Intel reveals more details of its six-core Westmere chip

No sooner had I posted a story on upcoming six-core processors than Intel held a press conference to discuss its Westmere six-core processor–among other products–in more detail. The purpose of the briefing was to preview the papers that Intel will present at a major semiconductor conference, known as ISSCC 2010, which takes place next week in San Francisco.

Here are some additional details on the six-core chip that Intel has confirmed:

The six-core version of Westmere will be available in both desktop (Gulftown) and dual-socket server versions. Not surprisingly, it shares a lot of the same features with the dual-core Core i3 and Core i5 Westmeres including Hyper-Threading (12 threads for a six-core chip), Turbo Boost for improved performance on tasks that are not multi-threaded, an integrated memory controller, and features designed to make it more power-efficient.

But there are some differences too. Gulftown does not have a graphics controller in the same package, which makes since given that it is designed for enthusiast desktops and will be paired with discrete graphics. It also has a larger data cache–a total of 12MB of L3 compared with 4MB on the dual-core versions–which when combined with the extra cores results in a chip that is larger and contains 1.17 billion transistors. Intel said it uses some of those extra transistors to speed up tasks such as data encryption and decryption.

Here’s how the six-core chip will look in a dual-socket server, meaning one that uses two of these processors:

And here’s a slide showing how the actual chip compares to the dual-core version currently available in mainstream laptops and desktops:

John Morris is a former executive editor at CNET Networks and senior editor at PC Magazine. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

posting a BEST-OF list, from this past year = 2009. a little reflection I guess u can call it. this is a post between me, and my girlfriend, of what we liked most in 2009, not necessarily what came out in 2009... this is a little different then other "2009" lists. we be sharing this space for a special post =)

-= fnord0 =-

movie of 2009: inglorious bastards, Hold Fast, watchmen, the one percent by jamie johnson, anti-christ, red cliff , sacco and vanzetti, Persepolis

music: Future of the Left – Travels With Myself And Another, yeah yeah yeahs - it's blitz, Middle Class Rut – MC Rut, Star Fucking Hipsters – Until Were Dead, Neko Case - Middle Cyclone, Ministry – With Sympathy, Street Sweeper Social Club – Street Sweeper Social Club, The Casualties – We Are All We Have, Steve Earle – Townes, yeasayer @ la blogotheque

TV shows of 2009: dexter season 4, tru blood season 1 + 2, south park season 13, itstheendoftheworldasweknowitandifeelfine, six feet under (the ENTIRE series!)

books 2009: expect resistance by crimethinc, The Day Philosophy Dies by Casey Maddox, Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization + Volume 2: Resistance by Derrick Jensen,  letters of insurgents by freddy perlman @ audioanarchy.org, the coming insurrection, the watchmen (comic), the invisibles, pricipia discordia

magazine/zine: phrack, 2600, rolling thunder, hack this zine, zinelibrary.info, fire to the prisons, indypendent.org

website: pdx indymedia, indymedia.org, democracy now, infoshop.org, submedia.tv/stimulator.tv, anarchistnews.org, theanarchistlibrary.org, GNN.tv, offensive-security, remote-exploit, maketotaldestroy, fuckcopyright, del.icio.us, google.com/reader, hulu.com, eztv.it, reddit.com, hackaday.com, ainfos.ca, radio4all.net, exploit-db.com, crimethinc.com, popdefectradio.blogspot.com, thoughtcrime.org, nopsr.us, fair.org, btjunkie.org, scnsrc.net, rlslog.net, lazypirate.org, audioanarchy.org, onebigtorrent.org

operating system/software/hacks of 2009: slackware 13 (x86 and x86_64), arch linux (bleeding edge ftw), backtrack 4 (beta/pre-final... early 2010 brought us FINAL), adobe CS4, CUDA, opensource software! perl, php, expect, bash, tcsh, tcshrc, jquery, ajax, ahah, port-knocking, ssh-tunneling, amarok, enlightenment (e17), xfce4, pyrit, aircrack-ng-cuda, drupal.org, metasploit, aircrack, dd-wrt, social engineering toolkit, shodan, sslstrip/sslsniff, crack.pl, karmetasploit, fake_pwn, wireless key grabber fakeAP, backtrack video tutorial series by fifothekid, satanicAP (karmetasploit+WKG+FakeAP+VNCBackdoor), evilAP CRT, airoscript, gerix wifi cracker, SSL striping/sniffing and null certs (moxie), DNS (kaminsky .. 2008 yes), blackhat archives, defcon archives, chaos communication congress archives, defcon CTF qualifier walkthrus @ nopsr.us

electronic/technology: the almighty "netbook"/laptop, nvidia GTX 285, intel Q6600, seagate freeagent go (320GB USB drive that is the size of an iphone, 1 cable for power & data xfer)

radio (terrestrial/internet/sattelite): kboo, last.fm, www.social-engineer.org – social-engineer.org Podcast, ainfos - radio4all.net, popDeFeCT radio, free radio olympia, punk4punks, freakradio/free radio santa cruz

most significant political development: that george w. bush, and dick chaney DID NOT goto jail was a the greatest travesty of american "justice", yet both thankfully left office, only to be replaced by someone just as lame, and just as much on the elite's dick. greece uprising/alexandros grigoropoulos murdered (technically 2008, but...), posse comatatus dead + john towery, green scare continues, 23 CIA agents convicted in kidnapping, torture trial in Italy, Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Countries, george carlton died =(

video games: bioshock, the witcher, call of duty IV, batman arkham asylum, GTA IV, crysis/warhead, left 4 dead, uplink/onlink, saints row 2, resident evil 5, godfather II, fallout 3, ledgend of zelda - twilight princess

favorite people who passed away in 2009: utah phillips, george carlin  <== u 2 will be very missed!

biggest douche(s) of the universe 2009: glenn beck, bill o'reily, rush limbaugh, dick chaney, george bush, sarah palin, john mccain, barack obama, joe biden, hillary clinton, bill clinton, harry reid, nancy pelosi, michael steele

-= cocoleigh =-

movie of 2009: paranormal activity, watchmen

TV show of 2009: flash forward, fringe, medium, hell's kitchen

book read in 2009: The Day Philosophy Dies by Casey Maddox, the shock doctrine by naomi kline

operating system/software of 2009: windows XP

video games: sims 3, left 4 dead

electronic/technology: ipod

magazine/zine: body and soul

most significant political development: obama sending more troops to afghanastan (and winning the nobel peace prize weeks later!)

website: foopets.com, current.com, divachix.com, runwayvixens.com

radio: kboo, projectplaylist

biggest douche of the universe 2009: glenn beck, pat robertson

from one of my FAVORITE online DIY computer sites [H]ardOCP ::

NVIDIA 3D Surround Multi-display Gaming Editorial

We give our readers a few of our first thoughts about NVIDIA and its new 3D Surround feature that will help push forward multi-display gaming to the masses. This is a great day for PC gamers, but there are a couple of things that need to be said.

 

it all started with the website csszengarden -- how I've loved that project... so when I found drupal had a theme based on the csszengarden concept called zen I immediately fell in love! couple this with my desire to learn and succeed at drupal, I snatched up zen immediately, and have begun work on my own zen subtheme!

zen has been awsome to work with, I then tried to implement rounded corners & transparency based on schillmania.com's "even more rounded corners" HOWTO but things feel short when I tried to find others who have done this. I am sure many others have, but I just couldn't find the documentation for it... so I tried to follow as closely as possible to the site schillmania.com HOWTO as possible, and got the final touch implemented with the help of "peterjmag" of #drupal-support & #drupal!! big thanks to him! so here we go with my HOWTO

drupal 6.x + zen sub-theme + schillmania.com-based rounded corners & transparency

ok, 2 files, and 2 images are being used, as this is all based on the <!-- most basic example --> in "Even More Rounded Corners With CSS" example archive. be aware I am using the zen theme version 6.x-1.0 -- no reason why this couldn't be ported to 6.x-2.x-dev, just have to update the right css file. this howto will be quick n easy. for now, this HOWTO (and my dev site) is using rounded-corners ONLY on blocks, please be aware, and take that into account when using my code on your site. (ps: I do not claim any authority on coding standards, nor do I think I am better then u! ha).

• I serve the images from a directory within my sub-zen theme folder called images, (( the images are located in the dialog2/demo directory from the "Even More Rounded Corners With CSS" example archive - the source .psd files are in dialog2/src directory of the same archive ))
• I am only using this on this currently in my left-sidebar blocks (( hence all the CSS calls to left-sidebar )) this is all being done within drupal/zen's  <div class="block-inner"> as the encapsulator.
• here is my blocks.tpl.php file that resides in my zen sub-theme root folder  {{ example "$drupalroot/sites/all/themes/$myzensubtheme" - with zen residing in it's own folder = "$drupal/sites/all/themes/zen" }}

?>
<div id="block-<?php print $block->module . '-' . $block->delta; ?>" class="<?php print $classes; ?>"><div class="block-inner">
        <div class="content0fnord">
        <div class="tv"></div>

  <?php if ($block->subject): ?>
      <h2 class="title"><?php print $block->subject; ?></h2>
  <?php endif; ?>

  <div class="content">
    <?php print $block->content; ?>
  </div>

  <?php print $edit_links; ?>

        </div>
        <div class="b"><div></div></div>
</div></div> <!-- /block-inner, /block -->



• here is my CSS from "nenzen.css" file - the main CSS file in the zen sub-theme folder

/*
  -- Even more rounded corners with CSS: Base stylesheet --
*/

#sidebar-left .block-inner {
 position:relative;
 margin:0px auto;
 min-width:8em;
 max-width:760px; /* based on image dimensions - not quite consistent with drip styles yet */
 color:#fff;
 z-index:1;
 margin-left:12px; /* default, width of left corner */
 margin-bottom:0.5em;spacing under dialog */
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .content0fnord,
#sidebar-left .block-inner .tv,
#sidebar-left .block-inner .b,
#sidebar-left .block-inner .b div {
 background:transparent url(images/dialog2-blue-800x1600.png) no-repeat top right;
 _background-image:url(images/dialog2-blue.gif);
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .content0fnord {
 position:relative;
 zoom:1;
 _overflow-y:hidden;
 padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .tv {
 /* top+left vertical slice */
 position:absolute;
 left:0px;
 top:0px;
 width:12px; /* top slice width */
 margin-left:-12px;
 height:100%;
 _height:1600px; /* arbitrary long height, IE 6 */
 background-position:top left;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .b {
 /* bottom */
 position:relative;
 width:100%;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .b,
#sidebar-left .block-inner .b div {
 height:30px; /* height of bottom cap/shade */
 font-size:1px;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .b {
 background-position:bottom right;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .b div {
 position:relative;
 width:12px; /* bottom corner width */
 margin-left:-12px;
 background-position:bottom left;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .hd,
#sidebar-left .block-inner .bd,
#sidebar-left .block-inner .ft {
 position:relative;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner .wrapper {
 /* extra content protector - preventing vertical overflow (past background) */
 /* extra content protector - preventing vertical overflow (past background) */
 position:static;
 max-height:1000px;
 overflow:auto; /* note that overflow:auto causes a rather annoying redraw "lag" in Firefox 2, and may
 degrade performance. Might be worth trying without if you aren't worried about height/overflow issues
. */
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner h1,
#sidebar-left .block-inner p {
 margin:0px; /* margins will blow out backgrounds, leaving whitespace. */
 padding:0.5em 0px 0.5em 0px;
}

#sidebar-left .block-inner h1 {
 padding-bottom:0px;
}

• and here is what it looks like (using the default images from schillmania.com) ;;

• well, thank goodness I had the support/assistance of "peterjmag" of #drupal-support & #drupal, we need to add this to our code ! tag this bad boy to the end, and should be golden - this will fix the bottom part of the corners!

.block ul {
 margin: 0;
}

and BAM, ohhy, gooey schillmania.com-based "even more rounded corners" for drupal blocks...

notice I still need to work on the header, I will update when that gets accomplished... till then, I'm still learning - and loving 
I got to hitup pdx drupal camp 2009, and it was great. I love u drupal & u too zen! hahahah

update 12/8/2009 :: I found the fix for the "header" issue listed above (looking at each screenshot you see the TOP text nearly touching the top of the block which makes it looks somewhat lame), so if anybody is reading and wants to know, I made a change to the .block ul by adding a padding, and also added a padding to the .block h2.title theme's CSS file as specified here (updates in RED) ::

.block ul {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 12px 3px 8px 10px;
}

  .block h2.title /* Block title */
  {
  padding: 12px 2px 1px;
  }