SearchWiki by Google!

Google has launched a function called SearchWiki, which lets people customize their searches. Now, what it basically does is that it allows users to rate and 'rank-up' the search results based on their preferences, for personal consumption. While it does not affect the way others see the search results, it is an option to help users customize thier search results. The details of this is explained in the video below.

This is an interesting option and lets me customize what I want to see on the top of my search results, and a move towards a 'social networking' way of customizing and sharing my searches (and the comments I have about the content and relevance of the search results). But it still does not let my preference influence the overall search results others see. Nor does it help give me more targeted content. I have blogged previously about how a synergy between StumbleUpon and Google search results can help give better targeted content and advertising. You can read it here.

I agree with TechCrunch's call that this new addition, while being a move towards making it more interactive and social, will essentially be a test platform to see how to make searches better. Here is Michael Arrington saying,

But Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.

My guess is they’ve made the changes to see what kind of data they get, and how it can be used to make their overall search results better. So when Google says “The changes you make only affect your own searches,” I think they’re only being half-truthful. All this data, in aggregate, will certainly be used to improve Google search results in general.

This can also be a move towards changing the search paradigm from traffic based popularity ranking to a more content and page view friendly approach to search results. For instance, Google could use the data from SearchWiki to observe and rate websites which are 'ranked up' and based on the quality of comments make subjective, qualitative decisions about the popularity of content. While I don't forsee dramtic changes in search technology becuase of SearchWiki, it is an interesting development!

Open Source Code

I came across this wonderful statement on the ideology behind the Open Source revolution from an interview, in Mint, with Bob Young - one of the founders of Red Hat:

"Only in the software industry, the vendor had control over the way the consumers use the product. Imagine you buy a car, and the dealer who sold you the car had the key to the hood of the car. If your engine starts making a noise, he can say that it is not a bug, but a feature."

Brilliant! Read the whole article here. I particularly like the way he says that he is not a free software exponent, but a free market exponent!

Hype Cycle of Emerging Technology and Me

Research Firm Gartner has recently identified five technologies which are about to reach the peak of the hype cycle. Hype Cycle according to Wikipedia is the

"Graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies"

I was just wondering how many of these have an impact or application on my life today.

Green IT

While I am very interested in this topic and would adopt a Green IT product if I had an option, my contribution to the 'Hype' or its impact on me (directly) is not significant. Green computing is the study and use of computing efficiently and the only exposure I have had to this are chain emails which warn us about the amount of power that can be saved by switching off the computer when it is not in use!

Cloud Computing

This is something I hear about very frequently. But despite being among those considered to be 'tech savvy' I have in the past made the mistake of thinking of Web2.0 and Cloud Computing are one and the same. Even as I write this I have not yet read Wikipedia articles about them to clarify my doubts. This according to me is a situation where innovation or 'invention' in the IT/Internet domain don't really have the same impact as 'inventions' in the classical hardware scheme of things. I recently purchased a digital transcriber which allows me to capture in digital form what I write on a paper, using this device. I am fascinated by the technology behind this and consider this to be groundbreaking in its utility. But a similar innovation in the IT/Internet domain would not be a tangible, physical product. Its utility will be manifest as an improvement in the way data is stored, retreived etc. This would result in downloading and uploading speeds to increase. Great! But the pace at which it happens has an inherent incrementality to it, which steals the shock and awe of a physical invention!

Social Networking

Now this is one emerging technology which I agree as having significant impact on my daily activity. Social networking has been pretty popular now for the past 3 years and I have been involved in various social networking sites and have actually found it to be useful in helping connect me to old friends. But if Hype Cycle peak is acheived when business application of the emerging technology becomes apparent, I fail to see this happening yet. I haven't been influenced to purchase anything yet as a result of being part of this social networking sites. Although, I can understand that information about me that the webmasters of these sites have access to, can be used to market products to me, I think I still haven't come across a such a proposition.

Video Telepresence

This is a very attractive technology, But I haven't yet been exposed to any business application which helps me use this effectively. I did see advanced prototypes of this in HP Cooltown in Singapore back in 2007, but have not had any business application of the same. But this is one technology which I can see being very prevalent, atleast in the near future - especially aided by the growth in cloud computing!

Microblogging

While I blog regularly in its traditional sense, I am yet to get onto this new phenomena of Microblogging. But some aspects of this seem odd to me. Earlier today I had an arguement with a colleague about the whole need to broadcast 'What I am Doing Right Now' to others, which is one of the main drivers behind the Microblogging buzz. I can see it as a superb tool at the workplace to replace old systems like sending memo. It is mainly facilitated through the mobile phone technology, using which most people Microblog. India with its already booming mobile telecom market is I think poised to get on the Microblogging bandwagan. I might just do so too!

Going by my dialog above, one can currently conclude that I am not really Tech Savvy. This I guess would be a victory for my colleague Freddie who claims I am an old relic who does not understand the impact of technology!

Assorted Links I Find Interseting!

Below you will find a list of assorted links which I think are interesting. I have made a small summary of each of these topics also which you might preview before you click on the link and read/view the original articles/website. Hope you find it interesting!

• New way of searching on the internet - "Searchme Visual Search": You think Google is the ultimate search engine? Think again. What do you think contributes to the cult brand status which Mac enjoys over Windows? Its the visual superiority. I have blogged about the Cuil search engine before and the way it presents data to the searcher. I came across this Visual Search engine. Human civilization and communication in the stone age was all visual - hand signals, pictorial. Then slowly language developed and 'text' which is an abstraction of the visual communication gained precedence. But with the advent of electronics in the early 20th century, the visual medium (television, cinema etc) is making a resurgence. This is one of the reasons why print medium is facing a decline around the world. This trend is also prevalent in the web world. First it was text, then came images and now the most popular sites are video and flash sites. Hence why should'nt the search engine medium be 'Visual' too? Nice website...
• Will the tall man dominate the world? So thinks this article which actually suggests toungue in cheek that "Short People Got No Reason to Live"! When the 6"5' Usain Bolt 'bolted' in the track field in Beijing and set a world record of running 100 m in just 9.69 seconds, the author claims that short people lost their final stronghold - ability to run fast!
• Here is another giant of a man! Micheal Phelps! Eight gold medals... Individually! India as a nation in 108 years of Olympic history has won ONE individual gold medal. I know about all the debates which talk about the lack of infrastructure and all that. But this man Phelps is on a different dimension! He is defenitely a super human! Check out these cartoons about this man! Awesome... Really!

• And finally, what do people on Indiatimes.com read most and email? not surprisingly its about Sex! I remember Khushwant Singh saying what a sex-crazed, voyueristic nation India was, and this I think is more proof of this. Compare what is read most and emailed most. This seems to indicate that we read all genres of news, but the most emailed topics are concerning the happening in the bedroom! I can imagine these emailers who find it interesting to 'share' these topics, hitting the email button while gleefully with dazed eyes drooling over the saucy content! Hey, afterall - even I am blogging about it!

More soon!

Scrabulously Wrong!

The Open Source revolution is here to stay, say most internet and computer experts. The open source revolution which has spiralled from writing operating system programms like Linux to application ‘widgets’ for various we based applications is currently in vougue with most programming savvy people indulging in. The advantage of the open source revolution is volunatry sharing of user generated ‘open’ source codes for the applications which can be sold at a price if the developer so intends, but essentially is a free to be upgraged, modified and marketed by any user if he or she is also into coding. This is a tremendous opportuity for millions of computer programmers around the world who are able to use thier coding knowledge to build better models of a basic functional tool and market it for profits.
But there are many, for lack of a better word, discrepancies in the open source revolution. Take for instance a situation when an open source program creates an application which replicates a patented real world product, service or an experience in the virtual world. What are the rules which govern this? Is it in violation of the patent rules? This is exactly what is happening in the case of Hasbro vs Scrabulous. Scrabulous, developed by two Kolkata residents, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla is the virtual version of the hit word game Scrabble which is a patented product owned by Hasbro.

Read On...

Whats in a name?

Today, I tried the new search engine which is being positioned as a competitor to Google. Its called ‘Cuil‘ and is supposed to be a word which sounds like ‘Cool’ or more so ‘Kewl’. I was disappointed. The first thing I tried searching on Cuil was my name; ‘Anand V Rao’ and unlike Google which shows search results which lead to my blogs, Cuil came up with links about somebody’s husband who had a name like mine. I am still very much single. You can call me a narcissist that the first thing I searched for was my name and when I did not find it, found the website disappointing. But hey, I am not the only one. Others also have seem to have done the same thing and have had the same results.
Read On...

StumbleUpon a pot of Gold!

I have recently installed the now famous Stumbleupon toolbar on my internet explorer, and man! is it addictive! All I have to do is indicate what my preferences are and voila! I can be directed to very interesting websites I never knew existed! This works very well when you have sometime to kill; you have finished reading all the updates on the regular sites you usually visit and don’t know what to find on the internet. (Ofcourse, Stumbleupon is not a substitute for going outdoors or reading a book, when one has time to kill; but it defenitely makes sense when its pouring cats and dogs, especially in Mumbai, where one dares not venture far from home, during the rainy season)
Stumbleupon is a very powerful tool according to me. Google currently makes money by... Continue

" Read also at http://anandvrao.wordpress.com "

How Authentic is History?

Imagine this situation. It is the year 2206, exactly a couple of hundred years from now. A student of History in a virtual classroom in Bangalore [or Bengaluru], with a holographic projection goggles worn over his eyes, is listening to a lecture of his Harvard professor addressing him. As the professor speaks, his voice is automatically presented as sub titles and the presentation he is making is also visible on the left corner of the view. Suppose the professor is dealing with a topic called “India in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries” and is discussing how art forms of this era portrayed the way people lived, their lifestyles and interactions with society. And suppose he is also discussing the way people of that era recorded their data and lives on circular metallic disks called CDs and DVDs, and although these methods of data presentation presupposed certain other reading devices called computers, they did ensure that these were available easily for the public. Our student in Bangalore now sees a lot of red squares flashing on the right side of his view, he selects one of the red tabs by calling out a small code and soon the view of his professor is now shared by another student from Lithuania who is eagerly asking the question that whether the people constantly recorded the events of their lives or was it only for select situations. A small message instructs our Bangalore student that he can choose if he wants to hear the answer the professor gives the Lithuanian student or continue with the lecture. Our student also intrigued by the question selects to listen to the answer which the professor gives, where he learns the professor’s opinion that, going by the sheer amount of data stored on these circular devices and the fact that many are yet to be deciphered, it may seem that people actually captured their day to day lives on these devices!

Soon the lecture takes a more interesting turn. The professor activates a full view projection and starts playing a “record” of the day to day life in 20^th century India. He instructs the students to observe the unique lifestyles that are apparent in that era. Soon the students from around the world hooked onto the virtual classroom are seeing a man in cooling glasses and a rough mustache, wearing a shirt with collars turned up, walking in the centre of the screen. The swaggering man suddenly throws a cigarette in the air, and using a pistol lights the cigarette, which lands right into his mouth. The students are now watching with rapt attention and shocked when all of a sudden a bunch of similar looking men pop out of the background bushes and break into a rhythmic dance and song sequence! The song continues, but soon a lady and a bunch of ladies who look like her, pop out of the background as well. The professor interjects to inform the students that they can watch the entire archive of this and similar footage at a particular link and dictates an assignment for the students to research “The instances of pistol use to light cigarettes in 20^th century India” and then declares the forum open for questions. The right side of our student’s view is now flashing with little red cubicles indicating that other students have questions. Soon the professor calms his students down by saying that the presentation was an entertainment sequence from the late 20^th century in India. But the students are still perplexed, and the professor tries to explain that based on a comparative study of similar “entertainment sequences” from around the world at that time, it can be concluded that this kind of song and dance sequences was unique only to Indian culture at that time. He goes on to declare that research has shown that due to the sociological framework of the multi-ethnic, multi lingual and multi religious culture of India in that era, there must have been a strong urge for people to break into such song and dance sequence during the middle of the day, to relieve stress, to establish social contacts with the members of the opposite sex, to express anguish at failing and the joy of succeeding. The professor further assigns the students tasks to present theories as to the chronological developments of such phenomena. With this our student in Bangalore, with a sense of fascination at his ancestors, logs off from the history lesson, determined to understand the uniqueness of the philosophy behind such behavior by his predecessors!

Back in the present, does this small anecdote from a probable future seem far fetched and unbelievable? Is it illogical to think that the future this close [200 years] will have such a distorted view about the past? We don’t break into song and dance sequences in the middle of our day, why it is in our movies is still a mystery to me. I have always argued with my friends that unlike our history [before the computer age], we will be leaving behind a very comprehensive, less destructible account of ourselves than what our ancestors with paper, papyrus and stone have left us. But off late I am having second thoughts about this enormous data we are leaving behind, if it will be easily understandable in the future? With the wheels of change setting such a blistering pace recently and in the future, will this account of us be intelligible to the denizens of the future? This thought leads me to one more speculation; is what we consider as history, authentic, or is it an “entertainment sequence” of the past which we are interpreting as history?

I read in an article that history as we know it is based on someone’s account of what he or she saw and experienced during any particular span of time. So is it correct to assume that what we read, see or decipher as the evidence of the past is essentially someone’s interpretation? This assumption may not be entirely true, since what we base as historical fact is not based on a single persons account but on accounts of many people which have common threads in them. But still there will be a gap which cannot be bridged; for instance by correlating accounts of many people we may be able to ascertain that certain events occurred at a certain period of time. But based on these assumptions, can we make conclusions about the behavior of the people involved in the event? The example of the future sequence seems a little far fetched; it would be difficult to come to inappropriate conclusions, since such assumptions would be considerably reduced in the presence of an enormous collection of stark visual data. But again as the example tries to highlight, even this visual data taken out of context can be taken to mean very different things. Now when one compares a visual documentary to one that was written on papyrus or carved on stone, the amount of imagination on the part of the reader in case of the latter is more than evident. The architectural reliefs on temples, churches and palaces have long been taken as relevant evidence to the society of the place they are situated in, but can they not be only the “director’s” opinion about the actual situation. With the amount of pull the saints, popes and kings exerted on the artisans and builders of the day, can these be accepted as valid historical evidence?

The more I see of the current trend in movies and soap operas, I wonder that if these were seen in the future as to indicate the status of society today, I begin to come to the conclusion that, in the future there will be a very inappropriate estimation of our times. It might be an entertainment sequence today, but what if they are viewed as depictions of authentic reality in the future? Maybe just as some of us believe that in ancient India people cavorted around in their birthday suits, based on the reliefs on the temples in Kahjuraho, people in the future may believe that we Indian’s broke out into song and dance in our day to day lives based on our movies!

Radio Frequency Identification

“How did you know we were lost?”

“The boxes told me- RFID radio tags on the boxes help track the shipment”

“The boxes knew we were lost”

“Then maybe the boxes should drive”

So goes the commercial for IBM’s On Demand Business. If you were following the trends in radio and communication technology over the past two decades, it would not be difficult to understand the above commercial. The idea of being able to track things is not new; it has been in practice since the inception of trade itself. RFID or Radio Frequency IDentification is the latest way of doing it, but this time it will not be limited to tracking commodities or shipments, RFID is set to revolutionize the way people live their lives.

Without going into the history of RFID, one can confidently say that it has been in the offing since the invention of wireless communication. The World War II was a watershed in the chronology of radio frequency identification when the British used this technique to differentiate between the Royal Air force airplanes and the Luftwaffe. The idea of using it to track the movement of animals and livestock herds caught up during the 1980’s. What has made the explosion of the use of this technique in tracking inventory shipments around the world, are the initiatives taken by the Retail Giant Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense in early 2003 to better manage their supply chains.

Before discussing the rationale and applications of RFID, one needs to understand the technology behind it. A Radio Frequency Identification system consists of the following essential components.

· A RFID tag or a transponder

· A RFID reader or transceiver

· Application and database software to analyze the data.

The tag is composed of an antenna and a wireless device. The RFID reader is composed of an antenna, a transceiver and a decoder. The tags are generally of two types, active tags are those which have an on-chip power supply and passive tags are those which use the power induced by the magnetic field of the reader. The RFID reader consists of a transceiver which sends out a periodic signal to inquire about the presence of any tags in the vicinity. The passive tags are cheaper as they do not incorporate any on-chip power supply but the range of their operations is smaller than those of active RFID tags. Each tag has a data storage device which is used to store data about the object being tagged. The four main frequency ranges that are active today are low frequency (125 kHz to 134.2 kHz), high frequency (13.56 MHz), ultra high frequency (868 MHz to 956 MHz) and microwave tags (2.45 GHz to 5.8 GHz).

Let us now examine what the use of these tags is in efficient organization of the global supply chains. In January 2003, Wal-Mart issued notices to its suppliers requiring them to implement RFID technology for all shipments to Wal-Mart by January 2005. This was in effort to improve the inventory stocks and schedules of the various Wal-Mart stores around the world. Although many of the suppliers were taken off guard by such a directive, most of them have complied fearing that they might be left behind if they do not do so. What this means is that, Wal-Mart stores can now effectively implement supply chain excellence principles like Just-In-Time by effectively monitoring and informing the suppliers of the availability of the stocks of the commodities being sold.

The cost of the RFID tags is currently around 50 cents and hence still very costly for implementation on all items and Wal-Mart accepts that it will be along time before individual items sold in their shops are tagged. Currently, the pallets of materials are tagged and tracked. A typical situation in the supply chain cycle of commodities in Wal-Mart would be as follows:

RFID readers are installed at the receiving docks of the stores and when the shipments arrive they are “scanned”. They are again “scanned” when the boxes with the tags are brought to the sales floor. Although due to certain privacy concerns they are not installed at the sales point, the box thrashing centers are fixed with readers which “scan” the utilized boxes. All the data collected is recorded and analyzed by the application software which is connected to an extranet with the suppliers who are updated real time about the status of inventory stocked at the Wal-Mart stores. What this means is that not only can the supply be replenished at the right time, but because of real time tracking it is even possible to accommodate for sudden surges in demand and effectively tweak the supply chain to suit such situations.

This is a great way of doing business and has revolutionized the supply chain management of major retail concerns around the world. But the applications of RFID are not limited to these applications. Cars are fitted with RFID tags which store data about the driver and other related details and are already being used to pay for road tolls by automatically sensing the car’s data by readers at the toll gate and automatically debiting a pre-paid account. This kind of system does away with the any waiting at toll gates and ensures smooth flow of traffic.

On similar lines one can imagine limitless applications for such a technology. Here are a few of them, some of which are already in application in various forms.

1. Consumers with unique RFID tags can walk in to stores equipped with RFID readers where they can pick up the items they want and walk out, debiting the prepaid account with the amount of their purchase.

2. Automobiles could be fitted with the relevant documents of the driver so that there is no need to physically carry them and police officers can automatically sense these in case of traffic offenders.

3. Tags on the credit and smart cards can be made to be activated only when used by the rightful owner with a matching tag on the person so as to avoid cases of credit card fraud.

4. Tickets and other travel documents can be stored in tags which would be carried by the person, read by the readers at railway, subway or air terminals to check and verify the person’s identity before accepting to allow them to travel.

5. The most sublime use of the technology would come when these tags could be effectively “implanted” on a person’s body so that they can store data such as electronic keys and passwords which would enable only them to enter their houses, offices, automobiles etc.

6. Medicines and drug boxes can be implanted with tags which can be opened only by those with a matching prescription tag to avoid drug abuse.

These are just a few examples and the possibilities are limitless. With all these interactive possibilities the interest for this technology in the market is at an all time high. But before all these there are a few issues which need to be resolved. On seeing the above examples it becomes rather evident that misuse of such devices can become rampant. Privacy activists have valid points about how these tags with personal details can be used by corporations, government or unscrupulous entities to illegally monitor activities of people. Certain individuals can block the readers from properly scanning the details and involve in unethical activities by gaining access to restricted areas. The problems related to the use of these techniques are many but the constructive uses of this outweigh the negative impacts. When properly regulated they can prove to be a boon for the whole society and way business operates.

The task ahead in making this technology more prevalent in societies around the world is standardization. Currently, there are a couple of competing standards in use around the world regarding protocols used for communication between readers and tags, how data is organized in the tags, the level of encryption of data for various applications and so on. With proper regulations in place, the technology is on the verge of being a very critical part of the way society behaves and the future looks bright!

References:

1. RFID tutorial:

http://www.tutorial-reports.com/wireless/rfid/

2. The Wikipedia account on RFID at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID

3. Wal-Mart website and case studies. www.walmart.com

Technological Pure Science

Certain proverbs have a characteristic of nagging at one’s understanding of them ever so frequently. Take for instance the old adage “Necessity is the mother of all invention”. The validity of the word Necessity has inspired quite a few arguments. Some people, ignoring the subtle difference in the meaning between the words, are of the opinion that Need would be a better substitute to Necessity. Some others argue that neither qualifies to be the cause of anything and that Chance provides the best alternative. This theory argues that so much is invented based on results, corollary to those being researched, that it is these chance discoveries which are the essence of creation. And finally one more interesting view point that I have come across is that Lethargy, or lack of motive purpose is the mother of invention. Even if one does not associate rather harshly the meaning of lethargy, as lack of motive purpose, one is led to believe by this assertion that laziness is the pinnacle of human pleasure, and the aspiration to attain this leads us to invent things.

The above argument is mostly an extension of an older philosophical debate. An unbiased, narrative article I recently read described two different sides of a similar argument: between merits of pure science and those of technology. It described the two different view points, that of the purists claiming that pursuing scientific truth is necessary and valuable in its own right without regard to its application, and that of the technologists discrediting the exalted view of science being guided from within and propounding a more democratic framework, with a need of collective good promoting scientific inquiry. Trying to correlate these into the existing philosophical structures I referred to the Britannica Junior Encyclopedia’s essay on Philosophy. The above argument is a direct consequence of the contrasting views that exist on the theory of human knowledge and opinion, to that of the methodology of gaining knowledge.

A philosophically equivalent parallel to this argument can be found in the debate between the Rationalists and Empiricist schools of thought. Both these theories deal with the theory and the sources of knowledge, but the basic dichotomy of the two again depends on the contrasting views of the ways to gain this knowledge. The rationalist source of knowledge and subsequently of reality would be through deduction of concepts formed in the mind. This theory relegates the need of appeal to the senses for gaining knowledge and highlights apparently, the priority of perception of reality rather than reality itself. This is in a way similar to the theory of Maya in one of our Indian theologies, expounded by Shankaracharya. The empiricist source of knowledge would be by means of direct perception of immediate facts only through sense observations and experiments. Here too the concept of identity and existence are deemed unimportant and non-conceptualized sensory data is considered as valid forms of knowledge.

The flaw, according to me, in these theories would be firstly the sacrifice of reality and secondly as a consequence of non conceptual sensory observation, the belittling of the mind. The argument for pure science trivializes the application of scientific knowledge and limits it to theorizing about phenomena. On the other hand the argument for technology belittles the need for such conceptualization and emphasizes on the needs of the sensory reality. This leads us to the reason why there seems to be a debate over which concept of knowledge fits the meaning of the proverb best. Is the need for technology, the source of scientific inquiry into knowledge, or is technology a chance byproduct in the grand scale of purist scientific outlook.

It probably augurs well now to look for a synthesis between the source and output. Consider these examples; the explanation of the theory behind semi-conduction has led to the understanding and development of electronics and the electronics industry. But it has been the growing requirements of memory and processing power that has fuelled the scientific inquiry into conceptualizing better explanations of conductivity and subsequently the research into better semi-conducting material. The mapping of the human genome may be a purely scientific undertaking based on the need to understand and explain the evolution of mankind but it is driven in part also by the lucrative insights it can provide in tackling genetic disorders among humans. Just as sensory data is just data without the application of a man’s intellectual process and notion of conception is just a notion without man’s sensory inputs, so are pure science and technology interlinked.

Etymology dissects the word Philosophy as Philien and Sophy, Greek words for Love and Wisdom respectively. Hence Philosophy is the love of wisdom and wisdom would suggest that in the above debate we need to go further than just testing knowledge by its practical consequence or vice versa and develop an integrated synthesis of knowledge and application. Now, if an etymologist can provide a single word for an ‘Integrated Synthesis of Knowledge and Application’, then I believe we have an apt word for our favorite proverb!

References:

Britannica Junior Encyclopedia, William Benton, 1972 edition.

Kant Vs Sullivan, Ayn Rand, 1970

En Garde! It is a Dual-Core Duel!

Let’s face it, being an electronics engineer does no good to your hopes of a life filled with James Bond like adventures. Sure, all the movies show these suave heroes and heroines hacking into computers networks of casinos, defusing electronically controlled bombs and plugging in a new chip in a socket and automatically redirecting a speeding ballistic missile in mid air. But the role of “electronic engineer” is always portrayed in plural with one Chinese and one Indian guy moving around with laptops with amazing graphic interfaces where the software readily asks for the longitudinal coordinates of the missile to be redirected, at a push of a button. The worst hit to the ego of an electronics engineer comes when these hunky heroes who are in the midst of saving the lives of millions from the threat of a bomb or a damsel about to be vaporized by a laser, seem to figure out the electronics in less than two minutes, while we have to pore over stuff like linear integrated circuits and feedback equalizers for about a decade before understanding the relation between current and voltage. “Isolate the power source here with a toothpick stuck in the negative terminal, couple the output with the input using chewing gum” will no longer vaporize the girl but genetically enhance her beauty! and voila!, the laser

But now, after all these years of denial of adventure for the electronics engineer something has come up which has made our entire community chivalrous. Unfortunately, it does not involve any damsel about to be vaporized, but nevertheless electronics engineers are not backing down from this real life adventure. It is time for the duel between the electronic giants Intel and AMD over the Dual Core Processor! But before I proceed further on describing about the duel, I think I should make my loyalties clear for the benefit of the reader. I have seen four generations of computers in my family. Great grandpa computer, an IBM286 machine, was born in my house in early 1992. Those were the dark ages where one did not worry too much about processor speeds and he spent his days running programs like GW-Basic and games like Dig-Dug. But come 1998, grandpa computer was born, and the generation gap was significant. He was an AMD K6 266Mhz computer who was at his time so advanced that poor old great grandpa was equivalent to a pocket calculator in front of him. Times had changed and considerable thought went into the selection of the processor with due considerations to the speed. But soon he too was obsolete and as the workload increased he was unable to cope with it. Soon a relatively simple brain transplant was carried out and old pa computer was born in late 2003. Now this guy was advanced! He had the same body as the old guy but he has an AMD Athalon XP 2400+ processor and to this day a good workhorse. Meanwhile, early 2005 saw the fourth generation computer, a young lady with a mobile AMD Sempron 2800+ was born and being a notebook, she is upwardly mobile as all of the younger generation today. Now that it must be clear to most of you that I am an out and out AMD guy, I think we can go ahead and explore the news about the duel more closely.

Back in 2003, when old pa computer was born, a geeky electronics engineer classmate of mine marveling at the capabilities of the highly advanced AMD Athalon XP 2400+ processor went into a tizzy. After using my computer for one evening he looked liked this was what he had been waiting for all those years of his life for. He was also an AMD aficionado and excitedly declared that if an AMD processor and an Intel processor were made to run a race, AMD would win. He wanted a world wide public contest between the two giants to prove that the cheaper AMD worked faster and better than the brand heavy Intel. I was impressed. The electronic engineers at AMD also seem to have the same idea; they have recently issued a challenge to Intel for a public duel between their new Dual Core Opteron 800 series and the corresponding Intel x86 server processors.

Now, without going into too much details, what is special about the dual core processor is this. As every electronic engineer knows, Moore’s law means two times more transistor on a chip every other 18 months. What they probably also know is that this means proportional increase in heat dissipated. That’s not all; higher clock speed to span these newly added transistors means that further power consumption and heat problems. This is where the dual core makes its entry. The solution to the above problem is what is called as thread-level parallelism. By keeping clock speeds down and putting multiple CPU cores on a chip, processor performance can rise as transistor counts do. One of the advantage of this for instance would be that OS can now run on its own separate processor core and leave the other processor core on the same chip for other peripheral activities. Now, AMD want to be the first to manufacture and deliver these beasts for workstations and servers. And hence the battle lines are drawn, which was made public with advertisements about AMD issuing an open challenge to Intel for a Dual Core Duel.

This new battle between the giants has brought the electronics community to battle hungry frenzy. Just as AMD’s advertisement beckons Intel to accept the challenge the electronics engineers are eagerly waiting for the fencing match to begin! Touché Intel?

More about this duel is can be read at the following URL:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/0,,3715_13368_13369,00.html?redir=CPSW51

References:

http://www.techreport.com/

http://www.extremetech.com/

http://www.amd.com/