They are finally here! Intel's 4th generation line of Core processors codenamed Haswell first started appearing on sale just this week to the consumer line and it does not disappoint.
The new CPU is 25% more efficient than the Ivy Bridge CPUs and it's integrated GPU is 2.6x more powerful. The IGP ends up being 50% faster when used to graphics intense tasks such as video editing or light gaming that the processors are suited to.
But where Ivy Bridge touched on Haswell intends to improve. The main forte of Ivy Bridge was still desktops, laptops and Ultrabooks. Haswell on the other hand has a much higher energy saving and therefore is well suited to tablets.
The IGP is where it is at however. The Ivy Bridge CPU itself is already a powerhouse and with only a few minor improvements for this side of things, the graphics chip has had full attention. To me personally, I believe that including a GPU in the CPU to create SoC (System-On-a-Chip) is a great idea and one that is great for those who use the GPU for certain tasks (I love the Quick Sync 2.0 feature in my Sandy Bridge CPU as it makes video rendering much faster) but I also have a dedicated GPU (AMD Radeon 7950) for gaming and for other GPU intensive applications.
The improvements within the GPU are incredibly useful for tablets and other devices which can utilise the lower power consumption and better performance better than a PC with a dedicated graphics card. What's more, the CPUs all feature different GPUs which allows for a broad scalability ranging from servers to tablets. It is claimed that the highest end GPU (Iris Pro 5200) included has a total of 40 execution cores (or units) in comparison to Sandy Bridge's stock of 16 cores. Intel has promised scalability of the GPU as the lowest end (HD 4200) model only has 20 units - still more than Sandy Bridge.
Haswell will also use a different socket to both Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge now using Socket 1150 which means no backward compatibility.
For the mean time, if you are like me and are waiting for Broadwell, the successor to Haswell (14nm fabrication process) or even waiting further then here is the new box design for you to look at.
For many long years, we have used hard disk drives as the primary storage medium, whilst solid state drives have been trying to catch up with their capacities and low prices. For the first time solid state drives are actually beginning to be appealing to the average user as prices tumble down and capacities keep on increasing. I have been constantly bombarded with emails saying how you can get one today for as little as £34 and a 480GB SATA II for as little as £150. This is why I have decided to post about this.
The benefits of solid state storage drives have increased as they drop in price and become more readily available. The price has gone down for SSDs and up for hard drives since I got my first one in November 2010 (in my LifeBook T4410 and still runs blazingly fast). I would say I was quite an early adopter of solid state, so when I bought my drive it cost me £200 for a 120GB drive which was a huge gamble considering it had a 500GB hard disk in it. Nowadays the price per gigabyte for solid state storage has gone as low as 60 cents (about 40p) according to one source. This is an incredible breakthrough and very important step for SSDs as the average price per gigabyte for a hard drive was previously as low as 10p before the floods that pretty much doomed the hard drive market the week before I ordered a new 2TB hard disk.
My first concern with SSDs at first was the reliability issues. When an SSD comes to the end of it's life, it can still function as a read only drive. Data can still be read from the disk (if you are using it to store data) but it cannot be written (operating systems need read/write access to the disk and cannot be one or the other, so it will probably not be able to load the operating system). I had originally presumed that this is what happens when the cells lose their functionality, but some articles had shown me otherwise. I now decided that as I have 4 solid state machines (2 for my desktop (the first had a fault in the first 5 months), MacBook Pro and Fujitsu Lifebook T4410 convertible tablet) that I needed to check up on this and find out if what I originally thought was true or not. Indeed I was actually correct about what I had though - once a solid state drive reaches the end of it's life, the cells become read only. You can still recover data from them. To me this was very good news, and single handedly this defeats the hard drive here as when a hard drive randomly decides to die, all the data goes with it.
The major benefit of SSDs that I am always enforcing into people's decisions when their hard drive fails and needs replaced is that of speed. Hard disks can only achieve a maximum/peak speed of around 125MB/s (1000Mbps) at 7,200 revelations per minute. Even with SATA III (better known as SATA6 because it operates at 6Gb/s) they can only achieve a maximum of 300MB/s so they cannot actually saturate SATA current maximum speed which is where the solid state can show its true colours. Most SSDs are rated at around 300MB/s to 500MB/s as a sustained read speed which put into context is 8 x 500 = 4000Mbps or 4Gbps, 2Gbps short of the SATA III peak speed. So SSDs are catching up on the maximum speed of SATA III. Less waiting. More doing. My first ever test with two drives was applied on my 7,200 RPM 500GB 2.5" drive which I used back in July 2010 in my Fujitsu LifeBook T4410 and the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB 2.5" drive that replaced it in November 2010. For the test I cleared everything off the 500GB and moved it to my desktop, formatted the drive and reinstalled Windows x64 on to it. I then formatted the OCZ Vertex 2 and installed Windows 7 x64 on it. On both occasions the PC was plugged in. I started the Fujitsu up with each drive recording the following durations for start up: with the 500GB HDD at 7,200 RPM it took 54 seconds to start up and with the 120GB SSD it took 34 seconds to start up. After tweaking the system a bit, I managed to break the 30 second barrier and get it starting up quicker than ever.
I am actually considering adding a new array of 2x 480GB SSDs (SATA III) to my RAID array of 2x 2TB hard disks (SATA II) as they have dropped so far in price, but offer much better performance with probably better reliability - although I do want to replace this soon with a Thunderbolt enclosure, so the disks may have to wait. My general conclusion is that solid state drives now offer more benefits than hard disk drives do, and although they are still more expensive than hard disks, they show their true colours when you want speed.
Today, I was working on the next release of Painter Pro, codenamed Dundee which I am releasing as version 1.3 of the application, and is next in line after St Andrews and the current build known as Aberdeen. For the Dundee build, there are some major changes. As I started work of improving the speed of algorithms used in Painter Pro, I also started to look at other ways to improve the overall performance.
Whilst I was working away, improving speed, I was working on linking code to make it efficient. I noticed that whilst I was working on this, all of my classes linked together through one library, i.e. they were all dependant on this one class library. Three libraries make up a lot of the components of my software, namely Balfour's Business Class Library (a set of business tools, methods, controls and more), Balfour's Business File Extension Library (a set of file extensions for use in the business applications) and Balfour's Business Extension Class Library (a set of tools, methods, controls and more which build upon the BBCL and is loosely coupled to it).
The class library houses all of my file extensions and nothing more (BIF, WUX, DUX, RUX, QQS and more). This is why I did not want the library to contain this code. Instead of doing this, I decided to duplicate the code (which again is not a good idea). The file extension library should be independent of all of the other libraries, or at least of the extension library. If they are linked, none of them can compile, because the changes require the latest versions of each other.
Coupling like this should be avoided, not just so that the libraries work alone but so that at least one of the libraries can function without the other. It's a very important part of writing a good library of classes.
Today Microsoft released the long anticipated information related to the Xbox 720. It started off with the announcement that the new generation would be revolutionary. Until now, everyone referred to the next generation of Xbox console and their 8th generation games console as the 720, but it's proper market name was released to us today, with the name Xbox One. The name is good, modern and it's not surprising they have gone for a simple name like One.
The console looked like a giant Kinect bar at first, but after closer observation, I noticed that what I was looking at was actually the new Kinect bar and the console together.
Now for the more interesting bit, the specifications. The One runs on an 8 core CPU (by AMD, so it is x86-64), has 8GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive and features a Blu-Ray disk drive as well as USB 3.0. In terms of whether or not it is a PC or not is now getting difficult to distinguish. One thing that it now adds is an HDMI in connection which can be used to connect a set top box or cable box as a passthrough to the TV. This allows you to say to the Xbox One that you want to watch television and it will display the input from the HDMI in connection.
It does look attractive
Xbox Live is compatible with old gamer tags, but the console itself (probably due to the fact that it is an x86-64 architecture) cannot play any Xbox 360 games or original Xbox games. The console runs on three operating systems including an Xbox kernel and a Windows kernel. Whether or not this is nice or not I've yet to decide (I'm not too fond of the whole Windows 8 interface). It also has a third operating system which is designed to link both of the operating systems together.
The controller is very similar to the Xbox 360 controller but now have a nicer design and by the looks of things, better analogue sticks.
The console also has backing from our good friends at EA (who made the absolutely gobsmackingly bad Command and Conquer 4 and destroyed a great series of games and who won the award of Worst Company in America) with new sports games and much more coming to it.
Overall, I was impressed with the design of the console, the specification (it is good that along with Sony they have gone for the x86 architecture like the PC, finally) and I liked the general presentation. However, I overall dislike the Xbox One for some very important reasons. Firstly, the console is another console which is bringing the end to console gaming. It focuses so much on Kinect now which makes it harder to see how the gaming market can ever go back to the classic ways of the Nintendo 64 or PS2. Interaction with the user is the core of the experience, not just immersion in the classics like Halo or Bond games. I also dislike the whole concept of using your voice all the time, or using Smart Glass which to me is a pointless idea.
I will not be buying an Xbox One, because I was not much of Xbox 360 fan; most of games sat on a shelf (bar Halo games) and cannot justify spending that much money. I'm more of a fan of my PC and Wii U because I like Nintendo games (I have always been a Nintendo gamer). I also feel that the gap between the PC and the games console has just about been bridged; as both the Xbox One and PS4 consoles are just PCs that simply cannot be upgraded. And finally, I have all these consoles I have accumulated over the years and I do not want any more.
If you ask me, just go and buy a good PC, it will last longer, can be upgraded and will cost less in the long run when you come to replace parts (and will not have issues such as the RRoD).
In this post, I'm basically describing why I really will never go back to Windows Phone, contradictory to my article I posted on my website a few years ago found here.
I loved my Windows Mobile phones
One of my good friends in 2009, had an iPhone 3G and my current phone at the time was an XDA Stellar (ran Windows Mobile 6.0). I totally hated the looks of the iPhone and loved the concept of having a small Windows device in my pocket. It made me feel 'geeky'. Compared with my previous Windows Mobile smartphone, the XDA Exec, this phone had serious issues. It was app-less, lacked a capacitive screen and slow, sometimes even making a phone call was a challenge.The Stellar seemed to lack a decent CPU, unlike it's predecessor. Most of the applications I had for the phone were useless because of this. Therefore, I had to look at a decent alternative, at first this was a HP smartphone that ran Windows Mobile 6.0 but with more RAM and a better CPU, but then I turned to another phone.
The iPhone 3GS - my first iPhone
In June 2009, I got myself an iPhone 3GS. I loved the phone to bits, even though I was anti-Apple (my only Apple product before hand was an iPod Shuffle 2GB 2nd Generation that I had won in a competition). The Windows Mobile platform that I was developing programs for was now officially dead in my eyes. The first app I got on my iPhone 3GS was Shazam - a fully fledged music recognition app (I had used it on Windows Mobile 6.0). The next app was Remote (the Apple iTunes Remote app) which can control the music playing through iTunes. The fact that I could browse the web again, and with a decent mobile data contract of 500MB of data (compared with 50MB on my Stellar), I felt like I had found the perfect smartphone. Things however changed when it was time for a renewal of my phone contract. The iPhone renewal seemed good enough to me, as they would put it back to £32 and give me the same amount of data and texts, but another phone seemed to be shouting out at me.
My iPhone contract went to a staggering £44 for the same amount of data and texts as some of my friends on the same network to which I complained vigorously but received no official recognition or help. I had to give my iPhone 3GS up. I took out a contract with a new phone, but not an iPhone. I was, to be honest, a bit sick of iPhone OS and iOS (it was originally called 'iPhone OS' when I purchased my 3GS) and needed a change. I thought to myself, I'll go for the Samsung Galaxy S2, but just as I was about to take out a new contract my phone started to ring, it was my network and funnily enough, they offered me an HTC HD7 which I had been looking at in the past few days, which was good because I liked HTC phones as well (both the XDAs were branded by O2 but were actually HTC phones). I took it. I knew all about the phone running on Windows Phone 7 and I kept trying to reinforce the fact that I took the phone out because of Windows Phone 7, feeling that iOS was no longer for me.
Windows Phone 7 was appealing to me because it felt more like a 'geeky' operating system again rather unlike iOS. Some of my favourite things were the live tiles on the home screen as well as their colours, the bigger phones, the fact that it was Microsoft, had Microsoft Office and Xbox Live support and generally liked the whole thing. All of this led to a Windows Phone for me. But before I knew it, I had made the wrong decision.
Because of the low share that was in existence when Windows Phone 7 was released (and the latest version still has a low market share), it lacked on the developer side as well. When I used the store to download apps for it, I found that there were some absolutely awful apps out there. Some were buggy and did not work, some were just incomplete and some just felt like junk. It felt unregulated, which may be a good thing or a bad thing. Now I'm not saying that there are no apps on iOS or Android that are like this, but with Windows Phone there seemed to be an overwhelming amount. Even the built in calculator and calendar did not feel as powerful as with iOS or Android. To put videos, music and other data on to the phone, Microsoft ensured that you used Zune, which was hell to use. Zune also took the concept of iTunes and made it even worse (Android wins here because you can just drag and drop the files you need onto the device).
Windows Phone was also not clear in who it was aimed for; enterprise or consumer. Office was a good feature to add but it was not perfect. In fact, it makes me think of my XDA Exec, which had Office but no PowerPoint creation support. Unlike Keynote on iOS and many other popular slideshow apps, PowerPoint by Microsoft (and may I add, Microsoft develops the most popular office suite in the world) could not create or edit slideshows. That annoyed me more than any other feature as I sometimes liked to work on the way back from university and on one or two occasions I would create slideshows. I could not do this with Windows Phone.
I'm not going to go mentioning every single thing about it, but I never felt that Microsoft really put their back into it.
So what do you think about Windows Phone?
Microsoft has today confirmed that Windows "Blue", which is the successor to Windows 8, will be a free update for those running Windows 8, although it will have significant changes, following the footsteps of Google and Apple with their respective OSes; Android and iOS.
According to this site, Microsoft aims for a June release for the first developer release. "Blue", as it was previously known, will be released under the name Windows 8.1. This follows a similar approach to Apple's version numbering with Mac OS X, flowing from 10.1 to 10.8 making it a minor release rather than a major release. Microsoft however, intend for 8.1 to be an important step required for the improved Windows and have brought many new (and old) features into 8.1.
Hopefully this will fix a lot of the disaster that is Windows 8. Pfff!
As the title states, Samsung will be releasing the Galaxy S4 without an octa-core CPU in the UK. The news comes as a shock after Samsung had announced that the new S4 would feature an octa-core CPU but it was confirmed on Omio.
The octa-core CPU that is included in the US version is similar to how the Intel Core 2 Quad (comprised of two Intel Core 2 Duo dies on the one chip and a shared L2 cache). In this case with the Exynos 5 Octa it works with two CPUs (two quad core CPUs in this case) and the instructions are spread between the two.
As such it would be the first phone to feature an octa-core CPU in the world, but for now it is just the first in the US.
Painter Pro, my graphics package, is a work that I started in August 2005 as part of my project known as Fusionscape. I originally wrote all of my applications using VB.NET. Then I noticed that C# might be a good idea when I got to the stage of learning Java at university as they are similar so it would benefit both languages (I had only written a few things in C# before).
Now after years of progress, joy, surprises, problems, fixes, bugs, compliments, feedback, support and much more, I am taking a good look back at previous versions that I released to friends, family and other beta testers who were prepared to try it out for me. I am so proud of this one piece of really good software and I am still working on it as my main project at the moment.
The purpose of this post is for you to see how Painter Pro's interface has improved with the years. Tell me what you think by commenting below. If you are interested in downloading a beta, click on this here 
Apple hinted that in quartile 4 of 2013 there could be a new range of products. Speculation has begun to appear about what this could be.
Apple has already been noted for not turning down the rumours of a new Apple TV set (as in not just a set top box, but a proper television with a display) for a long time now and there is still a possibility.
But can Apple conquer the television market from Samsung, LG, Panasonic and Sony who pretty much run the whole market these days? Well they came into the smartphone market with an innovative design - utilising the consumer friendly capacitive touch display all the way back in 2007 whereas Windows Mobile was still in favour of the enterprise users and still used to resistive technology. However, it was the early innovation that got them there in the first place. Apple have been beaten to be the first into the Smart TV market already, so it's hardly appealing that they release some app based TV when most of us have them as it is.
Connectivity to the Mac computers using AirPlay may inspire some of us to buy one, but for others there probably won't be that many benefits. Especially saying as Apple's computers seem to set in line Apple's hate for connectivity. This is what gets me about Apple - they brought out the Lightning connector and there are no docks - they destroyed something good and replaced it with something that could easily have been replaced with a micro USB connector like the rest of the industry (by the way, it's EU law to have some kind of way of charging the iPhone via micro USB). Again, there is no support for HDMI without purchasing adapters for the iPad - there are no physical connectors other than the Dock or Lightning connectors. The same goes for the Mac line of computers; on my 2011 MacBook Pro I have two USB ports, FireWire 800, Thunderbolt, Ethernet and an audio jack - a similar PC would have a lot more. In fact the new Retina line of MacBook Pro computers only have two Thunderbolt ports and two USB 3.0, an HDMI port and an audio jack. Apple seems to like the minimalist design of few connectors and I'm sure we would see the same happen to a television set if it happened.
However, a new television is not all that Apple could announce. The MacBook Air could do with a Retina display and perhaps this is what is meant by a new product from Apple.
So what do you think? Comment below if you have an opinion.
Whilst the fabrication size of features in processors is getting smaller all the time, IBM had time to show off how far we have (or they) have come with it, demonstrating a very short animation of a boy with his atom and putting it on the web so we can all see it.
For anyone who is interested in fabrication or physics or would just like to see atoms dance, this video is sure to please you.
Read the full story over at Wired.
