Ubuntu 10.10 Getting Multitouch ''Sequences''

Ubuntu 10.10 Getting Multitouch ''Sequences''

Canonical has announced that the next version of Ubuntu will come with support for multitouch.

Company founder Mark Shuttleworth yesterday announced that Ubuntu 10.10, scheduled for release in October, will feature multitouch support in the form of UTouch.

Multitouch is nothing new, however, Shuttleworth says Canonical tried to do something different with its implementation in Ubuntu.

"The design team has lead the way, developing a “touch language” which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere," Mr. Shuttleworth writes on his blog. "Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated 'sentences,'" he explains. "The basic gestures, or primitives, are like individual verbs, and stringing them together allows for richer interactions. It’s not quite the difference between banging rocks together and conducting a symphony orchestra, but it feels like a good step in the right direction."

Expect things to be pretty basic in 10.10, but Shuttleworth hopes that as third part developers jump on board, Ubuntu's multitouch experience will start to fill out quite nicely.

Ars Technica reports that uTouch is tightly integrated with Unity, Ubuntu's new lightweight netbook environment, and relies on recent improvements to the Linux kernel like the Xorg display server, and the Gtk+ toolkit.

Firefox 4 B4 Bringing Direct2D GPU Acceleration

Firefox 4 B4 Bringing Direct2D GPU Acceleration

Adventurous Firefox fans, there's a new beta coming on Monday that'll add a couple considerable features.


The fourth beta of Firefox 4 will be hitting on Monday, and notable will be the inclusion of hardware acceleration for Windows users that have the hardware and software to support Direct2D.

Firefox using your GPU to render won't be on by default – at least not yet. Mozilla's VP of engineering tweeted that Direct2D will be included in beta 4, but it isn't quite ready for everyone to be running it yet. Instead, the feature will be enabled through user intervention by modifying the config.
Mozilla details in its Wiki of how to turn it on and what to look out for:

D2D status:

* Direct2D is not turned on by default for Firefox 4 beta 4. (We weren't confident enough to turn it on for all users.)
* However, all the code in Firefox 4 beta 4, and it should work reasonably well for everyone.
* We really need testers, both on the beta and on nightlies. (We plan to enable Direct2D in nightlies as soon as beta 4 is tagged and branched.)

* To turn on Direct2D: Go in to about:config and set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 6, and gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled to true.
* To turn off Direct2D, once it is on by default, set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 0.
* To check whether you are running with Direct2D, go to about:support and look at the bottom. (Once bug 586046 lands, there will be even more information about your graphics card in there.)
* Please look out for memory usage, rendering speed, and any rendering problems you might see. Also focus on interactions with plugins like Flash.

HP Confirms WebOS and Windows Tablets/Slates

HP Confirms WebOS and Windows Tablets/Slates

Two tablets that have been talked about for months have been confirmed.

Talk of this device has been going on for a while now, even though we haven't had any official word from HP on it. Now we've finally got confirmation: All that talk of a WebOS tablet from HP was true; and yes, it's launching sometime at the beginning of next year. Also in the cards? A Windows tablet, despite the supposedly axed HP Slate.

Last week, word got out that a HP WebOS tablet called Hurricane had been discussed in an all hands meeting. Though tipsters didn't have any information -- other than the fact that project Hurricane had been mentioned by Personal Systems Group VP Todd Bradley -- it matched up with earlier reports that said HP would launch a WebOS tablet called Hurricane – though those pointed to a Q3 2010 launch as opposed to Q1 2011.

The company has also been talking about a Windows 7 slate for a very long time, debuting the HP Slate at CES last January. At the time, it was expected to see a June release but it never appeared and word on the street was HP had axed it. However, it seems that's not the case. Todd Bradley yesterday put an end to talk by confirming both devices, and gave a rough estimate of when we can expect to see them hit shelves.

"You'll see us with a Microsoft product out in the near future and a webOS-based product in early 2011," Bradley, said at the company's third-quarter earnings call, later confirmed that he was talking about tablets.

Bradley provided nothing else in the way of information, but gadget fans eager to see a tablet running Windows will be excited to hear HP hasn't completely ditched the OS, as we'd originally feared.

HP yesterday posted Q3 earnings with $2.3b in operating profit, a five percent increase over the same period last year. GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.75, up from $0.69 percent a year earlier, while non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.08, up from $0.92. This includes a one-time negative impact of approximately $0.02 per share related to a legal settlement. The company posted quarterly revenue of $30.7 billion, an 11 percent increase over last year.

Intel: Turbo Boost

Intel: Turbo Boost

Intel's implementation works best on processors with a lot of scalability inherent to their design, as Turbo Boost covers much broader clock speed ranges. For example, the new six-core "Gulftown," Core i7-980X, is already running close to its thermal ceiling under load. Thus, it's limited to a 266 MHz boost with a single core active, and a modest 133 MHz bump when two or more cores are active. Knowing that Intel’s overclocking headroom is sizable, this is really a pity for enthusiasts. After all, the Phenom II X6 can speed up three cores by up to 400 MHz using a 45 nm process.


Intel’s power gate transistors facilitate cutting power to individual cores. This allows the processor to actually disengage those cores from the overall power envelope, consequently "buying" the overhead needed to increase the remaining cores’ clock speed. The premise here is that fewer cores can run at higher clock speeds before they reach the same thermal output.

While AMD basically reduces clock speed and voltage for inactive cores, Intel can physically shut them down. In theory, this should result in lower power consumption and, paired with the ability to dynamically scale one or more cores up or down, a better overall performance result.

Intel has another advantage that should be mentioned. While AMD's six-core processors access 6 MB of shared L3 cache, Intel's architecture currently offers a massive 12 MB repository. If you switch off individual cores, the remaining active processing units can still access the full 12 MB L3. This should provide advantages for applications that work with limited data and use few threads.

AMD: Turbo CORE

AMD: Turbo CORE

Turbo CORE is available on all AMD Phenom II X4 and X6 processors based on the recent 45 nm designs, namely the Thuban six-core and seen-in-the-wild but not-yet-available-at-retail Zosma quad-core models. Should it ever see retail availability, the Phenom II X4 960T at 3.0 GHz nominal speed could accelerate two cores up to 3.4 GHz (+400 MHz) with the thermal headroom available, and if the application load demands the increase. The Phenom II X6 processors increase their clock speeds by 500 MHz, with the exception of the 1090T flagship, which adds 400 MHz to reach from 3.2 to 3.6 GHz.

This implementation can be considered an addition to the Cool’n’Quiet feature, which reduces clock speeds and voltages if there is little work for the processor to do. Once half of the cores are idle, the system reduces their clock speed to the Cool’n’Quiet minimum of 800 MHz. The next step is a voltage increase for the remaining active cores paired with a speed lift of up to 500 MHz, as explained above.

Unfortunately, few workloads would tax exactly three cores by 100%—the conditions needed for AMD’s solution to run at 3.6 GHz. We found that a two-core load scenario is more realistic. This is why the feature works better on a CPU with an even core count, such as the Phenom II X4 960T.

AMD’s Turbo CORE control allows Black Edition processor users to adjust their number of accelerated cores. This makes analysis more complex, but also gives enthusiasts a more powerful tool for fine tuning their systems.

Zotac GeForce GTX 480 AMP Edition

Zotac GeForce GTX 480 AMP! Edition

We've been impressed by Zotac's factory-overclocked AMP! edition cards in the past. This time around, the company is working with Zalman in order to provide a card with a more effective aftermarket cooler. Certainly, one of the main detractors from Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480 is how hot the card gets, and how noisy the stock cooler can be. So, if a new cooler can fix these issues, this product has the potential to be a particularly attractive option. At $510 on Newegg, this board is about $60 more than the lowest-priced reference GeForce GTX 480s.
The $60 price premium gets you a Zalman VF3000 graphics card cooler, which is a large and effective unit with dual-axial fans and five heat pipes designed to pull the high temperatures from the hot GF100 GPU. At the time of writing, the delta between this card and the reference pack was only $20. Since the Zalman VF3000F cooler will cost in the neighborhood of $50 when it's released (It hasn't made it to retail at time of writing), that seemed like a very reasonable deal. Now, it's a little less impressive in the face of cratering prices on the GTX 480s.

As with the rest of our factory-overclocked models, good case airflow is a must, as the hot air is not forced out of the back of the case. Instead, most of it will find its way back into the enclosure. Note that the Zotac GeForce GTX 480 AMP! edition card is the only model in our roundup that monopolizes three expansion card slots, due to the massive Zalman cooler.
The card's bundle includes some standard items, such as a driver CD, a manual, a DVI-to-VGA dongle, and a Molex-to-PCIe power adapter. But there are a couple of adapters that I'm not used to seeing: a mini HDMI-to-HDMI adapter and a dual-six-pin-to-eight-pin-PCIe power adapter. The card doesn't have any value-added software, but there are some 30-day trials of CUDA-accelerated software like the Badaboom video encoder. Zotac offers a five-year warranty with this AMP! edition card (and limited lifetime within the US), which is fantastic compared to the competition.
The PCB is 100% reference, complete with unused holes for the cross-flow fan with which the standard model comes equipped. Of course, this doesn't detract from the product. Just like the reference card, the GeForce GTX 480 comes with 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory. The outputs mirror the reference card, with two dual-link DVI options and a single mini-HDMI port. Because the GF100 includes two independent display pipelines, you can only use two of this card's three outputs at any given time.
This factory-overclocked AMP! edition card has a core speed of 756 MHz (56 MHz above reference), a shader speed of 1512 MHz (111 MHz over reference), and a memory speed of 950 MHz (26 MHz/104 MT/s effective over reference). As far as we know, the fastest factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 480 is the EVGA GeForce GTX 480 SuperClocked+ model, with a mere 4 MHz more on the core (760 MHz). Yet, the EVGA card has a 61 MHz lower shader speed, so we think it's reasonable to say that the Zotac AMP! card has the highest factory overclock you can get on a GeForce GTX 480. At idle, the card's clocks drop to a miserly 50.5 MHz core/101 MHz shader/67.5 MHz memory to keep things as efficient as possible.

Overclocking
As a testament to the effectiveness of the cooling system, we were able to overclock the Zotac card's core to 825 MHz, its shaders to 1650 MHz, and it memory to 1050 MHz. We achieved this with MSI's Afterburner overclocking utility that, fortunately, allowed us to adjust clock rates and voltages. We increased voltage from 1.05 V to 1.138 V, and we increased the fan speed to 100% to keep temperatures down.

Gigabyte GV-R587SO-1GD SUPER OVERCLOCK

Gigabyte GV-R587SO-1GD SUPER OVERCLOCK

Gigabyte's special sauce for its GV-R587SO-1GD comes in the form of a very high factory overclock, coupled with the ability to tweak the card's voltages using the Gigabyte OC Guru software. A large custom cooler completes the package. This card can be purchased from Newegg for $500, or about $110 more than typical Radeon HD 5870 reference models.
Speaking of the cooler, this is an impressive unit, as the temperature and noise benchmarks will show further into the story. It uses four heat pipes to pull the heat away from the GPU and a pair of axial fans to quickly dissipate it. Unlike the reference cooler, some of the heated air is forced back into the case. So, once again, good case airflow is a great idea.
As with our other Radeon HD 5870 sample, we only had the bare card to test. According to promotional images of the bundle, Gigabyte's bundle includes an install CD, an installation guide, a CrossFire bridge, two Molex-to-PCIe power adapters, and a DVI-to-VGA adapter. There is no value-added software to be had here. Instead, the engineers have focused exclusively on the hardware, and we're absolutely alright with that. The card comes with a three-year warranty, which is just what we'd expect from this class of hardware.
Gigabyte has gone out of its way to make the GV-R587SO-1GD stand out. You can tell this by looking at the PCB, which deviates significantly from the reference model, even though it's almost exactly the same physical size and carries the standard 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. The PCIe power connectors have been moved to the top of the card for easy access, which is a welcome change. Gigabyte claims that this card is part of its GPU Gauntlet program, meaning that the graphics processors are deliberately binned to ensure superior overclocking. We'll see if this bears out in the overclocking tests.
Despite all of its other differences, this Gigabyte card uses the same reference Radeon HD 5870 output bezel, complete with two DVI outputs, in addition to HDMI and DisplayPort connectors.

For a product with the words “Super Overclock” as part of its name, we have high expectations of default clock rates. The card does not disappoint, either. It's core clock is set 50 MHz shy of 1 GHz (that's 950 MHz), representing a 100 MHz overclock beyond AMD's reference design. Moreover, it sports a 1250 MHz memory clock, 50 MHz (200 MT/s effective) over the reference setting. To our knowledge, this is the highest factory overclock available on a Radeon HD 5870. Despite this, clock speeds drop to a low 157/300 MHz to save power, just as we'd hope to see.

Overclocking

While this card's BIOS allows for overclocking speeds of up to 2000 MHz on the core and memory through AMD's Overdrive panel in the Catalyst Control Center (CCC), there is naturally no way it'd ever make it that high. While MSI's Afterburner utility doesn't allow for voltage manipulation on this board, Gigabyte does have its own robust overclocking utility capable of altering clock rates and voltages.
Using Gigabyte's utility, we were able to push the card to just over 1 GHz stably, eventually resting on a 1010 MHz core and 1325 MHz (5300 MT/s effective) configuration with the GPU voltage raised to 1.29 V, up from 1.187 V. Incidentally, this is the highest voltage the OC Guru utility allowed us to use. Even still, load temperatures in FurMark remained nice and low at about 60 degrees Fahrenheit with the fan speed increased to 100%. This is a great overclock for a Radeon HD 5870. We weren't able to do much better with a water-cooled PowerColor Radeon HD 5870 LCS that we reviewed. It seems that most Radeon HD 5870 GPUs probably won't go much faster than 1 GHz, despite voltage and cooling tweaks.

HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo X

HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo X

The HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo X’s long name tells its tale: it's a Radeon HD 5870 equipped with HIS' iCooler V heat sink, and the Turbo suffix means that it's also overclocked. The "X" is a little something extra. The modifier indicates that the card is overclocked higher than HIS' standard Turbo model. We found the Turbo X on Newegg for $490 (at the time of publication, it's unavailable), which is $100 more than standard Radeon HD 5870 models, and very close to GeForce GTX 480 cards. So, let's see what HIS did to make this card special.

The card comes with the usual 1 GB of GDDR5 onboard memory, so the extra expense doesn't come from an abundance of RAM. The iCooler V is certainly unique when compared to the reference Radeon HD 5870 cooler, as HIS has abandoned the reference radial (cross-flow) fan in favor of an axial model. HIS claims this makes the card quieter and cooler than AMD's reference design. We'll see how effective the iCooler V is in our testing later on.
Since we were sent the bare card without the accompanying bundle, we can only report on the package contents from the HIS Web site, which indicates that the product includes a CrossFire bridge, two Molex-to-PCIe power adapters, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, an installation CD, and an installation guide. The package also comes bundled with a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game coupon. This becomes a real bonus if you don't already own the game. It's a AAA title that still sells for about 50 bucks. Of course, if you're one of the more than 20 million people worldwide who have already played the game, the bundle is less meaningful, naturally.

The HIS Web site declares that this product comes with a two-year warranty. While the two-year warranty is somewhat shorter than the three-year term we'd hope a premium product would offer, it is certainly not uncommon. And after two years, most enthusiasts have already started thinking about an upgrade anyway.
The printed circuit board is closely related to the reference design, but it does sport a few tweaks. It is about 3/8" shorter than the reference Radeon HD 5870, and its PCI Express (PCIe) power connections have been relocated to the top of the card--a change that can make installation a lot easier in tighter environments.
The iCooler V heat sink doesn't have any fancy heat pipes. It instead relies on brute force, with a lot of copper and aluminum fins to get the job done. It pulls air in the bottom and exhausts the heat out of the back of the case, in addition to the opposite end of the card. So, having a case with good airflow is ideal.
When it comes to outputs, the TurboX doesn't deviate from AMD's standard Radeon HD 5870 configuration. It boasts two DVI outputs, in addition to HDMI and DisplayPort options. In fact, the output bezel looks identical to the reference model. Just remember that you can only use three outputs at any given time, and in a three-monitor setup, one of them must be attached to the DisplayPort connector.

As mentioned, Turbo X indicates a factory overclock. This card sports a 900 MHz core clock, in addition to a 1225 MHz memory clock, representing a 50 MHz and 25 MHz (100 MT/s effective) increase over stock clocks, respectively. At idle, we saw the GPU frequency drop to 400 MHz core to save power, but the memory seemed to stay at 1,225 MHz. This is in sharp contrast to the 157/300 MHz clocks enabled on a reference card.

Overclocking

The card's BIOS locks the maximum overclocks accessible through AMD's Overdrive utility to a meager 920 MHz core, which is only a mere 20 MHz over its shipping frequency. While the memory limit is a little more flexible at 1300 MHz, we decided to use the MSI Afterburner utility, purported to override the BIOS limits with a little tweaking.
Unfortunately, the MSI Afterburner utility doesn't allow for voltage increases on most non-reference Radeon HD 5870s, so we weren't able to really push the card as far as we would have liked. Nevertheless, we were able to squeeze a maximum overclock of 940 MHz core and 1340 MHz memory from the board, which is 90 MHz over the reference core clock and 140 MHz (520 MT/s effective) over the reference memory data rate. This is a very good result without a voltage increase, and speaks to the effectiveness of the tweaks that HIS made to AMD's reference design.

At 100% fan speed, the card is noisier than a stock Radeon HD 5870. but it manages to keep the GPU cool, with temperatures under 70 degrees Celsius at full load.

Android Phone Can Be Used as a Supercomputer

google nexus one handphone

This supercomputer fits in your pocket.

When you hear 'supercomputer' and 'small' in the same sentence, you likely wonder how small a room are they talking about. However, when the folks at MIT and Texas Advanced Computing Center say small, they mean small as in pocket-sized.

A collaboration between MIT and the Texas Advanced Computing Center has led to an Android application that the two institutions claim can do honest-to-goodness supercomputing.

TACC explains that the team at MIT performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on TACC's Ranger supercomputer and then generated a smaller, reduced model, which was used to create an Android application for a Nexus One.

"You don’t need to have a high-powered computer on hand," insists David Knezevic, a post-doctoral associate in mechanical engineering at MIT. "Once you've created the reduced model, you can do all the computations on a phone."

Though this kind of model reduction has been done before, TACC says the MIT system's real advantage is its rigorous error bounds, which tell the user the range of possible solutions, and provide a metric of whether an answer is accurate or not.

Knezevic goes on to say that using a reduced scale model also results in faster computations.

"The payoff for model reduction is larger when you can go from an expensive supercomputer solution to a calculation that takes a couple of seconds on a smart phone," he said. "That’s a speed up of orders of magnitude."