windows 7. For encryption, Symwave is using the XTS-AES technology, based on the Advanced Encryption Standard. System makers can choose to implement it in 128-bit or 256-bit mode, Intrater said.

Symwave, a fabless semiconductor company based in Laguna Niguel, California, was founded in 2004 and restructured itself last year around the goal of designing chips for the emerging USB 3.0 standard. It faced some challenges, including the speed of the protocol itself. At the 5GHz speed of USB 3.0, bits of data travel so fast that on a 10-foot cable there can be multiple bits traveling over the wire at the same time, Intrater said.

Price is another issue. The final products will have to stay close to the price range of USB 2.0 gear, with only a small premium, Intrater said. Despite the huge performance advantage, vendors won't be able to charge twice as much, he said.

The company has made prototypes of the SOC and expects OEMs to ship products based on it by the end of this

OS deathmatch: Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7

2009-09-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

It's the best of times if you're a lover of operating systems, with the nearly simultaneous release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" (available right now) and Microsoft's Windows 7 (available Oct. 22). This leads to the inevitable debate: Which is the better operating system, Windows 7 or Snow Leopard?

To help determine that, I've put both operating systems through their paces, selected categories for a head-to-head competition, and then chosen a winner in each category. And at the end, I summarize the scorecard.

For testing Windows 7, I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition RTM on a Dell Inspiron E1505 notebook with 1GB of RAM and a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor. To test Snow Leopard, I did an upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Air, which is loaded with a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM.

Overview

The two companies took diametrically opposed approaches to their newest operating system upgrades.

Microsoft, burned by the compatibility issues that bedeviled Vista, strove to make compatibility with Vista-level hardware and software a centerpiece of Windows 7, and so didn't dramatically change the under-the-hood plumbing in Windows 7.

However, significant interface changes and features were added. The taskbar got a thorough reworking, making it much more Mac OS X Dock-like -- in fact, even better than the Dock. Similarly, the addition of HomeGroups was an attempt to make networking simpler for home users.

Apple, on the other hand, focused its efforts largely on internal plumbing, and many of those efforts won't pay off immediately for users. OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch are new technologies designed to better take advantage of multi-core CPUs and to offload more graphics and animation processing to graphics cards.

In the long run, this should make for significantly juiced-up performance. But in order for people to reap much of the benefits, developers will need to rewrite their programs. The new Apple technologies are designed to make that easier, but until those new applications are written, the effects most likely won't be extremely noticeable.

Apple also tweaked the operating system interface, refining the Finder and integrating the Dock with Exposé. But those changes are not nearly as significant as the ones Microsoft made to Windows 7.

With all that as a background, let's get on to the smackdown. Come along for the great debate -- and weigh in with your own comments.

With Snow Leopard, Apple focused mostly on under-the-hood changes.

By contrast, Windows 7 introduces significant interface changes and features.

Operating system name

OK, let's get this issue out of the way quickly. Which operating system would you rather run: one with the cool name Snow Leopard, or one with the unimaginative moniker Windows 7?

Enough said.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. Wild animals are inherently more exciting than panes of glass.

Price

For anyone buying a new computer, a price comparison between the two operating systems is meaningless, because the operating system will come pre-installed on whatever hardware they buy. But for upgraders, it can be a very big deal.

Apple upgraders will certainly be happier than those who make the move to Windows 7 from earlier versions. Snow Leopard is a $29 upgrade (unless you're still using Tiger, in which case you have to buy the Mac Box Set -- which includes iLife '09 and iWork '09 -- for $169). The Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade costs a whopping $220 on Amazon, Windows 7 Professional goes for $200, and Windows 7 Home Premium weighs in at $120.

Windows users also have to face the confusing decision about which of the versions of Windows 7 to purchase -- given the price points, are you better off with Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Professional or Windows 7 Home Premium? With Snow Leopard, there's no confusion; there's only one version of the operating system.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. At $29, it's practically an impulse buy.

Installation

Here's what you need to do in order to install Snow Leopard: Insert the installation disc and then go through a simple setup routine. You won't have to decide between a clean install and an upgrade. You won't have to mull over which version of Snow Leopard is best for you. You won't have to type in a lengthy registration code.

In Windows, you'll have to choose between a clean install and an upgrade. In addition, depending on your hardware configuration and version of Windows, it may take you some time to figure out which version of Windows 7 you can upgrade to.

Once you do all that, though, there are no real major differences between installing the operating systems. Snow Leopard took a little less time to install on my system, but apart from that, the installation process itself was quite similar.

Snow Leopard did do a better job of recognizing the hardware -- it did it without a hitch. Windows 7 at first didn't recognize my video card and so I had problems with screen resolution. However, Windows 7 quickly resolved the problem without any intervention on my part via Windows Update.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. It wins by a hair because of Windows 7's slight glitch with my hardware and the configuration choices you need to make. Aside from that, though, installation wasn't significantly different.

Launching applications

What do you do all day with an operating system? You primarily launch programs, and then switch among running programs and windows. To a certain extent, everything else is just window dressing.

So it's probably no surprise that some of the biggest changes to both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 have to do with the way you launch applications and switch among them. Snow Leopard's Dock was tweaked by integrating it with Exposé (a window-management feature); while Windows 7's taskbar was significantly reworked.

The Dock and the taskbar both do double-duty as application launchers and task switchers. The Dock is more aesthetically pleasing, with its application icons cut out in profile and highlighted against the Mac desktop, while the taskbar runs like a flat ribbon across the bottom of the Windows 7 screen.

Both added a nearly identical feature -- the ability to see thumbnails of all the windows open in an application. In Windows 7, when an application has multiple windows open, you'll see a stack of icons in the taskbar that match the number of windows open. Hover your mouse over the application's icon, and you'll see thumbnails of them all, spread out across the bottom of the screen. Similarly, in Snow Leopard, when you click on an application's icon in the Dock and hold it, you see thumbnails as well.

Snow Leopard's Dock lets you see thumbnails of all an app's open windows.
Click to view larger image

Windows 7's taskbar now has Dock-like features, and in some ways is superior.
Click to view larger image

The taskbar's implementation is superior to the Dock's. The taskbar displays the number of windows open in an application because it shows a stack of icons -- the Dock has no visual clues like that. In addition, when you scroll through each thumbnail in Windows 7, you see a full preview of the window on your desktop, making it easier to determine which window you want to switch to. The Dock doesn't do this.

The Dock's implementation of thumbnails is also incomplete. In Snow Leopard, if you run a browser such as Safari or Firefox and then hold down its icon in the Dock, you won't be able to see all open tabs as separate thumbnails; instead you see only a single tab, and have no idea what other tabs are open. In Windows 7, each tab gets its own thumbnail, so you know exactly what's open in your browser.

The Windows 7 taskbar has something else that Snow Leopard doesn't: Jump Lists. When you right-click an application's icon in the taskbar in Windows 7, you get a menu offering various actions and tasks associated with that application. The list varies according to the application -- so when you right-click Microsoft Word, for example, you see a list of recently opened files, but when you click Internet Explorer, you see a list of your most frequently visited sites.

Of course, both OSes have other ways to switch from one task to another: Snow Leopard has Exposé, while Windows 7 uses the Alt-Tab key combination. Here it's more of a toss-up over which is superior.

Exposé has nifty features such as letting you move your pointer to a corner of the desktop to perform a task like putting the display to sleep, displaying all open windows, etc. And the Spaces feature lets you create multiple virtual desktops, each with its own look and application organization.

Alt-Tab, though, has one thing that Exposé doesn't: When you cycle through all your open windows, the background of the desktop shows that window, so you can more easily decide which program you want to switch to.

The Winner: Windows 7. The taskbar has more features such as Jump Lists and has more fully featured thumbnails. The Dock may be more elegant-looking, but in this case function is more important than form.

System configuration

If you're like most people, you're not satisfied with the out-of-box experience offered by your operating system. You want to customize it and tweak it.

For doing this, it's hard to beat the straight-ahead simplicity and organization of Snow Leopard's System Preferences. It sports five categories: Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System, and Other. In each category you'll find a group of icons, such as Appearance, Desktop & Screen Saver, and so on. Click an icon, and you'll be presented with a straightforward menu for changing the way that feature works. It's as simple as customization gets.

Windows 7's Control Panel is far more complex. It has seven major categories and many subcategories, using a very confusing hierarchy. It has numerous applets for configuring Windows, but unlike System Preference, there is not a common interface among them all -- the interface of each applet is different, and so it takes quite a time to learn each. The learning curve is steep.

But there's also a big upside to that complexity: As a general rule, Windows is more configurable than Snow Leopard, with more options. And some of the applets are extremely useful and superior to what is available in Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard's System Preferences puts all settings within easy reach.
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Windows 7's Control Panel may be harder to use, but it also gives you more options.
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A good example of the contrasting approaches is Snow Leopard's Network System Preferences compared to the Windows 7's Network and Internet category in its Control Panel. In Snow Leopard, it's exceedingly easy to get at important network information such as TCP/IP and DNS configuration. In Windows 7, to get that information you have to dig deep through numerous applets and menus, and once you do it, it's not easy to remember how to do it again.

However, in Windows 7, you get more networking options and features, such as an excellent network map that visually displays all the devices on your network and lets you get information about them.

So while it's true that Microsoft could have done a better job for system configuration than the Control Panel, it has also tried to stuff many more features into it. Partly, the complex design goes with the complex territory.

The Winner: Windows 7. Many people might consider this a toss-up, but this choice reflects my predilection for tweaking and customizing. Those who want simplicity will appreciate Snow Leopard's System Preferences' easy and accessible way to configure the operating system. Tweakers who like as many choices as possible, no matter how confusing and inelegantly presented, will prefer Windows 7's Control Panel.

Software compatibility

What good is an operating system without software that runs on it? No good at all. So it's worthwhile looking at how compatible existing software is with each operating system.

When it comes to compatibility with existing third-party applications for the Mac, Snow Leopard has some problems. As I've written in Snow Leopard: Which apps, utilities have been left behind?, I found a number of compatibility problems between Snow Leopard and software that I use on a daily basis. The excellent Xmarks bookmark synchronizer won't work on Safari in Snow Leopard, for example, and neither will the free office productivity suite NeoOffice. In addition, Adobe Systems has said that its Creative Suite 3, which includes Photoshop, may not run on Snow Leopard, although Creative Suite 4 should have no problems.

I've found several other utilities that won't work either, such as the very good Windows Sync synchronization tool from Windows. In some instances, betas of the utilities or applications already exist that fix the problem. In others, work is being done or planned, but not yet completed. Most likely, most if not all popular applications will eventually be compatible with Snow Leopard. But that's not the case today.

As for Windows 7, Microsoft seems to have learned the lessons of Windows Vista. Applications written for Windows Vista will work with Windows 7 -- I haven't found a single issue where that isn't the case. There's also a Windows XP mode that allows applications written for XP to run on Windows 7 and look as if they were running on it natively. True, it's a kludge, but at least it works. (Note that XP mode is available only for certain hardware and in certain versions of Windows 7.)

The Winner: Windows 7. That's for now, though. In relatively short order, Snow Leopard may have its compatibility problems worked out.

Hardware compatibility

I haven't given Windows 7 or Snow Leopard comprehensive run-throughs that test how well they work with different peripherals. As a result, there's no way for me to compare their compatibility with peripherals at this point.

But I can generally gauge their compatibility with the hardware for which their operating systems were designed. So how compatible is Windows 7 with Windows-based PCs and how compatible is Snow Leopard with Macs?

Snow Leopard requires Intel-based hardware; in other words, it won't run on PowerPC G4 or G5-based systems. This means if you've got an Apple machine built before 2006 (when Intel processors were introduced to Macs), you're out of luck. The various Mac lines were switched to Intel processors at different points throughout 2006, so if your machine was built in 2006 it may or may not be compatible. You can check About This Mac under the Apple menu to see what kind of processor you have.

In general, though, if you've bought a new machine in the last three years, you're probably in good shape. Snow Leopard requires 5GB of free disk space and 1GB of RAM.

With Windows 7, things get a bit more complicated. It is designed to run on any machine that runs Windows Vista, which was released in January 2007. But it will also run on many machines originally designed for Windows XP -- in fact, I run it on a Dell Inspiron E1505 that I bought before Vista's release in January 2007, and that was originally an XP machine.

To be more specific: Windows 7 requires 1GB of RAM for the 32-bit version and 2GB for the 64-bit version. The 16-bit version requires 16GB of hard disk space, while the 32-bit version needs 20GB. To run the Aero interface, a graphics card must support DirectX 9 graphics and have 128MB of graphics memory. These are generally modest specifications, so many PCs designed for XP can handle Windows 7. That means that Windows 7 will run on older hardware than Snow Leopard (although if your machine dates from 2001 or 2002, you may need to check its specs carefully).

The Winner: Windows 7. Windows 7 will work with a wider variety of hardware for which Windows was designed than Snow Leopard will work with Macs.

Ease of use and elegance

Windows has come a long way since its humble -- and let's face it, just plain ugly -- beginnings. With each iteration of the operating system, it gets a little slicker, a little smoother, a little easier to use. Windows 7 continues this tradition, particularly with the new taskbar.

All that being said, Snow Leopard, like earlier versions of Mac OS X, is just plain beautiful. The word "seamless" is overused when describing an elegant, simple-to-use product, but in the case of Snow Leopard it's absolutely true. It's as intuitive and as aesthetically pleasing an operating system as you can find.

In addition, because Apple controls the hardware as well as the software, the integration between machine and software is unparalleled. Windows users have become used to strange behavior and odd error messages that appear from time to time -- it's the background radiation of Windows. To a certain extent, there's no way around it. Windows has to work with countless different combinations of CPUs, RAM, hard disks, video cards and other main system hardware. Because of that, these kinds of problems are almost inevitable with Windows-based hardware. They don't happen on Macs.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. No one beats Apple when it comes to design. As with previous versions of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard is flat-out beautiful. Windows may be improving, but it still has a way to go if it wants to catch the Mac.

Enterprise readiness

Windows is the business standard -- and the release of Snow Leopard won't change that. In enterprises and most businesses, the vast majority of computers run Windows, with only a few exceptions. Many enterprises have standardized not just on Windows but on the entire Microsoft architecture, including Office, SharePoint, Exchange, custom-built applications for Windows and so on.

In addition, Microsoft has a host of IT and management tools for deploying, maintaining and updating Windows hardware and software. Windows 7 adds some new ones, including management tools that use the scripting and automation capabilities of Windows PowerShell 2.0.

Snow Leopard makes a nod toward the enterprise, with built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. But that's simply not enough. Snow Leopard is a consumer operating system, and isn't accompanied by the kind of management tools and IT ecosystem that enterprises need in order to manage large deployments.

The Winner: Windows 7. Windows remains the enterprise standard. No change appears imminent.

Extras

Snow Leopard is more than just an operating system -- it comes with a full suite of applications, notably iLife with iMovie for making movies, GarageBand for recording and editing music, iWeb for making Web pages and more. There's also the excellent Time Machine backup and restore utility, QuickTime X for capturing movies, and the PDF reader and utility Preview.

Snow Leopard includes the excellent Time Machine backup and restore utility.
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Windows 7 has omitted many built-in apps; this backup utility is one that remains.
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By way of contrast, Microsoft has made the decision in Windows 7 to strip out many of the extras in Windows. For example, Windows Movie Maker and Windows Mail -- both very good programs -- shipped with Windows Vista, but will not ship with Windows 7. Windows 7 does include a usable backup program -- finally -- but it's not up to the standards of Time Machine.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. There's no real competition here; it wins hands down.

Conclusion

If you go by the scorecard, we have a tie -- Windows 7 and Snow Leopard each win five categories. Of course, going by a scorecard is too simplistic, because not all of the categories carry equal weight.

So which operating system is better? The near-simultaneous release of Snow Leopard and Windows 7 doesn't change the dynamic that has been in place for many years in the operating system competition between Apple and Microsoft.

Snow Leopard is more beautiful and elegant as well as simpler to use -- although with Windows 7, Microsoft has closed the gap between the operating systems, particularly when it comes to taskbar improvements.

Windows 7, on the other hand, remains the corporate standard, and nothing in Snow Leopard is likely to change that. And it's still a more tweakable operating system (although its critics may say that tweaking is mandatory in order to get it running right).

As for me, I'll continue to use both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. I can't remember another time in which Apple and Microsoft simultaneously released major upgrades to their operating systems. Both releases are big improvements. It's a golden time for operating system aficionados -- my recommendation is to use both and enjoy them if you can.

The Biggest Security Hole on the Web?

2009-08-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, Adobe released a critical patch for Flash Player and Acrobat Reader. According to online security company Trusteer, about 80% of users are still vulnerable, and perhaps more startling, the company views this as being possibly the biggest security hole on the Internet today.

That 80% figure is based on Trusteer's installed base of over 2.5 million online banking users of the company's security service.

"The penetration of Adobe Flash and Acrobat is unparalleled," a spokesperson for Trusteer tells WebProNews. "According to Adobe, 99% of Internet users run Flash.

So so many people on the web are running Flash, and Adobe released the patch two weeks ago, why are so many still vulnerable? Trusteer thinks Adobe just has issues with distributing patches.

"Adobe is facing some major security challenges and one of its biggest hurdles is its software update mechanism. For some reason, it is not effective enough in distributing security patches to the field," says Trusteer CEO Mickey Boodaei. "Given the lack of attention this situation has received to date, it appears that few people understand the magnitude of the problem. We recommend that all enterprises and individuals install the latest Flash and Acrobat updates immediately."

Accoreding to Trusteer, targeting products like Flash and Acrobat is attractive to wrongdoers because they reach such a huge portion of Internet users. Browser use is much more diversified with Internet Explorer reaching about 65% of users and Firefox reaching 30%. Targeting Adobe's products just covers a lot more people.

Security researchers zero in on Twitter hackers

2009-08-11T05:41:00.001-07:00

Confirm DDoS attacks targeted pro-Georgian blogger in massive effort to keep him quiet

Security experts are making progress in their efforts to identify the hackers responsible for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that crippled Twitter for several hours yesterday.

They have also come up with strong evidence that confirms claims the DDoS rampage that brought down Twitter and hit Facebook, Google's YouTube and LiveJournal, were caused by attacks targeting a pro-Georgian activist and blogger.

But they have yet to nail down exactly who was behind the attacks, how they were conducted, and from where.

Twitter, meanwhile, admitted that the attacks were "geopolitical in motivation."

"This was a very targeted attack, and what the research shows is that it was aimed at one particular person, and that person's accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LiveJournal," said Dave Marcus, director of security research at antivirus vendor McAfee.

McAfee has identified six separate DDoS attacks against various accounts registered to a user pegged as "Cyxymu," as well as a simultaneous spam e-mail campaign aimed at Cyxymu's Gmail account.

"We back-traced and correlated the data the attacks targeting Facebook, Twitter and others, and found commonalities in the IP [address] information," Marcus said.

Although McAfee was as of yet unable to identify the botnet responsible for the DDoS attacks, its trace-backs revealed that 29% of the machines composing the army of hijacked computers were located in Brazil. Turkish PCs accounted for another 9%, and Indian systems made up another 8%.

Marcus declined to guess the botnet's size. "That's kind of point of contention," he said. "In the case of Twitter, they've gone down before anyway, so it could have been small. Facebook, however, tends to be a lot more resilient, with a lot more load balancing and defensive measures." That might indicate the botnet, which hampered Facebook but didn't knock it offline, is larger.

"We're still looking at which botnet it was that did this," Marcus said.

So is Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks and a noted DDoS expert, who last year at this time investigated Russian "cybermilitia" attacks against Georgia, the former Soviet republic that was then battling Russian military forces over a territorial dispute. "We don't have indication that it's part of a known botnet," Jackson said today. "For such a high-volume, high-profile DDoS [attack], there's a conspicuous lack of evidence."

Jackson and other researchers at SecureWorks haven't seen the usual chatter in known hacker and "hacktivist" forums, been able to locate any botnet command-and-control servers showing evidence of having ordered the DDoS attack, or found any clues that the usual commercial DDoS suspects, who make a living renting out bots for such attacks, were involved.

"Either we had a serious breakdown in our security intelligence on this, or the commercial DDoS guys have researched, and found, different ways to mask their attacks," said Jackson.

However, what data SecureWorks does have points to multiple DDoS attacks launched against the pro-Georgian blogger, Jackson said, backing what Marcus has said.

Even so, Jackson was mystified at the lack of hard information. "We have all kinds of feelers out there to find out if this is a Georgia versus Russia thing," he said. "We have all kinds of triggers that would tell us if that was the case. But so far, there's been nothing."

Last August, Russian hackers mobilized an ad hoc DDoS against numerous state-sponsored sites in Georgia, including its foreign ministry's, defense department's and president's sites. At the time, researchers said that the attacks had left Russian hacker fingerprints.

Today, Jackson said there might well be a connection between last year's attacks and those against Twitter, Facebook and others yesterday. He cited the circumstantial evidence of the dates -- Georgia attacked the break-away province of South Ossetia on August 7, and Russia responded the next day.

"There's certainly a lot constant hackers involved over there, but there's no chat about it at all in the usual places," Jackson said. "But I think it would be unusual for them to self-mobilize for an attack of this size, against one person."

That would add weight to the idea that a commercial DDoS operator might have been involved. If it was a Russian group that specializes in DDoS attacks, "the cost would be free," said Jackson, adding that it was conceivable that the botnet had been donated to the cause of hitting Cyxymu.

"Hacktivism is very much back," said McAfee's Marcus. "But it's really hard to say that this is the beginning of a trend, this targeting of individuals that leads to collateral damage [like the Twitter outage]."

On the plus side, Marcus said, when Twitter went dark for several hours the outage prevented not only the innocent from using the site, but also the criminals, who rely on Twitter as a launch platform for spam and malware distribution.

"I guarantee that they were irritated," Marcus said.

For its part, today Twitter co-found Biz Stone acknowledged that the micro-blogging site had not restored full service, and was in fact still fending off attacks. He also hinted at a confirmation of what McAfee, SecureWorks and other security firms said today, that the attacks had some kind of political agenda.

"The ongoing, massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation," Stone said in a company blog posted just before 2 p.m. Eastern.

"However, we don't feel it's appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations," Stone said.

Security researchers zero in on Twitter hackers

2009-08-11T05:41:00.000-07:00