Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Technology

Apple Macintosh with Intel processors !!!

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Nearly impossible to believe but it’s true !

Steve Jobs has just announced that as soon as from next year (2006), Macintosh computer will be sold with Intel processors.

The main argument for Intel is that Intel (with its great Pentium-M) can as from today give Apple a processor which can be used in the next line of Mac PowerBooks !

So very very exciting times ahead ! Once more ! And I’m sure that (as one guy on Slashdot said) “it will be the most brilliant business decision made since he [Steve Jobs] invented the MP3 player.”

The new Playstation 3…

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… will be launched around this time next year (spring 2006) :-)

The Sony Playstation 3 is very intriguing.

On one hand it is a game console. And I personally don’t care about those… I mean, a Computer Scientist does not have time to play games, isn’t it ???

On the other hand, the Playstation 3 is one hell of a machine according to its specs :

Let’s see.

It uses a Cell processor (jointly developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba) which is, in fact, a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz dispatching tasks to 7 (yes, seven!) vector units each with its own 128 registers and its own memory… The Cell has been announced to perform at 218 GFLOPS compared to my latest AMD Athlon64 3000+ running at 4 GFLOPS. Of course, the question is whether application developers will be able to leverage this power but things depend a lot on the quality of the optimising compilers I suppose as no one now writes directly in Assembly code (especially for RISC architectures)

It also has a GPU from NVidia called the RSX which runs at a maximum of 1.8 TFLOPS (I am feeling dizzy…) and supports 2 channels of high-definition (HD) video. Judging by some screenshots released by Sony, I can tell you that games will be photorealistic.

The Playstation 3 uses Blu-Ray Disc which can hold up to 25 Gb of data compared to the 4.7 Gb found on a single-layer DVD.

Finally, it also can handle up to 7 Bluetooth wireless appliances like a keyboard, a mouse, joypads and what not. It is also fully USB, Wi-fi and Ethernet capable.

The Playstation 3 has only 512 Mb of RAM though. And it does not have a hard-disc which is pretty disapointing.

It has the potential to become the PC killer. For that, it must get additional RAM, a hard-disc and, most important, a real operating system.

Why not Linux ?

Mac OS X Tiger released today

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Hi guys and gals,

I have some secrets (?) to tell you all : (1) I don’t like Micro$oft and Windoze is crap, (2) Linux and the Opensource movement are just fantastic, but (3) one day, I’ll buy an Apple Mac OS X Powerbook and stop using Linux as my main OS…

Why ?

Because I’m fascinated by Apple hardware and the Mac OS X operating system.

The Powerbook I’m dreaming of every night has the following configuration : 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 processor ; 1GB DDR333 SDRAM; 15″ screen ; 64MB Video RAM ; 8x DVD±RW drive ; 80GB Ultra ATA drive ; Wifi enabled.

Furthermore, the Mac OS X operating system has a fantastic architecture. It’s basically the Aqua user interface running on an Opensource Unix-based foundation. And, as such, most Linux applications just simply run.

Mac OS X Tiger, which is going to be released today, is revolutionary according to Apple. The OS will introduce a new technology, Spotlight.

Spotlight is a lightning-fast search technology which completely decouples the user from the physical filesystem. There is no need now to remember where files or folders are. Spotlight keeps track of everything using metadata and it can also look inside documents (PDF or whatever). Smart folders (a la smart playlists of iTunes) can easily be created by the user. This will change the whole way of interacting with a computer.

The Powerbook comes with iLife ’05 which is a suite of very powerful applications like iPhoto (which I’ll use to manipulate photos from my hypothetical Nikon D70), iMovie HD (which I’ll use to edit DV recordings of Kyan and Anya), iDVD (which I’ll use to burn commercial quality DVD of the kids), iTunes (which I’ll use to listen to my extensive music collection) and, perhaps GarageBand (because as an existing owner of Logic, I will surely upgrade mine to the latest Logic Pro 7 version)

Better yet, Football Manager 2005 (which is the best computer game ever) runs on Mac OS X.

And, as far as software development is concerned, one can easily develop in C or C++ because gcc is pre-installed (and is used to build Mac OS X itself) and Java (as a VM is also pre-installed). So, no problem at all to run Eclipse or even KDevelop…

But, to really leverage the power of this fantastic machine, I’m ready to adopt the freely available Xcode IDE, learn Objective C and start using the Cocoa framework.

Message to Christina and (perhaps) Steve Jobs : I want a Mac !