Have you ever heard of Minecraft? Someone at work mentioned it to me as one of their favourite “sandbox” games. The basic premise is that you find yourself in a new world full of trees, dirt, stone and other resources and you have to survive. You do this by building stuff out of the available resources. First you collect some wood and build a workbench, then build a house to keep you safe for the night and so on.
I am at the absolute beginner stage where I haven’t even figured out how to put the workbench down on the ground. I can already however see how addictive this game could become. I quick look online will show you what some people have built with blocks. You can make glass, smelt metals, farm crops and what you can make seems to only be limited by your imagination. When I figure out how to play the think properly I’ll give another review.
At the other end of the scale is StarCraft 2. Playing that one has taught me that at the very least I need a new graphics card as things seem to take forever to load. I’m looking at buying a GTX 460 1GB variant. I’ll let you know how this goes, or doesn’t.
On the 8th of June it will be World IPv6 day. Most of us are still on the IPv4 addressing system. If you are wondering what happened to IPv5 , you know that you are, it never became an official protocol. Some time back Internet Stream Protocol (ST) was considered IP version five by industry researchers, but ST was abandoned before ever becoming a standard or widely known as IPv5. Work on ST and IPv5 is also never expected to ever restart.
At the same time giants like Google and Facebook will be start providing their services using of what amounts to this new version of the Internet. If you didn’t already know, IPv6 was introduced to handle the lack of new IP addresses available for future use. IPv6 not only provides a lot of new address space but also better security and faster addressing.
An IP address currently looks something like 128.196.001.001 i.e. 32 bits. The IPv6 address is 128 bits in length and will look something like 2001:0470:1f09:1890:021f:f3ff:fe51:43f8 that is eight groups of 4 hexadecimal digits. Each group has a 64 bit prefix that is likely to be given to your ISP. Your home allocation then could be more that the whole of existing IPv4 network, just kidding.
So the new system provides almost unlimited addressing, how will this affect you now at home? For the time being probably not at all. IPv4 is not being turned off and most of what you have now is not IPv6 compatible anyway. Your computer can probably handle it, as can the later operating systems so if you enable IPv6 on your network you probably won’t have any problems, probably. There are some sites that use only IPv6 but you are unlikely to hit them for the time being. So expect both versions to be around for a while yet.
So for now you will be given some IPv6 addresses for your network and your router will provide an IPv4 address and NAT (Network Address Translation) for devices. This will also mean that your IPv6 devices will now be visible on the network. It may be that games lead the way with groups like World of Warcraft ready to do with Ipv6 but not yet running it. When they do it will really start to test people’s connectivity. I suspect that when it does start to happen there will be some who find out that things stop working.
Special Report – Intel’s New 3D Transistors
If you haven’t heard Intel had a big presentation recently touting their new 3D Tri-Gate transistors using 22 nanometer technology. This puts AMD in the catch up position as they have their Bulldozer 32 nanometer technology. Since I was curious, and I one studied computer servicing many, many years ago, I decided to take a close look at the technology and see if it will really give Intel the competitive advantage they are crowing about.
Intel’s announcement comes just as AMD is ramping up with GlobalFoundries to produce the 32 nm wafer baking that would have theoretically caught them up with Intel that has had it since late in 2009. AMD’s product contains both a CPU and a GPU on a single die, called an APU. AMD plans to roll out the new products in the third quarter. Intel responded with the latest announcement. Intel will put the new technology in their Ivy Bridge family, an upgraded version of the Sandy Bridge range.
The issue in the simplest form is how power affects switching speeds. The new technology here allows faster switching at lower voltages. In this case at 0.7 of a volt the switching gains run out to about 37 percent. Or put another way 22 nm at 0.8 volts performs as well as 32 nm at 1 volt with a 50 percent reduction in active power. All of this of a 2-3 percent increase in wafer manufacturing costs. That is some serious power savings and the lower voltages mean less thermal handing required.
The ramification is that Intel wants all chip markets from smartphones to servers and everything in between. The technology itself is not that new and can be found in various forms in labs all over the planet. The difference is that Intel is throwing its considerable manufacturing weight behind the concept and spending $8b to upgrade four plants and build a new one. They are also investing in a new process for 14nm technology.
Industry News
It seems like every time I look at some It news Apple is up to something new to restrict people from doing something. In the latest iteration Apple has made it even harder to swap your hard drive in the latest line of iMacs. They have changed the standard 4 wire SATA connector to a proprietary 7 wire version. They have also moved the drive’s temperature control to that connector in addition to the firmware.
What this means is if you use a non-Apple cable or hard drive to say increase your available space you will end up with a hard drive fan that always spins at the maximum speed, i.e. is noisy, very noisy. The fan scream you hear is Apple yelling at you for not buying their replacements. Wonder what they will do to mess up your life next week? This is yet another reason why I don’t buy any Apple products, ever.
Also this week in the new technology stakes boffins over at HP think they have cracked the memristors technology. This is a combination of physical and chemical technologies that could replace NAND and even DRAM in the future. In theory the technology could be ten times faster that flash at one tenth the power cost. They can also be stacked to achieve high density memory structures. Fabrication is also fairly simple and they have tested 3nm devices that switch at about one nanosecond and provide 20Gb per square centimeter, before stacking. The breakthrough is that now they know how the process works at the microscopic level. Planned ship dates for some early versions are planned for 2013.
It is expected that the first target for memristors will be flash memory devices. Since memristors also mimic synapses there is one scientist who is working on modeling a cat’s brain. With this new development Wei Lu may be closer to making an artificial cat. I for one will welcome our new cyber-kitty overlords.
The chip maker Tilera is coming out with a new range of processors that currently range up to 100 cores in a single die. There will be three versions depending on what the IO and memory requirements are. 16, 32, 64 and 100 core versions are planned all with a mesh network construction. Each core has 32 KB of cache giving the 100 version a whopping 32MB of cache to play with. There are lots of other features like fact encryption, fast graphics processing and 80 GB/s PCI express bandwidth. In a word, fast.
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