Nehalem: An Overview
It’s hard to talk about an overview of an architecture like Nehalem, which is fundamentally designed to be modular. The Intel engineers wanted to design a set of building blocks that can be assembled like Legos to create the various versions of the architecture.
It is possible, though, to take a look at the flagship of the new architecture—the very high-end version that will be used in servers and high-performance workstations. At first glance, the specs will likely remind you of the Barcelona (K10) architecture from AMD. It is natively quad-core and has three levels of cache, a built-in memory controller, and a high-performance system of point-to-point interconnections for communicating with peripherals and other CPUs in multiprocessor configurations. This proves that it wasn’t AMD’s technological choices that were bad, but simply its implementation, which hasn’t scaled well enough through its current design.
But Intel has done more than just revise its architecture by taking inspiration from their competitor’s innovations. With a budget of more than 700 million transistors (731 million, to be exact), the engineers were able to greatly improve certain characteristics of the execution core while adding new functionality. For example, simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), which had already appeared with the Pentium 4 "Northwood" under the name Hyper-Threading has made its comeback. Associated with four physical cores, certain versions of Nehalem that incorporate two dies in a single package will be capable of executing up to 16 threads simultaneously. While this change appears simple at first glance, as we’ll see later on, it has a wide impact at several levels of the pipeline; many buffers need to be re-dimensioned so that this mode of operation doesn’t impact performance. As has been the case with each new architecture for several years now, Intel has also added new SSE instructions to Nehalem. The architecture supports SSE 4.2, components of which appear to be borrowed from AMD’s K10 micro-architecture. .
Now that you know the broad outlines of the new architecture, it’s time to take a more detailed look, starting with the front end of the pipeline—the part that’s in charge of reading instructions in memory and preparing them for execution.
Reading And Decoding Instructions
Unlike the changes made in moving from Core to Core 2, Intel hasn’t done much to Nehalem’s front end. It has the same four decoders that made their appearance with the Conroe—three simple and one complex. It is still capable of macro-ops fusion and so offers a theoretical maximum throughput of 4+1 x86 instructions per cycle.
Though there are no revolutionary changes at first glance, the devil is in the details. As we noted in our article on the Barcelona architecture, increasing the number of processing units is an extremely inefficient way to boost performance. The cost is high and the gains shrink more and more with each addition, following the law of diminishing returns. So instead of adding a new decoder, the engineers concentrated on making the existing ones more efficient.
First, they added support for macro-ops fusion in 64-bit mode, which is justified for an architecture like Nehalem that makes no attempt to hide its ambitions in the server market segment. But the engineers didn’t stop there. Where the Conroe architecture could fuse only a limited number of instructions, the Nehalem architecture supports a greater number of variations, making it possible to use macro-ops fusion more frequently.
Another new feature introduced by the Conroe has also been improved: the Loop Stream Detector. Behind this name lies what is in fact a data buffer that holds a few instructions (18 x86 instructions on Core 2s). When the processor detects a loop, it disables certain parts of the pipeline. Since a loop consists of executing the same instructions a given number of times, it’s not necessary to perform branch prediction or to recover the instruction from the L1 cache at each iteration of the loop. So the Loop Stream Detector acts as a small cache memory that short-circuits the first stages of the pipeline in such situations. The gains made via this technique are twofold: it decreases power consumption by avoiding useless tasks and it improves performance by reducing the pressure on the L1 instruction cache.
With the Nehalem architecture, Intel has improved the functionality of the Loop Stream Detector. First of all the buffer is larger—it can now store 28 instructions. But what’s more, its position in the pipeline has changed. In Conroe, it was located just after the instruction fetch phase. It’s now located after the decoders; this new position allows a larger part of the pipeline to be disabled. The Nehalem’s Loop Stream Detector no longer stores x86 instructions, but rather µops. In this sense, it’s similar to the Pentium 4’s trace cache concept. It’s no surprise to find certain innovations ushered in by that architecture in the Nehalem, given that the Hillsboro team now in charge of the Nehalem was responsible for the Pentium 4 project. However, where the Pentium 4 used the trace cache exclusively, since it could only count on one decoder in case of a data cache miss, Nehalem has the benefit of the power of its four decoders, while the Loop Stream Detector is only an additional optimization for certain situations. In a way, it’s the best of both worlds.
Branch Predictors
The last improvement to the front end has to do with the branch predictors. The efficiency of branch prediction algorithms becomes crucial in architectures that need high levels of instruction parallelism. A branch breaks the parallelism because it necessitates waiting for the result of a preceding instruction before execution of the flow of instructions can be continued. Branch prediction determines whether or not a branch will be taken, and if it is, quickly determines the target address for continuing execution. No complicated techniques are needed to do this; all that’s needed is an array of branches—the Branch Target Buffer (BTB)—that stores the results of the branches as execution progresses (Taken or Not Taken and target address) and an algorithm for determining the result of the next branch.
Intel hasn’t provided details on the algorithm used for their new predictors, but it is known that they are now two-level predictors. the first level is unchanged from the Conroe architecture, but a new level with slower access that can store more branch history has been added. According to Intel, this configuration improves branch prediction for certain applications that use large volumes of code, such as databases—more evidence of Nehalem’s server orientation. Another improvement is to the Return Stack Buffer, which stores the return addresses of functions when they’re called. In certain cases this buffer can overflow, which could lead to faulty predictions. To limit that possibility, AMD increased its size to 24 entries, whereas with the Nehalem Intel has introduced a renaming system for this buffer.
The Return Of Hyper-Threading
So, the front end hasn’t been profoundly overhauled; neither has the back end. It has exactly the same execution units as the most recent Core processors, but here again the engineers have worked on using them more efficiently.
With Nehalem, Hyper-Threading makes its great comeback. Introduced with the Northwood version of Intel’s NetBurst architecture, Hyper-Threading—also known outside the world of Intel as Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT)—is a means of exploiting thread parallelism to improve the use of a core’s execution units, making the core appear to be two cores at the application level.
In order to use parallel threads, certain resources—such as registers—must be duplicated. Other resources are shared by the two threads, and that includes all the out-of-order execution logic (the instruction reorder buffer, the execution units, and cache memory). A simple observation led to the introduction of SMT: the “wider” (meaning more execution units) and “deeper” (meaning more pipeline stages) processors become, the harder it is to extract enough parallelism to use all the execution units at each cycle. Where the Pentium 4 was very deep, with a pipeline having more than 20 stages, Nehalem is very wide. It has six execution units capable of executing three memory operations and three calculation operations. If the execution engine can’t find sufficient parallelism of instructions to take advantage of them all, “bubbles”—lost cycles—occur in the pipeline.
To remedy that situation, SMT looks for instruction parallelism in two threads instead of just one, with the goal of leaving as few units unused as possible. This approach can be extremely effective when the two threads are executing tasks that are highly separate. On the other hand, two threads involving intensive calculation, for example, will only increase the pressure on the same calculating units, putting them in competition with each other for access to the cache. It goes without saying that SMT is of no interest in this type of situation, and can even negatively impact performance.
SMT Implementation
Still, the impact of SMT on performance is positive most of the time and the cost in terms of resources is still very limited, which explains why the technology is making a comeback. But programmers will have to pay attention because with Nehalem, all threads are not created equal. To help solve this puzzle, Intel provides a way of precisely determining the exact topology of the processor (the number of physical and logical processors), and programmers can then use the operating system affinity mechanism to assign each thread to a processor. This kind of thing shouldn’t be a problem for game programmers, who are already in the habit of working that way because of the way the Xenon processor (the one used in the Xbox 360) works. But unlike consoles, where programmers have very low-level access, on a PC the operating system’s thread scheduler will always have the last word.
Since SMT puts a heavier load on the out-of-order execution engine, Intel has increased the size of certain internal buffers to avoid turning them into bottlenecks. So the reorder buffer, which keeps track of all the instructions being executed in order to reorder them, has increased from 96 entries on the Core 2 to 128 entries on Nehalem. In practice, since this buffer is partitioned statically to keep any one thread from monopolizing all the resources, its size is reduced to 64 entries for each thread with SMT. Obviously, in cases where a single thread is executed, it has access to all the entries, which should mean that there won’t be any specific situations where Nehalem turns out to have worse performance than its predecessor.
The reservation station, which is the unit in charge of assigning instructions to the different execution units, has also increased in size: from 32 to 36 entries. But unlike the reorder buffer, here partitioning is dynamic, so that a thread can take up more or fewer entries as a function of its needs.
Two other buffers have also been resized: the load buffer and the store buffer. The former has 48 entries as opposed to 32 with Conroe, and the latter 32 instead of 20. Here too, partitioning between threads is static.
Another consequence of the return of SMT is that the performance of thread synchronization instructions has improved, according to Intel.
SSE 4.2 And Power Consumption
With the Nehalem architecture, Intel couldn’t resist adding some new items to the already long list of SSE instructions. Nehalem supports SSE 4.2, which has all the instructions supported by Penryn (SSE4.1) and adds seven more. Most of these new instructions are for manipulating character strings, one purpose of which, Intel says, is to speed up the processing of XML files.
The two other instructions are aimed at specific applications; one is POPCNT, which appeared with Barcelona, and is used to count the number of non-zero bits in a register. According to Intel, this instruction is especially useful in voice recognition and DNA sequencing. The last instruction, CRC32, is used for accelerating the calculation of error detection codes.
Power Consumption Under Control
Over and over Intel says that for any potential innovation in one of its new architectures, the engineers weigh performance gains against the impact on power consumption—it’s proof that they’ve learned well from Pentium 4. With the Nehalem architecture, the engineers have gone even farther with techniques for limiting consumption. There’s now a built-in microcontroller—the Power Control Unit—that constantly watches the temperature and power use of the cores and can disable them completely when they’re not being used. Thanks to this technology, the energy consumption of an unused core is next to zero, whereas before Nehalem there were still losses due to leakage currents.
Intel has implemented this in an original way with what it calls a Turbo mode. When the processor is operating below its standard TDP, for example, the Turbo mode increases the frequency of the cores being used, while still keeping within the TDP limit.
Note also that like the Atom processor, Nehalem’s L1 and L2 caches use eight transistors instead of the usual six, which reduces consumption at the cost of a slightly larger die surface.
QuickPath Interconnect
While the Core architecture was remarkably efficient, certain design details had begun to show their age, first among them the Front Side Bus (FSB) system. This bus connecting the processors to the northbridge was a real anachronism in an otherwise highly modern architecture. The major fault was most noticeable in multiprocessor configurations, where the architecture had a hard time keeping up with increasing loads. The processors had to share this bus not only for access to memory, but also for ensuring the coherence of the data contained in their respective cache memories.
In this kind of situation, the influx of transactions to the bus can lead to its saturation. For a long time, Intel simply worked around the problem by using a faster bus or larger cache memories, but it was high time for them to address the underlying cause by completely overhauling the way its processors communicate with memory and outside components.
The solution Intel chose—called QuickPath Interconnect (QPI)—was nothing new; an integrated memory controller is an extremely fast point-to-point serial bus. The technology was introduced five years ago in AMD processors, but in reality it’s even older than that. These concepts, showing up in AMD and now Intel products, are in fact the result of work done ten years ago by the engineers at DEC during the design of the Alpha 21364 (EV7). Since many former DEC engineers ended up in Santa Clara, it’s not surprising to see these concepts surfacing in the latest Intel architecture.
From a technical point of view, a QPI link is bidirectional and has two 20-bit links—one in each direction—of which 16 are reserved for data; the four others are used for error detection codes or protocol functions. This works out to a maximum of 6.4 GT/s (billion transfers per second), or a usable bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s, both read and write. Just for comparison, the FSB on the most recent Intel processors operates at a maximum clock frequency of 400 MHz, and address transfers need two clock cycles (200 MT/s) whereas data transfers operate in QDR mode, with a bandwidth of 1.6 GT/s. With its 64-bit width, the FSB also has a total bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s, but it’s usable for writing or reading.
So a QPI link has a theoretical bandwidth that’s up to twice as high, provided reads and writes are well balanced. In a theoretical case consisting of reads only or writes only, the bandwidth would be identical to that of the FSB. However, you have to keep in mind that the FSB was used both for memory access and for all transfers of data to peripherals or between processors. With Nehalem, a QPI link will be exclusively dedicated to transfers of data to peripherals, with memory transfers handled by the integrated controller and inter-CPU communications in multi-socket configurations by another QPI link. Even in the worst cases, a QPI link should show significantly better performance than the FSB.
As we’ve seen, Nehalem was designed to be a flexible, scalable architecture, and so the number of QPI links available will vary with the market segment being aimed at—from one link to the chipset for single-socket configurations to as many as four in four-socket server configurations. This enables true fully-connected four-processor systems, meaning that each processor can access any position in memory with a maximum of a single QPI link hop since each CPU is connected directly to the three others.
Memory Subsystem
An Integrated Memory Controller
Intel has taken its time catching up to AMD on this point. But as is often the case, when the giant does something, he takes a giant step. Where Barcelona had two 64-bit memory controllers supporting DDR2, Intel’s top-of-the-line configuration will include three DDR3 memory controllers. Hooked up to DDR3-1333, which Nehalem will also support, that adds up to a bandwidth of 32 GB/s in certain configurations. But the advantage of an integrated memory controller isn’t just a matter of bandwidth. It also substantially lowers memory access latency, which is just as important, considering that each access costs several hundred cycles. Though the latecy reduction achieved by an integrated memory controller will be appreciable in the context of desktop use, it is multi-socket server configurations that will get the full benefit of the more scalable architecture. Before, while bandwidth remained constant when CPUs were added, now each new CPU added will increase bandwidth, since each processor has its own local memory space.
Obviously this is not a miracle solution. This is a Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) configuration, which means that memory accesses can be more or less costly, depending on where the data is in memory. An access to local memory obviously has the lowest latency and the highest bandwidth; conversely, an access to remote memory requires a transit via the QPI link, which reduces performance.
The impact on performance is difficult to predict, since it’ll be dependent on the application and the operating system. Intel says the performance hit for remote access is around 70% in terms of latency, and that bandwidth can be reduced by half compared to local access. According to Intel, even with remote access via the QPI link, latency will still be lower than on earlier processors where the memory controller was on the northbridge. However, those considerations only apply to server applications, and for a long time now they’ve already been designed with the specifics of NUMA configurations in mind.
A Three-Level Cache Hierarchy
The memory hierarchy of Conroe was extremely simple and Intel was able to concentrate on the performance of the shared L2 cache, which was the best solution for an architecture that was aimed mostly at dual-core implementations. But with Nehalem, the engineers started from scratch and came to the same conclusions as their competitors: a shared L2 cache was not suited to a native quad-core architecture. The different cores can too frequently flush data needed by another core and that surely would have involved too many problems in terms of internal buses and arbitration to provide all four cores with sufficient bandwidth while keeping latency sufficiently low. To solve the problem, the engineers provided each core with a Level 2 cache of its own. Since it’s dedicated to a single core and relatively small (256 KB), the engineers were able to endow it with very high performance; latency, in particular, has reportedly improved significantly over Penryn—from 15 cycles to approximately 10 cycles.
Then comes an enormous Level 3 cache memory (8 MB) for managing communications between cores. While at first glance Nehalem’s cache hierarchy reminds one of Barcelona, the operation of the Level 3 cache is very different from AMD’s—it’s inclusive of all lower levels of the cache hierarchy. That means that if a core tries to access a data item and it’s not present in the Level 3 cache, there’s no need to look in the other cores’ private caches—the data item won’t be there either. Conversely, if the data are present, four bits associated with each line of the cache memory (one bit per core) show whether or not the data are potentially present (potentially, but not with certainty) in the lower-level cache of another core, and which one.
This technique is effective for ensuring the coherency of the private caches because it limits the need for exchanges between cores. It has the disadvantage of wasting part of the cache memory with data that is already in other cache levels. That’s somewhat mitigated, however, by the fact that the L1 and L2 caches are relatively small compared to the L3 cache—all the data in the L1 and L2 caches takes up a maximum of 1.25 MB out of the 8 MB available. As on Barcelona, the Level 3 cache doesn’t operate at the same frequency as the rest of the chip. Consequently, latency of access to this level is variable, but it should be in the neighborhood of 40 cycles.
The only real disappointment with Nehalem’s new cache hierarchy is its L1 cache. The bandwidth of the instruction cache hasn’t been increased—it’s still 16 bytes per cycle compared to 32 on Barcelona. This could create a bottleneck in a server-oriented architecture since 64-bit instructions are larger than 32-bit ones, especially since Nehalem has one more decoder than Barcelona, which puts that much more pressure on the cache. As for the data cache, its latency has increased to four cycles compared to three on the Conroe, facilitating higher clock frequencies. To end on a positive note, though, the engineers at Intel have increased the number of Level 1 data cache misses that the architecture can process in parallel.
TLB
For many years now, processors have been working not with physical memory addresses, but with virtual addresses. Among other advantages, this approach lets more memory be allocated to a program than the computer actually has, keeping only the data necessary at a given moment in actual physical memory with the rest remaining on the hard disk. This means that for each memory access a virtual address has to be translated into a physical address, and to do that an enormous table is put in charge of keeping track of the correspondences. The problem is that this table gets so large that it can’t be stored on-chip—it’s placed in main memory, and can even be paged (part of the table can be absent from memory and itself kept on the hard disk).
If this translation stage were necessary at each memory access, it would make access much too slow. As a result, engineers returned to the principle of physical addressing by adding a small cache memory directly on the processor that stored the correspondences for a few recently accessed addresses. This cache memory is called a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB). Intel has completely revamped the operation of the TLB in their new architecture. Up until now, the Core 2 has used a level 1 TLB that is extremely small (16 entries) but also very fast for loads only, and a larger level 2 TLB (256 entries) that handled loads missed in the level 1 TLB, as well as stores.
Nehalem now has a true two-level TLB: the first level of TLB is shared between data and instructions. The level 1 data TLB now stores 64 entries for small pages (4K) or 32 for large pages (2M/4M), while the level 1 instruction TLB stores 128 entries for small pages (the same as with Core 2) and seven for large pages. The second level is a unified cache that can store up to 512 entries and operates only with small pages. The purpose of this improvement is to increase the performance of applications that use large sets of data. As with the introduction of two-level branch predictors, this is further evidence of the architecture’s server orientation.
Let’s go back to SMT for a moment, since it also has an impact on the TLBs. The level 1 data TLB and the level 2 TLB are shared dynamically between the two threads. Conversely, the level 1 instruction TLB is statically shared for small pages, whereas the one dedicated to large pages is entirely replicated—this is understandable given its small size (seven entries per thread).
Memory Access And Prefetcher
Optimized Unaligned Memory Access
With the Core architecture, memory access was subject to several restrictions in terms of performance. The processor was optimized for access to memory addresses that were aligned on 64-byte boundaries—the size of one cache line. Not only was access slow for unaligned data, but execution of an unaligned load or store instruction was more costly than for aligned instructions, regardless of actual alignment of the data in memory. That’s because these instructions generated several µops for the decoders to handle, which reduced the throughput of this type of instruction. As a result, compilers avoided generating this type of instruction, by substituting sequences of instructions that were less costly.
Thus, memory reads that overlapped two cache lines took a performance hit of approximately 12 cycles, compared to 10 for writes. The Intel engineers have optimized these accesses to make them faster. First of all, there’s no performance penalty for using the unaligned versions of load/store instructions in cases where the data are aligned in memory. In other cases, Intel has optimized these accesses to reduce the performance hit compared to that of the Core architecture.
More Prefetchers Running More Efficiently
With the Conroe architecture, Intel was especially proud of its hardware prefetchers. As you know, a prefetch is a mechanism that observes memory access patterns and tries to anticipate which data will be needed several cycles in advance. The point is to return the data to the cache, where it will be more readily accessible to the processor while trying to maximize bandwidth by using it when the processor doesn’t need it.
This technique produced remarkable results with most desktop applications, but in the server world the result was often a loss of performance. There are many reasons for that inefficiency. First of all, memory accesses are often much less easy to predict with server applications. Database accesses, for example, aren’t linear—when an item of data is accessed in memory, the adjacent data won’t necessarily be called on next. That limits the prefetcher’s effectiveness. But the main problem was with memory bandwidth in multi-socket configurations. As we said earlier, there was already a bottleneck between processors, but in addition, the prefetchers added additional pressure at this level. When a microprocessor wasn’t accessing memory, the prefetchers kicked in to use bandwidth they assumed was available. They had no way of knowing at that precise point that the other processor might need the bandwidth. That meant the prefetchers could deprive a processor of bandwidth that was already at a premium in this kind of configuration. To solve the problem, Intel had no better solution to offer than to disable the prefetchers in these situations—hardly a satisfactory answer.
Intel says the problem is solved now, but provides no details on the operation of the new prefetch algorithms; all its says is that it won’t be necessary to disable them for server configurations. But even if Intel hasn’t changed anything, the gains stemming from the new memory organization and the resulting wider bandwidth should limit any negative impact of the prefetchers
Conclusion
Conroe laid strong foundations and Nehalem builds on them. It has the same efficient architecture, but it’s now much more modular and scalable, which should guarantee success in the different market segments. We’re not saying that Nehalem revolutionizes the Core architecture, but it does revolutionize the Intel platform, which has now once again become a formidable match for AMD in terms of design and surpassed its competitor in terms of implementation.
With all the improvements made at this level (integrated memory controller, QPI), it’s not really surprising that the changes to the execution core are purely incremental. But the return of Hyper-Threading is significant and there are several little optimizations that should guarantee a notable gain in performance compared to Penryn at equal frequencies.
Clearly, the greatest gains will be in situations where memory was the main bottleneck. In reading this article, you’ve probably noticed that this is the area the engineers have focused their attentions on. In addition to the integrated memory controller, which will undoubtedly produce the biggest gains where memory access is concerned, there’s a raft of other improvements, both big and small—the new cache and TLB hierarchies, unaligned memory access and prefetchers.
After all these theoretical considerations, the next step will be to see if the improvements in actual applications will live up to the expectations that the new architecture has aroused. We’ll look into that in a series of upcoming articles, so stay tuned!
Mobile Phone Secrets & Tricks
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Mobile Phone Secrets & Tricks
.:: NOKIA ::.
Nokia Universal Codes
Code Description :
These Nokia codes will work on most Nokia Mobile Phones
(1) *3370# Activate Enhanced Full Rate Codec (EFR) - Your phone uses the best sound quality but talk time is reduced my approx. 5%
(2) #3370# Deactivate Enhanced Full Rate Codec (EFR) OR *3370# ( F avourite )
(3) *#4720# Activate Half Rate Codec - Your phone uses a lower quality sound but you should gain approx 30% more Talk Time.
(4) *#4720# Deactivate Half Rate Codec.
(5) *#0000# Displays your phones software version, 1st Line : Software Version, 2nd Line : Software Release Date, 3rd Line : Compression Type. ( Favourite )
(6) *#9999# Phones software version if *#0000# does not work.
(7) *#06# For checking the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI Number). ( Favourite )
(8) #pw+1234567890+1# Provider Lock Status. (use the "*" button to obtain the "p,w"
and "+" symbols).
(9) #pw+1234567890+2# Network Lock Status. (use the "*" button to obtain the "p,w"
and "+" symbols).
(10) #pw+1234567890+3# Country Lock Status. (use the "*" button to obtain the "p,w"
and "+" symbols).
(11) #pw+1234567890+4# SIM Card Lock Status. (use the "*" button to obtain the "p,w"
and "+" symbols).
(12) *#147# (vodafone) this lets you know who called you last.
(13) *#1471# Last call (Only vodofone).
(14) *#21# Allows you to check the number that "All Calls" are diverted to
(15) *#2640# Displays security code in use.
(16) *#30# Lets you see the private number.
(17) *#43# Allows you to check the "Call Waiting" status of your phone.
(18) *#61# Allows you to check the number that "On No Reply" calls are diverted to.
(19) *#62# Allows you to check the number that "Divert If Unreachable (no service)" calls
are diverted to.
(20) *#67# Allows you to check the number that "On Busy Calls" are diverted to.
(21) *#67705646# Removes operator logo on 3310 & 3330.
(22) *#73# Reset phone timers and game scores.
(23) *#746025625# Displays the SIM Clock status, if your phone supports this power saving feature "SIM Clock Stop Allowed", it means you will get the best standby time possible.
(24) *#7760# Manufactures code.
(25) *#7780# Restore factory settings.
(26) *#8110# Software version for the nokia 8110.
(27) *#92702689# Displays - 1.Serial Number, 2.Date Made, 3.Purchase Date, 4.Date of last repair (0000 for no repairs), 5.Transfer User Data. To exit this mode you need to switch your phone off then on again. ( Favourite )
(28) *#94870345123456789# Deactivate the PWM-Mem.
(29) **21*number# Turn on "All Calls" diverting to the phone number entered.
(30) **61*number# Turn on "No Reply" diverting to the phone number entered.
(31) **67*number# Turn on "On Busy" diverting to the phone number entered.
(32) 12345 This is the default security code.
press and hold # Lets you switch between lines
NOKIA 5110/5120/5130/5190
IMEI number: * # 0 6 #
Software version: * # 0 0 0 0 #
Simlock info: * # 9 2 7 0 2 6 8 9 #
Enhanced Full Rate: * 3 3 7 0 # [ # 3 3 7 0 # off]
Half Rate: * 4 7 2 0 #
Provider lock status: #pw+1234567890+1
Network lock status #pw+1234567890+2
Provider lock status: #pw+1234567890+3
SimCard lock status: #pw+1234567890+4
NOKIA 6110/6120/6130/6150/6190
IMEI number: * # 0 6 #
Software version: * # 0 0 0 0 #
Simlock info: * # 9 2 7 0 2 6 8 9 #
Enhanced Full Rate: * 3 3 7 0 # [ # 3 3 7 0 # off]
Half Rate: * 4 7 2 0 #
NOKIA 3110
IMEI number: * # 0 6 #
Software version: * # 0 0 0 0 # or * # 9 9 9 9 # or * # 3 1 1 0 #
Simlock info: * # 9 2 7 0 2 6 8 9 #
NOKIA 3330
*#06#
This will show your warranty details *#92702689#
*3370#
Basically increases the quality of calling sound, but decreases battery length.
#3370#
Deactivates the above
*#0000#
Shows your software version
*#746025625#This shows if your phone will allow sim clock stoppage
*4370#
Half Rate Codec activation. It will automatically restart
#4370#
Half Rate Codec deactivation. It will automatically restart
Restore Factory Settings
To do this simply use this code *#7780#
Manufacturer Info
Date of Manufacturing *#3283#
*3001#12345# (TDMA phones only)
This will put your phone into programming mode, and you'll be presented with the programming menu.
2) Select "NAM1"
3) Select "PSID/RSID"
4) Select "P/RSID 1"
Note: Any of the P/RSIDs will work
5) Select "System Type" and set it to Private
6) Select "PSID/RSID" and set it to 1
7) Select "Connected System ID"
Note: Enter your System ID for Cantel, which is 16401 or 16423. If you don't know yours,
ask your local dealer for it.
8) Select "Alpha Tag"
9) Enter a new tag, then press OK
10) Select "Operator Code (SOC)" and set it to 2050
11) Select "Country Code" and set it to 302 for Canada, and 310 for the US.
12) Power down the phone and power it back on again
ISDN Code
To check the ISDN number on your Nokia use this code *#92772689#
.:: Ericsson ::.
Ericson T65
*#05# Fake Insert puk screen Press no to exit
Ericsson T20
Ericsson T20
MENU tecnichal Info
[type] >*<<*<*
Displays :
1] Info service
1] Info SW
2] Info hardware
3] SIMlock
4]setup
2] Service setup
1] Contrast
3]Service Test
1] Display
2]Leds
3]Keyboard
4] ringer
5] Vibration
6]Headset
7] Microphone
8]Clock
4] Names List
MENU info
[Type] >*<<**<
Network and Subnetwork : NCK and NSCK
Ericsson T28
>*<<*<* menu Tecnichal info
SW vers. and name list
>*<<**< menu Personal Info
Network and Subnetwork : NCK and NSCK
< and > are the right and left menu's keys
Ericsson T18s/T10/A1018s
>*<<*<* software
CXC125065 Internal product code
PRG
970715 1515 Software version and SW rev.
<* CLR <><**
>*<<*<*> Displays texts and messages in the phone
It will be displayed " TEXT " then push YES
< and > are the right and left menu's keys
!!!><**
Control /Enable SIM Lock!!!
Ericsson R310
Technical Info : >*<<*<*
Options :
1) service Info
info Software
Simlock
Configuration
2) Service Test
Display
Led/Illumination
Keyboard
ringer
Vibration
Headset
Microphone
Clock
3)Text's name List
Info personal : >*<<**<
SIM Locking ( 8 digits' code ) ( it could harm your phone )
1) Network
2) Subnetwork
3) SP
4) Corporate
.:: Siemens ::.
Siemens C25
IMEI number: * # 0 6 #
Software version: put off sim card and enter: : * # 0 6 # and press LONG KEY
Bonus screen: in phone booke: + 1 2 0 2 2 2 4 3 1 2 1
.:: Bosch ::.
IMEI Number: * # 0 6 #
Dafault Language: * # 0 0 0 0 #
Net Monitor: * # 3 2 6 2 2 5 5 * 8 3 7 8 #
.::Alcatel ::.
IMEI number: * # 0 6 #
Software version: * # 0 6 #
Net Monitor: 0 0 0 0 0 0 *
.:: Samsung ::.
Samsung SGH600/2100DB
IMEI number: * # 0 6 #
Software version: * # 9 9 9 9 # albo * # 0 8 3 7 #
Net Monitor: * # 0 3 2 4 #
Chaning LCD contrast: * # 0 5 2 3 #
Memory info: * # 0 3 7 7 # albo * # 0 2 4 6 #
Reset pamieci (SIMLOCK`a removing!!!): *2767*3855#
Reset pamieci CUSTOM: *2767*2878#
Battery state: * # 9 9 9 8 * 2 2 8 #
Alarm beeper: *#9998*289#
Vibra test: *#9998*842#
.:: Dancall ::.
IMEI number: * # 0 6 #
Software version: * # 9 9 9 9 #
.:: Philips ::.
*#3333*# Displays the blocking list.
*#7489*# Displays the security code.
*#06# Displays the IMEI number.
*#8377*# Displays the SW info.
.:: Panasonic ::.
Panasonic gd90 gd93
*#9999# SW - Type the code on switch on , during network seek
-Vers. SW and production code
Enable ringing and vibration contemporarily
Enable vibration with # then increase volume with "tone menu "
Panasonic gd70
*#9999# SW - Type the code on switch on , during network seek
-Vers. SW and production code
Enable ringing and vibration contemporarily
Enable vibration with # then increase volume with "tone menu "
.:: Acer ::.
Acer V 750
*#400# Display Adc/ Set Cal-Value -
*#402# Set LCD Contrast
*#403# Display Errors Info
*#300# Display Info Hw & Sw
*#301# Menu Test
*#302# Menu Acoustics
*#303# (Settings saved) Set English language?
*#307# Menu Engineering
*#311# Reset Phone Code - [ Also reset Security Codes ! ]
*#330# (Execute not success) [ unknown ]
*#331# (Service deactivated) [ unknown ]
*#332# (Service unavailable)[ unknown ]
*#333# (Execute not success)[ unknown ]
*#351# (Service unavailable) [ unknown ]
*#360# (Invalid input)[ unknown ]
*#361# (Invalid input) [ unknown ]
*#362# (Invalid input) [ unknown ]
*#363# (Invalid input) [ unknown ]
.:: Genie ::.
Genie DB
*#06# IMEI.
*#2254*# Near Cell Mode.
For every received BTS will be displayed :
Current channel and 2 channel levels
*#06# IMEI
*#2558# time of network connection ( D/H/M )
*#2562# Fores reconnection to network
!!!*#7489# Dispalys and modify phones' security code!!!
!!!*#3377# SIM lock information !!!
*#7378# SIM card Informations : supported phase name and tipe
*#7693# Enable/disable "Sleep Mode"
*#8463# State of "Sleep Mode"
*#2255# Debug Call Mode enable/disable
*#3333*# Displays the blocking list.
*#7489*# Displays the security code
*#06# Displays the IMEI number
*#8377*# Displays the SW info.
.:: NEC ::.
NEC db2000
*#2820# software vers.
IMEI *#06#
Reset *73738# (send?)
SP Lock info:
* # 3210 # (send?)
Network barring info : *#8140# (send?)
( it could harm your phone )
SIM lock it could harm your phone )
*#4960 # (send?) -Inquiry * 4960 * password * password # (send?) lock
#4960* password # (send?) unlock
[password] [8 digits]
Net Lock
*#7320# (send?) -Inquiry * 7320 * password * password # (send?) lock
#7320* password # (send?) unlock
[password] [ 8 digits]
Net Lock 2:
*#2220# (invio) - Inquiry * 2220 * password * password # (send?) lock
#2220* password # (invio?)unlock
[password] [8 digits]
Unlock subnetwork
*#1110# (send?) - inquiry * 1110 * password * password # (send?) lock
#1110* password # (send?) unlock
[password] [n� 8 cifre]
( it could harm your phone )
.:: Trium ::.
Trium Geo/Geo @ - Astral - Cosmo -Aria
Enter the menu and type *
A new menu will be displayed :
Application : SW version and battery's voltage
Trium Galaxy
Push * and type 5806: Production date and SW version
.:: Telit ::.
Telit GM 810
MONITOR - technical menu - : type ++++ and push OK.
Adiacent cells list : # and *
Now if you push OK the phone displays battery ' s voltage and temperature
.:: Sagem ::.
Sagem MC959/940
Select commands' menu and push *
Displays a new menu' :
Appli : software vers. and battery's voltage
Eprom
Sim Lock
Test LCD: display test , green/red and vibration
Sagem MC920
Select commands' menu and push *
Displays 5 new menus :
1 APPLI
VERSION ( SW)
BATTERY (voltage )
2 PROM (IMEI)
3!!! SIM LOCK (10 digits code requested ) !!!
4- NETWORK (returns : OPTION NOT AVAILABLE)
5- TEST LCD
SYMBOL 1 (LCD)
SYMBOL 2 (test2 LCD)
BLACK (all icons and carachters displayed )
FOR PHOTO (welcome message and time )
VIBRATOR (vibration test )
.:: Sony ::.
Sony CMD Z5/J5
Vers. SW :
Without SIM , switch on phone and type l *#7353273#
.:: Eprom ::.
!!! Sim Lock [10 digits code ] ( it could harm your phone )
NETWORK : OPTION NOT AVAILABLE
Test LCD: display test of the green/red leds and vibration
Push * and type 4329 :enables/disables network monitor 1 (the same of MT35)
Push * and type 621342 :enables/disables network monitor 2
Push * and type 5807 : Serial Number Software Vers.
Push * and type 936505: IMEI -- Software Vers.
TPush * and type 547 : Test serial Data Cable DISPLAYS :"Testmode"
Push * and type 362628: ISMI BLOCK (UNKNOWN)
Push * and type 476989: NS BLOCK (UNKNOWN)
Push * and type 482896:CP BLOCK (UNKNOWN)
Push * and type 787090: ? BLOCK (UNKNOWN)
Push * and type 787292 : block current network
!!! Push * and type 967678: SP LOCK!!!
Push * and type 850696:Warm Start ( ENABLE/DISABLE)
Push * and type 3926 : Swicth off phone
Push * and type 5806: Production date and SW version
.:: Motorola ::.
Motorola V3688
IMEI *#06#
Enhanced Full Rate Codec EFR
Enable EFR : [][][] 119 [] 1 [] OK.
disable EFR : [][][] 119 [] 0 [] OK
.:: Tips and Tricks ::.
Send an E-mail from your GSM
From your telephone you can send an email to whichever E-mail customer of the Internet network.
The e-mail will be sent to the maximum of within an hour from the reception.
The sended message will contain in luminosity the telephone number of the sender.
In order for sending e-mail, send an SMS with this syntax (always separated by spaces):
EMA name@domain text-of-your-email
Example: in order to send an email to john@doe.com , do the following:
EMA john@doe.com text-of-your-email
if your phone cant print @ replace it with a !
EMA johon!doe.com text-of-your-email
And then send this message to the folloving number: +39 338 8641732
Free SMS Center numbers
From your telephone you can send SMS messages of 160 char. max. to another GSM phone
Your message will be sent through an SMS Center (usually the one that gave your provider)
You pay a little fee depending of your provider, BUT YOU WILL HAVE TO PAY something
In order for sending SMS without paying anything, you got to change your SMS Center number with these one
+491722270300 or +358405202999 or +352021100003
Codes (that they dont tell you in the manual)
To check the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) type: *#06#
Information you get from the IMEI:
XXXXXX XX XXXXXX X
TAC FAC SNR SP
TAC = Type Approval Code (first 2 digits = country code).
FAC = Final Assembly Code (For Nokia phonfiltered=10).
SNR = Serial Number.
SP = Spare (always SP=0).
To check the phone's software (firmware revision information) type: *#0000# ( or for some phones outher then Nokia 61XX you can try *#model nummber# ex. for 8110 *#8110#)
Information you can get from the phone's software version:
V 3.14
28-11-97
NSE-3
1st line: Software version.
2nd line: The date of the software release.
3nd line: Phone type, .
Some versions and dates:
V 3.14 28/11/97
V4.33 11/03/98
V 4.73 22/04/98
V 5.24 14/9/98
Pin-Out Diagram for the 6110
1 - VIN CHARGER INPUT VOLTAGE 8.4V 0.8A
2 - CHRG CTRL CHARGER CONTROL PWM 32Khz
3 - XMIC MIC INPUT 60mV - 1V
4 - SGND SIGNAL GROUND
5 - XEAR EAR OUTPUT 80mV - 1V
6 - MBUS 9600 B/S
7 - FBUS_RX 9.6 - 230.4 KB/S
8 - FBUS_TX 9.6 - 230.4 KB/S
9 - L_GND CHARGER / LOGIC GND
Revealing Headphone and Car-Kit Menus
Think about this: If you do these tricks the new menus can not be erased after the procedure. But it's not dangerous or harmful for your phone
To enable the headset-function, you have to short-circuit the "3" and "4". After a short time there is "Headset" on the display Now, menu 3-6 is now enabled!
To enable the carkit-function you have to short-circuit the "4" and "5". After a short time, "Car" is shown on the display and the menu 3-7 is enabled!!
This Trick is for you how want to hear more then your supposed to !
If you short-circuit the left and the right contact with the middle contact ("3", "6" and "9") the Nokia Software hangs! The profile "Headset" will be activated. Before you do this, just active the "auto call receive" function in the headphone profile and set the ringing volume to "mute" Now you can use your phone for checking out what people are talking about in a room. Place the phone somewhere stratidic and call your phone! The phone receives the call without ringing and you can listen to what people are talking about! .....gr8...
Serial numbers on your 6110
For more info type: *#92702689#
The first screen gives you the serial and IMEI number.
Then there is the Date of Manufacture: ex. Made 1297
Then there is the Purchasing Date: ex. Purchasing Date 0298
Then there is the last Repair Date: ex. Repaired: 0000
Note: you must turn off the phone to exit after this test, because of the last function, "transfer user data" which doesn't work as "standard"....You can use this mode only to transfer all Calender, Profile and Callers Group Information to another phone (eg. if you are replacing phone or configuring phones for use within your company or when a particular phone doesn't works correctly )
Activating and deactivating EFR and HFR, on your 6110
*3370# to activate Enhanced Full Rate - Makes calls sound better, but decreases the battery life by about 5%.
#3370# to deactivate Enhanced Full Rate
*4720# to activate Half Rate Mode - Drops call quality, but increases battery life by about 30%.
#4720# to deactivate Half Rate Mode
who says you need four core????
Confessions Of A Guilty Editor
I have a confession to make. Although I work in a lab filled with the latest hardware, my workstation still consists of a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 processor. Sure, it features Hyper-Threading, but the chip is six years old. Why am I still using it? Because it runs on a platform that has given me nary a problem. It’s stable, fast enough in Vista vista to drive four monitors with 15 different windows open at any given time, and remarkably quiet in its little Shuttle box.
Zoom
But everyone has their limits, and after six years, it’s definitely time to move on. As I considered the pieces for my next PC, I first contemplated an affordable quad-core box based on Intel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation ’s Q9300 or AMD’s Phenom X4 9850 BE. No—I’d rather see how low I could go on the system’s thermal footprint while still achieving reasonable performance.
And then it hit me. Do I really need a quad-core processor? Is the software I run really benefiting from the extra complexity? Could I not get more horsepower from dual-core chip? After all, it’d still be a tremendous upgrade from that 2.8 GHz Pentium 4.
In the interest of full disclosure, my workstation doesn’t touch gaming—nor could it, sporting Nvidia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia ’s Quadro NVS 440. For entertainment I turn to a dual-processor Xeon-based machine that can’t be run after 10:00PM for fear of a noise complaint from the neighbors. Nevertheless, I have to imagine that there are plenty of enthusiasts out there with a solid little desktop sputtering along doing menial productivity-type tasks. So let’s take a look at what it means to upgrade to an affordable configuration with modern components as I build my next six-year system.
Zoom
The Contenders
There are actually several strong platforms available right now that’d be perfect foundations for a basic workstation upgrade. From AMD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices , the 780G and 790GX both help save money through capable integrated graphics cores. Nvidia’s GeForce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce 8200 does the same thing. Intel’s P45 chipset looks to be a strong contender if you don’t mind spending some money on an add-in video card.
However, we’re focusing on two specific chipsets here: AMD’s 740G and Intel’s G45. They aren’t meant to go head-to-head—if they were, we could tell you the performance outcome right now. Rather, the former gives us an ultra-affordable entry point for exploring platform performance, while the latter kicks things up a notch with more current technology. Is the 740G enough? Where are our bottlenecks when we make price the priority? Is Intel’s G45 finally up to snuff with regard to graphics? Most important, do you really need a quad-core CPU or will one of today’s dual-core chips serve up enough muscle to stand the test of time?
I have a confession to make. Although I work in a lab filled with the latest hardware, my workstation still consists of a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 processor. Sure, it features Hyper-Threading, but the chip is six years old. Why am I still using it? Because it runs on a platform that has given me nary a problem. It’s stable, fast enough in Vista vista to drive four monitors with 15 different windows open at any given time, and remarkably quiet in its little Shuttle box.
Zoom
But everyone has their limits, and after six years, it’s definitely time to move on. As I considered the pieces for my next PC, I first contemplated an affordable quad-core box based on Intel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation ’s Q9300 or AMD’s Phenom X4 9850 BE. No—I’d rather see how low I could go on the system’s thermal footprint while still achieving reasonable performance.
And then it hit me. Do I really need a quad-core processor? Is the software I run really benefiting from the extra complexity? Could I not get more horsepower from dual-core chip? After all, it’d still be a tremendous upgrade from that 2.8 GHz Pentium 4.
In the interest of full disclosure, my workstation doesn’t touch gaming—nor could it, sporting Nvidia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia ’s Quadro NVS 440. For entertainment I turn to a dual-processor Xeon-based machine that can’t be run after 10:00PM for fear of a noise complaint from the neighbors. Nevertheless, I have to imagine that there are plenty of enthusiasts out there with a solid little desktop sputtering along doing menial productivity-type tasks. So let’s take a look at what it means to upgrade to an affordable configuration with modern components as I build my next six-year system.
Zoom
The Contenders
There are actually several strong platforms available right now that’d be perfect foundations for a basic workstation upgrade. From AMD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices , the 780G and 790GX both help save money through capable integrated graphics cores. Nvidia’s GeForce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce 8200 does the same thing. Intel’s P45 chipset looks to be a strong contender if you don’t mind spending some money on an add-in video card.
However, we’re focusing on two specific chipsets here: AMD’s 740G and Intel’s G45. They aren’t meant to go head-to-head—if they were, we could tell you the performance outcome right now. Rather, the former gives us an ultra-affordable entry point for exploring platform performance, while the latter kicks things up a notch with more current technology. Is the 740G enough? Where are our bottlenecks when we make price the priority? Is Intel’s G45 finally up to snuff with regard to graphics? Most important, do you really need a quad-core CPU or will one of today’s dual-core chips serve up enough muscle to stand the test of time?
Great moments in microprocessor history
Great moments in microprocessor history
The history of the micro from the vacuum tube to today's dual-core multithreaded madness
The evolution of the modern microprocessor is one of many surprising twists and turns. Who invented the first micro? Who had the first 32-bit single-chip design? You might be surprised at the answers. This article shows the defining decisions that brought the contemporary microprocessor to its present-day configuration.
At the dawn of the 19th century, Benjamin Franklin's discovery of the principles of electricity were still fairly new, and practical applications of his discoveries were few -- the most notable exception being the lightning rod, which was invented independently by two different people in two different places. Independent contemporaneous (and not so contemporaneous) discovery would remain a recurring theme in electronics.
So it was with the invention of the vacuum tube -- invented by Fleming, who was investigating the Effect named for and discovered by Edison; it was refined four years later by de Forest (but is now rumored to have been invented 20 years prior by Tesla). So it was with the transistor: Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen were awarded the Nobel Prize for turning de Forest's triode into a solid state device -- but they were not awarded a patent, because of 20-year-prior art by Lilienfeld. So it was with the integrated circuit (or IC) for which Jack Kilby was awarded a Nobel Prize, but which was contemporaneously developed by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor (who got the patent). And so it was, indeed, with the microprocessor.
Before the flood: The 1960s
Just a scant few years after the first laboratory integrated circuits, Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (although at almost the same time as one from Texas Instruments).
Already at the start of the decade, process that would last until the present day was available: commercial ICs made in the planar process were available from both Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments by 1961, and TTL (transistor-transistor logic) circuits appeared commercially in 1962. By 1968, CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) hit the market. There is no doubt but that technology, design, and process were rapidly evolving.
Observing this trend, Fairchild Semiconductor's director of Research & Development Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that the density of elements in ICs was doubling annually, and predicted that the trend would continue for the next ten years. With certain amendments, this came to be known as Moore's Law.
The first ICs contained just a few transistors per wafer; by the dawn of the 1970s, production techniques allowed for thousands of transistors per wafer. It was only a matter of time before someone would use this capacity to put an entire computer on a chip, and several someones, indeed, did just that.
Development explosion: The 1970s
The idea of a computer on a single chip had been described in the literature as far back as 1952 (see Resources), and more articles like this began to appear as the 1970s dawned. Finally, process had caught up to thinking, and the computer on a chip was made possible. The air was electric with the possibility.
Once the feat had been established, the rest of the decade saw a proliferation of companies old and new getting into the semiconductor business, as well as the first personal computers, the first arcade games, and even the first home video game systems -- thus spreading consumer contact with electronics, and paving the way for continued rapid growth in the 1980s.
At the beginning of the 1970s, microprocessors had not yet been introduced. By the end of the decade, a saturated market led to price wars, and many processors were already 16-bit.
The first three
At the time of this writing, three groups lay claim for having been the first to put a computer in a chip: The Central Air Data Computer (CADC), the Intel® 4004, and the Texas Instruments TMS 1000.
The CADC system was completed for the Navy's "TomCat" fighter jets in 1970. It is often discounted because it was a chip set and not a CPU. The TI TMS 1000 was first to market in calculator form, but not in stand-alone form -- that distinction goes to the Intel 4004, which is just one of the reasons it is often cited as the first (incidentally, it too was just one in a chipset of four).
In truth, it does not matter who was first. As with the lightning rod, the light bulb, radio -- and so many other innovations before and after -- it suffices to say it was in the aether, it was inevitable, its time was come.
Where are they now?
CADC spent 20 years in top-secret, cold-war-era mothballs until finally being declassified in 1998. Thus, even if it was the first, it has remained under most people's radar even today, and did not have a chance to influence other early microprocessor design.
The Intel 4004 had a short and mostly uneventful history, to be superseded by the 8008 and other early Intel chips (see below).
In 1973, Texas Instrument's Gary Boone was awarded U.S. Patent No. 3,757,306 for the single-chip microprocessor architecture. The chip was finally marketed in stand-alone form in 1974, for the low, low (bulk) price of US$2 apiece. In 1978, a special version of the TI TMS 1000 was the brains of the educational "Speak and Spell" toy which E.T. jerry-rigged to phone home.
Early Intel: 4004, 8008, and 8080
Intel released its single 4-bit all-purpose chip, the Intel 4004, in November 1971. It had a clock speed of 108KHz and 2,300 transistors with ports for ROM, RAM, and I/O. Originally designed for use in a calculator, Intel had to renegotiate its contract to be able to market it as a stand-alone processor. Its ISA had been inspired by the DEC PDP-8.
The Intel 8008 was introduced in April 1972, and didn't make much of a splash, being more or less an 8-bit 4004. Its primary claim to fame is that its ISA -- provided by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC), who had commissioned the chip -- was to form the basis for the 8080, as well as for the later 8086 (and hence the x86) architecture. Lesser-known Intels from this time include the nearly forgotten 4040, which added logical and compare instructions to the 4004, and the ill-fated 32-bit Intel 432.
Intel put itself back on the map with the 8080, which used the same instruction set as the earlier 8008 and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor. The 8080 had a 16-bit address bus and an 8-bit data bus, a 16-bit stack pointer to memory which replaced the 8-level internal stack of the 8008, and a 16-bit program counter. It also contained 256 I/O ports, so I/O devices could be connected without taking away or interfering with the addressing space. It also possessed a signal pin that allowed the stack to occupy a separate bank of memory. These features are what made this a truly modern microprocessor. It was used in the Altair 8800, one of the first renowned personal computers (other claimants to that title include the 1963 MIT Lincoln Labs' 12-bit LINC/Laboratory Instruments Computer built with DEC components and DEC's own 1965 PDP-8).
Although the 4004 had been the company's first, it was really the 8080 that clinched its future -- this was immediately apparent, and in fact in 1974 the company changed its phone number so that the last four digits would be 8080.
Where is Intel now?
Last time we checked, Intel was still around.
RCA 1802
In 1974, RCA released the 1802 8-bit processor with a different architecture than other 8-bit processors. It had a register file of 16 registers of 16 bits each and using the SEP instruction, you could select any of the registers to be the program counter. Using the SEP instruction, you could choose any of the registers to be the index register. It did not have standard subroutine CALL immediate and RET instructions, though they could be emulated.
A few commonly used subroutines could be called quickly by keeping their address in one of the 16 registers. Before a subroutine returned, it jumped to the location immediately preceding its entry point so that after the RET instruction returned control to the caller, the register would be pointing to the right value for next time. An interesting variation was to have two or more subroutines in a ring so that they were called in round-robin order.
The RCA 1802 is considered one of the first RISC chips although others (notably Seymore Cray -- see the sidebar, The evolution of RISC -- had used concepts already).
Where is it now?
Sadly, the RCA chip was a spectacular market failure due to its slow clock cycle speed. But it could be fabricated to be radiation resistant, so it was used on the Voyager 1, Viking, and Galileo space probes (where rapidly executed commands aren't a necessity).
IBM 801
In 1975, IBM® produced some of the earliest efforts to build a microprocessor based on RISC design principles (although it wasn't called RISC yet -- see the sidebar, The evolution of RISC). Initially a research effort led by John Cocke (the father of RISC), many say that the IBM 801 was named after the address of the building where the chip was designed -- but we suspect that the IBM systems already numbered 601 and 701 had at least something to do with it also.
Where is the 801 now?
The 801 chip family never saw mainstream use, and was primarily used in other IBM hardware. Even though the 801 never went far, it did inspire further work which would converge, fifteen years later, to produce the Power Architecture™ family.
Moto 6800
In 1975, Motorola introduced the 6800, a chip with 78 instructions and probably the first microprocessor with an index register.
Two things are of significance here. One is the use of the index register which is a processor register (a small amount of fast computer memory that's used to speed the execution of programs by providing quick access to commonly used values). The index register can modify operand addresses during the run of a program, typically while doing vector/array operations. Before the invention of index registers and without indirect addressing, array operations had to be performed either by linearly repeating program code for each array element or by using self-modifying code techniques. Both of these methods harbor significant disadvantages when it comes to program flexibility and maintenance and more importantly, they are wasteful when it comes to using up scarce computer memory.
Where is the 6800 now?
Many Motorola stand-alone processors and microcontrollers trace their lineage to the 6800, including the popular and powerful 6809 of 1979
MOS 6502
Soon after Motorola released the 6800, the company's design team quit en masse and formed their own company, MOS Technology. They quickly developed the MOS 6501, a completely new design that was nevertheless pin-compatible with the 6800. Motorola sued, and MOS agreed to halt production. The company then released the MOS 6502, which differed from the 6501 only in the pin-out arrangement.
The MOS 6502 was released in September 1975, and it sold for US$25 per unit. At the time, the Intel 8080 and the Motorola 6800 were selling for US$179. Many people thought this must be some sort of scam. Eventually, Intel and Motorola dropped their prices to US$79. This had the effect of legitimizing the MOS 6502, and they began selling by the hundreds. The 6502 was a staple in the Apple® II and various Commodore and Atari computers.
Where is the MOS 6502 now?
Many of the original MOS 6502 still have loving homes today, in the hands of collectors (or even the original owners) of machines like the Atari 2600 video game console, Apple II family of computers, the first Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64 -- all of which used the 6502. MOS 6502 processors are still being manufactured today for use in embedded systems.
AMD clones the 8080
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was founded in 1969 by Jerry Sanders. Like so many of the people who were influential in the early days of the microprocessor (including the founders of Intel), Sanders came from Fairchild Semiconductor. AMD's business was not the creation of new products; it concentrated on making higher quality versions of existing products under license. For example, all of its products met MILSPEC requirements no matter what the end market was. In 1975, it began selling reverse-engineered clones of the Intel 8080 processor.
Where is AMD now?
In the 1980s, first licensing agreements -- and then legal disputes -- with Intel, eventually led to court validation of clean-room reverse engineering and opened the 1990s floodgates to many clone corps.
Fairchild F8
The 8-bit Fairchild F8 (also known as the 3850) microcontroller was Fairchild's first processor. It had no stack pointer, no program counter, no address bus. It did have 64 registers (the first 8 of which could be accessed directly) and 64 bytes of "scratchpad" RAM. The first F8s were multichip designs (usually 2-chip, with the second being ROM). The F8 was released in a single-chip implementation (the Mostek 3870) in 1977.
Where is it now?
The F8 was used in the company's Channel F Fairchild Video Entertainment System in 1976. By the end of the decade, Fairchild played mostly in niche markets, including the "hardened" IC market for military and space applications, and in Cray supercomputers. Fairchild was acquired by National Semiconductor in the 1980s, and spun off again as an independent company in 1997.
16 bits, two contenders
The first multi-chip 16-bit microprocessor was introduced by either Digital Equipment Corporation in its LSI-11 OEM board set and its packaged PDP 11/03 minicomputer, or by Fairchild Semiconductor with its MicroFlame 9440, both released in 1975. The first single-chip 16-bit microprocessor was the 1976 TI TMS 9900, which was also compatible with the TI 990 line of minicomputers and was used in the TM 990 line of OEM microcomputer boards.
Where are they now?
The DEC chipset later gave way to the 32-bit DEC VAX product line, which was replaced by the Alpha family, which was discontinued in 2004.
The aptly named Fairchild MicroFlame ran hot and was never chosen by a major computer manufacturer, so it faded out of existence.
The TI TMS 9900 had a strong beginning, but was packaged in a large (for the time) ceramic 64-pin package which pushed the cost out of range compared with the much cheaper 8-bit Intel 8080 and 8085. In March 1982, TI decided to start ramping down TMS 9900 production, and go into the DSP business instead. TI is still in the chip business today, and in 2004 it came out with a nifty TV tuner chip for cell phones.
Zilog Z-80
Probably the most popular microprocessor of all time, the Zilog Z-80 was designed by Frederico Faggin after he left Intel, and it was released in July 1976. Faggin had designed or led the design teams for all of Intel's early processors: the 4004, the 8008, and particularly, the revolutionary 8080.
This 8-bit microprocessor was binary compatible with the 8080 and surprisingly, is still in widespread use today in many embedded applications. Faggin intended it to be an improved version of the 8080 and according to popular opinion, it was. It could execute all of the 8080 operating codes as well as 80 more instructions (including 1-, 4-, 8-, and 16-bit operations, block I/O, block move, and so on). Because it contained two sets of switchable data registers, it supported fast operating system or interrupt context switches.
The thing that really made it popular though, was its memory interface. Since the CPU generated its own RAM refresh signals, it provided lower system costs and made it easier to design a system around. When coupled with its 8080 compatibility and its support for the first standardized microprocessor operating system CP/M, the cost and enhanced capabilities made this the choice chip for many designers (including TI; it was the brains of the TRS-80 Model 1).
The Z-80 featured many undocumented instructions that were in some cases a by-product of early designs (which did not trap invalid op codes, but tried to interpret them as best they could); in other cases the chip area near the edge was used for added instructions, but fabrication methods of the day made the failure rate high. Instructions that often failed were just not documented, so the chip yield could be increased. Later fabrication made these more reliable.
Where are they now?
In 1979, Zilog announced the 16-bit Z8000. Sporting another great design with a stack pointer and both a user and a supervisor mode, this chip never really took off. The main reason: Zilog was a small company, it struggled with support, and never managed to bank enough to stay around and outlast the competition.
However, Zilog is not only still making microcontrollers, it is still making Z-80 microcontrollers. In all, more than one billion Z-80s have been made over the years -- a proud testament to Faggin's superb design.
Faggin is currently Chairman of the Board & Co-Founder of Synaptics, a "user interface solutions" company in the Silicon Valley.
Intel 8085 and 8086
In 1976, Intel updated the 8080 design with the 8085 by adding two instructions to enable/disable three added interrupt pins (and the serial I/O pins). They also simplified hardware so that it used only +5V power, and added clock-generator and bus-controller circuits on the chip. It was binary compatible with the 8080, but required less supporting hardware, allowing simpler and less expensive microcomputer systems to be built. These were the first Intel chips to be produced without input from Faggin.
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086, a 16-bit processor which gave rise to the x86 architecture. It did not contain floating-point instructions. In 1980 the company released the 8087, the first math co-processor they'd developed.
Next came the 8088, the processor for the first IBM PC. Even though IBM engineers at the time wanted to use the Motorola 68000 in the PC, the company already had the rights to produce the 8086 line (by trading rights to Intel for its bubble memory) and it could use modified 8085-type components (and 68000-style components were much more scarce).
Moto 68000
In 1979, Motorola introduced the 68000. With internal 32-bit registers and a 32-bit address space, its bus was still 16 bits due to hardware prices. Originally designed for embedded applications, its DEC PDP-11 and VAX-inspired design meant that it eventually found its way into the Apple Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, and even the original Sun Microsystems® and Silicon Graphics computers.
Where is the 68000 now?
As the 68000 was reaching the end of its life, Motorola entered into the Apple-IBM-Motorola "AIM" alliance which would eventually produce the first PowerPC® chips. Motorola ceased production of the 68000 in 2000.
The dawning of the age of RISC: The 1980s
Advances in process ushered in the "more is more" era of VLSI, leading to true 32-bit architectures. At the same time, the "less is more" RISC philosophy allowed for greater performance. When combined, VLSI and RISC produced chips with awesome capabilities, giving rise to the UNIX® workstation market.
The decade opened with intriguing contemporaneous independent projects at Berkeley and Stanford -- RISC and MIPS. Even with the new RISC families, an industry shakeout commonly referred to as "the microprocessor wars," would mean that we left the 1980s with fewer major micro manufacturers than we had coming in.
By the end of the decade, prices had dropped substantially, so that record numbers of households and schools had access to more computers than ever before.
RISC and MIPS and POWER
RISC, too, started in many places at once, and was antedated by some of the examples already cited (see the sidebar, The evolution of RISC).
Berkeley RISC
In 1980, the University of California at Berkeley started something it called the RISC Project (in fact, the professors leading the project, David Patterson and Carlo H. Sequin, are credited with coining the term "RISC").
The project emphasized pipelining and the use of register windows: by 1982, they had delivered their first processor, called the RISC-I. With only 44KB transistors (compared with about 100KB in most contemporary processors) and only 32 instructions, it outperformed any other single chip design in existence.
MIPS
Meanwhile, in 1981, and just across the San Francisco Bay from Berkeley, John Hennessy and a team at Stanford University started building what would become the first MIPS processor. They wanted to use deep instruction pipelines -- a difficult-to-implement practice -- to increase performance. A major obstacle to pipelining was that it required the hard-to-set-up interlocks in place to ascertain that multiple-clock-cycle instructions would stop the pipeline from loading data until the instruction was completed. The MIPS design settled on a relatively simple demand to eliminate interlocking -- all instructions must take only one clock cycle. This was a potentially useful alteration in the RISC philosophy.
POWER
Also contemporaneously and independently, IBM continued to work on RISC as well. 1974's 801 project turned into Project America and Project Cheetah. Project Cheetah would become the first workstation to use a RISC chip, in 1986: the PC/RT, which used the 801-inspired ROMP chip.
Where are they now?
By 1983, the RISC Project at Berkeley had produced the RISC-II which contained 39 instructions and ran more than 3 times as fast as the RISC-I. Sun Microsystem's SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) chip design is heavily influenced by the minimalist RISC Project designs of the RISC-I and -II.
Professors Patterson and Sequin are both still at Berkeley.
MIPS was used in Silicon Graphics workstations for years. Although SGI's newest offerings now use Intel processors, MIPS is very popular in embedded applications.
Professor Hennessy left Stanford in 1984 to form MIPS Computers. The company's commercial 32-bit designs implemented the interlocks in hardware. MIPS was purchased by Silicon Graphics, Inc. in 1992, and was spun off as MIPS Technologies, Inc. in 1998. John Hennessy is currently Stanford University's tenth President.
IBM's Cheetah project, which developed into the PC-RT's ROMP, was a bit of a flop, but Project America was in prototype by 1985 and would, in 1990, become RISC System/6000. Its processor would be renamed the POWER1.
RISC was quickly adopted in the industry, and today remains the most popular architecture for processors. During the 1980s, several additional RISC families were launched. Aside from those already mentioned above were:
• CRISP (C Reduced Instruction Set Processor) from AT&T Bell Labs.
• The Motorola 88000 family.
• Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha's (the world's first single-chip 64-bit microprocessor).
• HP Precision Architecture (HP PA-RISC).
32-bitness
The early 1980s also saw the first 32-bit chips arrive in droves.
BELLMAC-32A
AT&T's Computer Systems division opened its doors in 1980, and by 1981 it had introduced the world's first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor, the AT&T Bell Labs' BELLMAC-32A, (it was renamed the WE 32000 after the break-up in 1984). There were two subsequent generations, the WE 32100 and WE 32200, which were used in:
• the 3B5 and 3B15 minicomputers
• the 3B2, the world's first desktop supermicrocomputer
• the "Companion", the world's first 32-bit laptop computer
• "Alexander", the world's first book-sized supermicrocomputer
All ran the original Bell Labs UNIX.
Motorola 68010 (and friends)
Motorola had already introduced the MC 68000, which had a 32-bit architecture internally, but a 16-bit pinout externally. It introduced its pure 32-bit microprocessors, the MC 68010, 68012, and 68020 by 1985 or thereabouts, and began to work on a 32-bit family of RISC processors, named 88000.
NS 32032
In 1983, National Semiconductor introduced a 16-bit pinout, 32-bit internal microprocessor called the NS 16032, the full 32-bit NS 32032, and a line of 32-bit industrial OEM microcomputers. Sequent also introduced the first symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) server-class computer using the NS 32032.
Intel entered the 32-bit world in 1981, same as the AT&T BELLMAC chips, with the ill-fated 432. It was a three-chip design rather than a single-chip implementation, and it didn't go anywhere. In 1986, its 32-bit i386 became its first single-chip 32-bit offering, closely followed by the 486 in 1989.
Where are they now?
AT&T closed its Computer Systems division in December, 1995. The company shifted to MIPS and Intel chips.
Sequent's SMP machine faded away, and that company also switched to Intel microprocessors.
The Motorola 88000 design wasn't commercially available until 1990, and was cancelled soon after in favor of Motorola's deal with IBM and Apple to create the first PowerPC.
ARM is born
In 1983, Acorn Computers Ltd. was looking for a processor. Some say that Acorn was refused access to Intel's upcoming 80286 chip, others say that Acorn rejected both the Intel 286 and the Motorola MC 68000 as being not powerful enough. In any case, the company decided to develop its own processor called the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM. The company had development samples, known as the ARM I by 1985; production models (ARM II) were ready by the following year. The original ARM chip contained only 30,000 transistors.
Where are they now?
Acorn Computers was taken over by Olivetti in 1985, and after a few more shakeups, was purchased by Broadcom in 2000.
However, the company's ARM architecture today accounts for approximately 75% of all 32-bit embedded processors. The most successful implementation has been the ARM7TDMI with hundreds of millions sold in cellular phones. The Digital/ARM combo StrongARM is the basis for the Intel XScale processor.
A new hope: The 1990s
The 1990s dawned just a few months after most of the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe had rolled over and played dead; by 1991, the Cold War was officially at an end. Those high-end UNIX workstation vendors who were left standing after the "microprocessor wars" scrambled to find new, non-military markets for their wares. Luckily, the commercialization and broad adoption of the Internet in the 1990s neatly stepped in to fill the gap. For at the beginning of that decade, you couldn't run an Internet server or even properly connect to the Internet on anything but UNIX. A side effect of this was that a large number of new people were introduced to the open-standards Free Software that ran the Internet.
The popularization of the Internet led to higher desktop sales as well, fueling growth in that sector. Throughout the 1990s, desktop chipmakers participated in a mad speed race to keep up with "Moore's Law" -- often neglecting other areas of their chips' architecture to pursue elusive clock rate milestones.
32-bitness, so coveted in the 1980s, gave way to 64-bitness. The first high-end UNIX processors would blazon the 64-bit trail at the very start of the 1990s, and by the time of this writing, most desktop systems had joined them. The POWER™ and PowerPC family, introduced in 1990, had a 64-bit ISA from the beginning.
Power Architecture
IBM introduced the POWER architecture -- a multichip RISC design -- in early 1990. By the next year, the first single-chip PowerPC derivatives (the product of the Apple-IBM-Motorola AIM alliance) were available as a high-volume alternative to the predominating CISC desktop structure.
Where is Power Architecture technology now?
Power Architecture technology is popular in all markets, from the high-end UNIX eServer™ to embedded systems. When used on the desktop, it is often known as the Apple G5. The cooperative climate of the original AIM alliance has been expanded into an organization by name of Power.org.
DEC Alpha
In 1992, DEC introduced the Alpha 21064 at a speed of 200MHz. The superscalar, superpipelined 64-bit processor design was pure RISC, but it outperformed the other chips and was referred to by DEC as the world's fastest processor. (When the Pentium was launched the next spring, it only ran at 66MHz.) The Alpha too was intended to be used in both UNIX server/workstations as well as desktop variants.
The primary contribution of the Alpha design to microprocessor history was not in its architecture -- that was pure RISC. The Alpha's performance was due to excellent implementation. The microchip design process is dominated by automated logic synthesis flows. To deal with the extremely complex VAX architecture, Digital designers applied human, individually crafted attention to circuit design. When this was applied to a simple, clean architecture like the RISC-based Alpha, the combination gleaned the highest possible performance.
Where is Alpha now?
Sadly, the very thing that led Alpha down the primrose path -- hand-tuned circuits -- would prove to be its undoing. As DEC was going out of business, , its chip division, Digital Semiconductor, was sold to Intel as part of a legal settlement. Intel used the StrongARM (a joint project of DEC and ARM) to replace its i860 and i960 line of RISC processors.
The Clone Wars begin
In March 1991, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced its clone of Intel's i386DX. It ran at clock speeds of up to 40MHz. This set a precedent for AMD -- its goal was not just cheaper chips that would run code intended for Intel-based systems, but chips that would also outperform the competition. AMD chips are RISC designs internally; they convert the Intel instructions to appropriate internal operations before execution.
Also in 1991, litigation between AMD and Intel was finally settled in favor of AMD, leading to a flood of clonemakers -- among them, Cyrix, NexGen, and others -- few of which would survive into the next decade.
In the desktop space, Moore's Law turned into a Sisyphean treadmill as makers chased elusive clock speed milestones.
Where are they now?
Well, of course, AMD is still standing. In fact, its latest designs are being cloned by Intel!
Cyrix was acquired by National Semiconductor in 1997, and sold to VIA in 1999. The acquisition turned VIA into a processor player, where it had mainly offered core logic chipsets before. The company today specializes in high-performance, low-power chips for the mobile market.
Where are we now? The 2000s
The 2000s have come along and it's too early yet to say what will have happened by decade's end. As Federico Faggin said, the exponential progression of Moore's law cannot continue forever. As the day nears when process will be measured in Angstroms instead of nanometers, researchers are furiously experimenting with layout, materials, concepts, and process. After all, today's microprocessors are based on the same architecture and processes that were first invented 30 years ago -- something has definitely got to give.
We are not at the end of the decade yet, but from where we sit at its mid-way point, the major players are few, and can easily be arranged on a pretty small scorecard:
In high-end UNIX, DEC has phased out Alpha, SGI uses Intel, and Sun is planning to outsource production of SPARC to Fujitsu (IBM continues to make its own chips). RISC is still king, but its MIPS and ARM variants are found mostly in embedded systems.
In 64-bit desktop computing, the DEC Alpha is being phased out, and HP just ended its Itanium alliance with Intel. The AMD 64 (and its clones) and the IBM PowerPC are the major players, while in the desktop arena as a whole, Intel, AMD, and VIA make x86-compatible processors along RISC lines.
As for 2005 and beyond, the second half of the decade is sure to bring as many surprises as the first. Maybe you have ideas as to what they might be! Take this month's chips challenge, and let us know your predictions for chips in 2005.
The history of microprocessors is a robust topic -- this article hasn't covered everything, and we apologize for any omissions. Please e-mail the Power Architecture editors with any corrections or additions to the information provided here.
The history of the micro from the vacuum tube to today's dual-core multithreaded madness
The evolution of the modern microprocessor is one of many surprising twists and turns. Who invented the first micro? Who had the first 32-bit single-chip design? You might be surprised at the answers. This article shows the defining decisions that brought the contemporary microprocessor to its present-day configuration.
At the dawn of the 19th century, Benjamin Franklin's discovery of the principles of electricity were still fairly new, and practical applications of his discoveries were few -- the most notable exception being the lightning rod, which was invented independently by two different people in two different places. Independent contemporaneous (and not so contemporaneous) discovery would remain a recurring theme in electronics.
So it was with the invention of the vacuum tube -- invented by Fleming, who was investigating the Effect named for and discovered by Edison; it was refined four years later by de Forest (but is now rumored to have been invented 20 years prior by Tesla). So it was with the transistor: Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen were awarded the Nobel Prize for turning de Forest's triode into a solid state device -- but they were not awarded a patent, because of 20-year-prior art by Lilienfeld. So it was with the integrated circuit (or IC) for which Jack Kilby was awarded a Nobel Prize, but which was contemporaneously developed by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor (who got the patent). And so it was, indeed, with the microprocessor.
Before the flood: The 1960s
Just a scant few years after the first laboratory integrated circuits, Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (although at almost the same time as one from Texas Instruments).
Already at the start of the decade, process that would last until the present day was available: commercial ICs made in the planar process were available from both Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments by 1961, and TTL (transistor-transistor logic) circuits appeared commercially in 1962. By 1968, CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) hit the market. There is no doubt but that technology, design, and process were rapidly evolving.
Observing this trend, Fairchild Semiconductor's director of Research & Development Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that the density of elements in ICs was doubling annually, and predicted that the trend would continue for the next ten years. With certain amendments, this came to be known as Moore's Law.
The first ICs contained just a few transistors per wafer; by the dawn of the 1970s, production techniques allowed for thousands of transistors per wafer. It was only a matter of time before someone would use this capacity to put an entire computer on a chip, and several someones, indeed, did just that.
Development explosion: The 1970s
The idea of a computer on a single chip had been described in the literature as far back as 1952 (see Resources), and more articles like this began to appear as the 1970s dawned. Finally, process had caught up to thinking, and the computer on a chip was made possible. The air was electric with the possibility.
Once the feat had been established, the rest of the decade saw a proliferation of companies old and new getting into the semiconductor business, as well as the first personal computers, the first arcade games, and even the first home video game systems -- thus spreading consumer contact with electronics, and paving the way for continued rapid growth in the 1980s.
At the beginning of the 1970s, microprocessors had not yet been introduced. By the end of the decade, a saturated market led to price wars, and many processors were already 16-bit.
The first three
At the time of this writing, three groups lay claim for having been the first to put a computer in a chip: The Central Air Data Computer (CADC), the Intel® 4004, and the Texas Instruments TMS 1000.
The CADC system was completed for the Navy's "TomCat" fighter jets in 1970. It is often discounted because it was a chip set and not a CPU. The TI TMS 1000 was first to market in calculator form, but not in stand-alone form -- that distinction goes to the Intel 4004, which is just one of the reasons it is often cited as the first (incidentally, it too was just one in a chipset of four).
In truth, it does not matter who was first. As with the lightning rod, the light bulb, radio -- and so many other innovations before and after -- it suffices to say it was in the aether, it was inevitable, its time was come.
Where are they now?
CADC spent 20 years in top-secret, cold-war-era mothballs until finally being declassified in 1998. Thus, even if it was the first, it has remained under most people's radar even today, and did not have a chance to influence other early microprocessor design.
The Intel 4004 had a short and mostly uneventful history, to be superseded by the 8008 and other early Intel chips (see below).
In 1973, Texas Instrument's Gary Boone was awarded U.S. Patent No. 3,757,306 for the single-chip microprocessor architecture. The chip was finally marketed in stand-alone form in 1974, for the low, low (bulk) price of US$2 apiece. In 1978, a special version of the TI TMS 1000 was the brains of the educational "Speak and Spell" toy which E.T. jerry-rigged to phone home.
Early Intel: 4004, 8008, and 8080
Intel released its single 4-bit all-purpose chip, the Intel 4004, in November 1971. It had a clock speed of 108KHz and 2,300 transistors with ports for ROM, RAM, and I/O. Originally designed for use in a calculator, Intel had to renegotiate its contract to be able to market it as a stand-alone processor. Its ISA had been inspired by the DEC PDP-8.
The Intel 8008 was introduced in April 1972, and didn't make much of a splash, being more or less an 8-bit 4004. Its primary claim to fame is that its ISA -- provided by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC), who had commissioned the chip -- was to form the basis for the 8080, as well as for the later 8086 (and hence the x86) architecture. Lesser-known Intels from this time include the nearly forgotten 4040, which added logical and compare instructions to the 4004, and the ill-fated 32-bit Intel 432.
Intel put itself back on the map with the 8080, which used the same instruction set as the earlier 8008 and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor. The 8080 had a 16-bit address bus and an 8-bit data bus, a 16-bit stack pointer to memory which replaced the 8-level internal stack of the 8008, and a 16-bit program counter. It also contained 256 I/O ports, so I/O devices could be connected without taking away or interfering with the addressing space. It also possessed a signal pin that allowed the stack to occupy a separate bank of memory. These features are what made this a truly modern microprocessor. It was used in the Altair 8800, one of the first renowned personal computers (other claimants to that title include the 1963 MIT Lincoln Labs' 12-bit LINC/Laboratory Instruments Computer built with DEC components and DEC's own 1965 PDP-8).
Although the 4004 had been the company's first, it was really the 8080 that clinched its future -- this was immediately apparent, and in fact in 1974 the company changed its phone number so that the last four digits would be 8080.
Where is Intel now?
Last time we checked, Intel was still around.
RCA 1802
In 1974, RCA released the 1802 8-bit processor with a different architecture than other 8-bit processors. It had a register file of 16 registers of 16 bits each and using the SEP instruction, you could select any of the registers to be the program counter. Using the SEP instruction, you could choose any of the registers to be the index register. It did not have standard subroutine CALL immediate and RET instructions, though they could be emulated.
A few commonly used subroutines could be called quickly by keeping their address in one of the 16 registers. Before a subroutine returned, it jumped to the location immediately preceding its entry point so that after the RET instruction returned control to the caller, the register would be pointing to the right value for next time. An interesting variation was to have two or more subroutines in a ring so that they were called in round-robin order.
The RCA 1802 is considered one of the first RISC chips although others (notably Seymore Cray -- see the sidebar, The evolution of RISC -- had used concepts already).
Where is it now?
Sadly, the RCA chip was a spectacular market failure due to its slow clock cycle speed. But it could be fabricated to be radiation resistant, so it was used on the Voyager 1, Viking, and Galileo space probes (where rapidly executed commands aren't a necessity).
IBM 801
In 1975, IBM® produced some of the earliest efforts to build a microprocessor based on RISC design principles (although it wasn't called RISC yet -- see the sidebar, The evolution of RISC). Initially a research effort led by John Cocke (the father of RISC), many say that the IBM 801 was named after the address of the building where the chip was designed -- but we suspect that the IBM systems already numbered 601 and 701 had at least something to do with it also.
Where is the 801 now?
The 801 chip family never saw mainstream use, and was primarily used in other IBM hardware. Even though the 801 never went far, it did inspire further work which would converge, fifteen years later, to produce the Power Architecture™ family.
Moto 6800
In 1975, Motorola introduced the 6800, a chip with 78 instructions and probably the first microprocessor with an index register.
Two things are of significance here. One is the use of the index register which is a processor register (a small amount of fast computer memory that's used to speed the execution of programs by providing quick access to commonly used values). The index register can modify operand addresses during the run of a program, typically while doing vector/array operations. Before the invention of index registers and without indirect addressing, array operations had to be performed either by linearly repeating program code for each array element or by using self-modifying code techniques. Both of these methods harbor significant disadvantages when it comes to program flexibility and maintenance and more importantly, they are wasteful when it comes to using up scarce computer memory.
Where is the 6800 now?
Many Motorola stand-alone processors and microcontrollers trace their lineage to the 6800, including the popular and powerful 6809 of 1979
MOS 6502
Soon after Motorola released the 6800, the company's design team quit en masse and formed their own company, MOS Technology. They quickly developed the MOS 6501, a completely new design that was nevertheless pin-compatible with the 6800. Motorola sued, and MOS agreed to halt production. The company then released the MOS 6502, which differed from the 6501 only in the pin-out arrangement.
The MOS 6502 was released in September 1975, and it sold for US$25 per unit. At the time, the Intel 8080 and the Motorola 6800 were selling for US$179. Many people thought this must be some sort of scam. Eventually, Intel and Motorola dropped their prices to US$79. This had the effect of legitimizing the MOS 6502, and they began selling by the hundreds. The 6502 was a staple in the Apple® II and various Commodore and Atari computers.
Where is the MOS 6502 now?
Many of the original MOS 6502 still have loving homes today, in the hands of collectors (or even the original owners) of machines like the Atari 2600 video game console, Apple II family of computers, the first Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64 -- all of which used the 6502. MOS 6502 processors are still being manufactured today for use in embedded systems.
AMD clones the 8080
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was founded in 1969 by Jerry Sanders. Like so many of the people who were influential in the early days of the microprocessor (including the founders of Intel), Sanders came from Fairchild Semiconductor. AMD's business was not the creation of new products; it concentrated on making higher quality versions of existing products under license. For example, all of its products met MILSPEC requirements no matter what the end market was. In 1975, it began selling reverse-engineered clones of the Intel 8080 processor.
Where is AMD now?
In the 1980s, first licensing agreements -- and then legal disputes -- with Intel, eventually led to court validation of clean-room reverse engineering and opened the 1990s floodgates to many clone corps.
Fairchild F8
The 8-bit Fairchild F8 (also known as the 3850) microcontroller was Fairchild's first processor. It had no stack pointer, no program counter, no address bus. It did have 64 registers (the first 8 of which could be accessed directly) and 64 bytes of "scratchpad" RAM. The first F8s were multichip designs (usually 2-chip, with the second being ROM). The F8 was released in a single-chip implementation (the Mostek 3870) in 1977.
Where is it now?
The F8 was used in the company's Channel F Fairchild Video Entertainment System in 1976. By the end of the decade, Fairchild played mostly in niche markets, including the "hardened" IC market for military and space applications, and in Cray supercomputers. Fairchild was acquired by National Semiconductor in the 1980s, and spun off again as an independent company in 1997.
16 bits, two contenders
The first multi-chip 16-bit microprocessor was introduced by either Digital Equipment Corporation in its LSI-11 OEM board set and its packaged PDP 11/03 minicomputer, or by Fairchild Semiconductor with its MicroFlame 9440, both released in 1975. The first single-chip 16-bit microprocessor was the 1976 TI TMS 9900, which was also compatible with the TI 990 line of minicomputers and was used in the TM 990 line of OEM microcomputer boards.
Where are they now?
The DEC chipset later gave way to the 32-bit DEC VAX product line, which was replaced by the Alpha family, which was discontinued in 2004.
The aptly named Fairchild MicroFlame ran hot and was never chosen by a major computer manufacturer, so it faded out of existence.
The TI TMS 9900 had a strong beginning, but was packaged in a large (for the time) ceramic 64-pin package which pushed the cost out of range compared with the much cheaper 8-bit Intel 8080 and 8085. In March 1982, TI decided to start ramping down TMS 9900 production, and go into the DSP business instead. TI is still in the chip business today, and in 2004 it came out with a nifty TV tuner chip for cell phones.
Zilog Z-80
Probably the most popular microprocessor of all time, the Zilog Z-80 was designed by Frederico Faggin after he left Intel, and it was released in July 1976. Faggin had designed or led the design teams for all of Intel's early processors: the 4004, the 8008, and particularly, the revolutionary 8080.
This 8-bit microprocessor was binary compatible with the 8080 and surprisingly, is still in widespread use today in many embedded applications. Faggin intended it to be an improved version of the 8080 and according to popular opinion, it was. It could execute all of the 8080 operating codes as well as 80 more instructions (including 1-, 4-, 8-, and 16-bit operations, block I/O, block move, and so on). Because it contained two sets of switchable data registers, it supported fast operating system or interrupt context switches.
The thing that really made it popular though, was its memory interface. Since the CPU generated its own RAM refresh signals, it provided lower system costs and made it easier to design a system around. When coupled with its 8080 compatibility and its support for the first standardized microprocessor operating system CP/M, the cost and enhanced capabilities made this the choice chip for many designers (including TI; it was the brains of the TRS-80 Model 1).
The Z-80 featured many undocumented instructions that were in some cases a by-product of early designs (which did not trap invalid op codes, but tried to interpret them as best they could); in other cases the chip area near the edge was used for added instructions, but fabrication methods of the day made the failure rate high. Instructions that often failed were just not documented, so the chip yield could be increased. Later fabrication made these more reliable.
Where are they now?
In 1979, Zilog announced the 16-bit Z8000. Sporting another great design with a stack pointer and both a user and a supervisor mode, this chip never really took off. The main reason: Zilog was a small company, it struggled with support, and never managed to bank enough to stay around and outlast the competition.
However, Zilog is not only still making microcontrollers, it is still making Z-80 microcontrollers. In all, more than one billion Z-80s have been made over the years -- a proud testament to Faggin's superb design.
Faggin is currently Chairman of the Board & Co-Founder of Synaptics, a "user interface solutions" company in the Silicon Valley.
Intel 8085 and 8086
In 1976, Intel updated the 8080 design with the 8085 by adding two instructions to enable/disable three added interrupt pins (and the serial I/O pins). They also simplified hardware so that it used only +5V power, and added clock-generator and bus-controller circuits on the chip. It was binary compatible with the 8080, but required less supporting hardware, allowing simpler and less expensive microcomputer systems to be built. These were the first Intel chips to be produced without input from Faggin.
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086, a 16-bit processor which gave rise to the x86 architecture. It did not contain floating-point instructions. In 1980 the company released the 8087, the first math co-processor they'd developed.
Next came the 8088, the processor for the first IBM PC. Even though IBM engineers at the time wanted to use the Motorola 68000 in the PC, the company already had the rights to produce the 8086 line (by trading rights to Intel for its bubble memory) and it could use modified 8085-type components (and 68000-style components were much more scarce).
Moto 68000
In 1979, Motorola introduced the 68000. With internal 32-bit registers and a 32-bit address space, its bus was still 16 bits due to hardware prices. Originally designed for embedded applications, its DEC PDP-11 and VAX-inspired design meant that it eventually found its way into the Apple Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, and even the original Sun Microsystems® and Silicon Graphics computers.
Where is the 68000 now?
As the 68000 was reaching the end of its life, Motorola entered into the Apple-IBM-Motorola "AIM" alliance which would eventually produce the first PowerPC® chips. Motorola ceased production of the 68000 in 2000.
The dawning of the age of RISC: The 1980s
Advances in process ushered in the "more is more" era of VLSI, leading to true 32-bit architectures. At the same time, the "less is more" RISC philosophy allowed for greater performance. When combined, VLSI and RISC produced chips with awesome capabilities, giving rise to the UNIX® workstation market.
The decade opened with intriguing contemporaneous independent projects at Berkeley and Stanford -- RISC and MIPS. Even with the new RISC families, an industry shakeout commonly referred to as "the microprocessor wars," would mean that we left the 1980s with fewer major micro manufacturers than we had coming in.
By the end of the decade, prices had dropped substantially, so that record numbers of households and schools had access to more computers than ever before.
RISC and MIPS and POWER
RISC, too, started in many places at once, and was antedated by some of the examples already cited (see the sidebar, The evolution of RISC).
Berkeley RISC
In 1980, the University of California at Berkeley started something it called the RISC Project (in fact, the professors leading the project, David Patterson and Carlo H. Sequin, are credited with coining the term "RISC").
The project emphasized pipelining and the use of register windows: by 1982, they had delivered their first processor, called the RISC-I. With only 44KB transistors (compared with about 100KB in most contemporary processors) and only 32 instructions, it outperformed any other single chip design in existence.
MIPS
Meanwhile, in 1981, and just across the San Francisco Bay from Berkeley, John Hennessy and a team at Stanford University started building what would become the first MIPS processor. They wanted to use deep instruction pipelines -- a difficult-to-implement practice -- to increase performance. A major obstacle to pipelining was that it required the hard-to-set-up interlocks in place to ascertain that multiple-clock-cycle instructions would stop the pipeline from loading data until the instruction was completed. The MIPS design settled on a relatively simple demand to eliminate interlocking -- all instructions must take only one clock cycle. This was a potentially useful alteration in the RISC philosophy.
POWER
Also contemporaneously and independently, IBM continued to work on RISC as well. 1974's 801 project turned into Project America and Project Cheetah. Project Cheetah would become the first workstation to use a RISC chip, in 1986: the PC/RT, which used the 801-inspired ROMP chip.
Where are they now?
By 1983, the RISC Project at Berkeley had produced the RISC-II which contained 39 instructions and ran more than 3 times as fast as the RISC-I. Sun Microsystem's SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) chip design is heavily influenced by the minimalist RISC Project designs of the RISC-I and -II.
Professors Patterson and Sequin are both still at Berkeley.
MIPS was used in Silicon Graphics workstations for years. Although SGI's newest offerings now use Intel processors, MIPS is very popular in embedded applications.
Professor Hennessy left Stanford in 1984 to form MIPS Computers. The company's commercial 32-bit designs implemented the interlocks in hardware. MIPS was purchased by Silicon Graphics, Inc. in 1992, and was spun off as MIPS Technologies, Inc. in 1998. John Hennessy is currently Stanford University's tenth President.
IBM's Cheetah project, which developed into the PC-RT's ROMP, was a bit of a flop, but Project America was in prototype by 1985 and would, in 1990, become RISC System/6000. Its processor would be renamed the POWER1.
RISC was quickly adopted in the industry, and today remains the most popular architecture for processors. During the 1980s, several additional RISC families were launched. Aside from those already mentioned above were:
• CRISP (C Reduced Instruction Set Processor) from AT&T Bell Labs.
• The Motorola 88000 family.
• Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha's (the world's first single-chip 64-bit microprocessor).
• HP Precision Architecture (HP PA-RISC).
32-bitness
The early 1980s also saw the first 32-bit chips arrive in droves.
BELLMAC-32A
AT&T's Computer Systems division opened its doors in 1980, and by 1981 it had introduced the world's first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor, the AT&T Bell Labs' BELLMAC-32A, (it was renamed the WE 32000 after the break-up in 1984). There were two subsequent generations, the WE 32100 and WE 32200, which were used in:
• the 3B5 and 3B15 minicomputers
• the 3B2, the world's first desktop supermicrocomputer
• the "Companion", the world's first 32-bit laptop computer
• "Alexander", the world's first book-sized supermicrocomputer
All ran the original Bell Labs UNIX.
Motorola 68010 (and friends)
Motorola had already introduced the MC 68000, which had a 32-bit architecture internally, but a 16-bit pinout externally. It introduced its pure 32-bit microprocessors, the MC 68010, 68012, and 68020 by 1985 or thereabouts, and began to work on a 32-bit family of RISC processors, named 88000.
NS 32032
In 1983, National Semiconductor introduced a 16-bit pinout, 32-bit internal microprocessor called the NS 16032, the full 32-bit NS 32032, and a line of 32-bit industrial OEM microcomputers. Sequent also introduced the first symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) server-class computer using the NS 32032.
Intel entered the 32-bit world in 1981, same as the AT&T BELLMAC chips, with the ill-fated 432. It was a three-chip design rather than a single-chip implementation, and it didn't go anywhere. In 1986, its 32-bit i386 became its first single-chip 32-bit offering, closely followed by the 486 in 1989.
Where are they now?
AT&T closed its Computer Systems division in December, 1995. The company shifted to MIPS and Intel chips.
Sequent's SMP machine faded away, and that company also switched to Intel microprocessors.
The Motorola 88000 design wasn't commercially available until 1990, and was cancelled soon after in favor of Motorola's deal with IBM and Apple to create the first PowerPC.
ARM is born
In 1983, Acorn Computers Ltd. was looking for a processor. Some say that Acorn was refused access to Intel's upcoming 80286 chip, others say that Acorn rejected both the Intel 286 and the Motorola MC 68000 as being not powerful enough. In any case, the company decided to develop its own processor called the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM. The company had development samples, known as the ARM I by 1985; production models (ARM II) were ready by the following year. The original ARM chip contained only 30,000 transistors.
Where are they now?
Acorn Computers was taken over by Olivetti in 1985, and after a few more shakeups, was purchased by Broadcom in 2000.
However, the company's ARM architecture today accounts for approximately 75% of all 32-bit embedded processors. The most successful implementation has been the ARM7TDMI with hundreds of millions sold in cellular phones. The Digital/ARM combo StrongARM is the basis for the Intel XScale processor.
A new hope: The 1990s
The 1990s dawned just a few months after most of the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe had rolled over and played dead; by 1991, the Cold War was officially at an end. Those high-end UNIX workstation vendors who were left standing after the "microprocessor wars" scrambled to find new, non-military markets for their wares. Luckily, the commercialization and broad adoption of the Internet in the 1990s neatly stepped in to fill the gap. For at the beginning of that decade, you couldn't run an Internet server or even properly connect to the Internet on anything but UNIX. A side effect of this was that a large number of new people were introduced to the open-standards Free Software that ran the Internet.
The popularization of the Internet led to higher desktop sales as well, fueling growth in that sector. Throughout the 1990s, desktop chipmakers participated in a mad speed race to keep up with "Moore's Law" -- often neglecting other areas of their chips' architecture to pursue elusive clock rate milestones.
32-bitness, so coveted in the 1980s, gave way to 64-bitness. The first high-end UNIX processors would blazon the 64-bit trail at the very start of the 1990s, and by the time of this writing, most desktop systems had joined them. The POWER™ and PowerPC family, introduced in 1990, had a 64-bit ISA from the beginning.
Power Architecture
IBM introduced the POWER architecture -- a multichip RISC design -- in early 1990. By the next year, the first single-chip PowerPC derivatives (the product of the Apple-IBM-Motorola AIM alliance) were available as a high-volume alternative to the predominating CISC desktop structure.
Where is Power Architecture technology now?
Power Architecture technology is popular in all markets, from the high-end UNIX eServer™ to embedded systems. When used on the desktop, it is often known as the Apple G5. The cooperative climate of the original AIM alliance has been expanded into an organization by name of Power.org.
DEC Alpha
In 1992, DEC introduced the Alpha 21064 at a speed of 200MHz. The superscalar, superpipelined 64-bit processor design was pure RISC, but it outperformed the other chips and was referred to by DEC as the world's fastest processor. (When the Pentium was launched the next spring, it only ran at 66MHz.) The Alpha too was intended to be used in both UNIX server/workstations as well as desktop variants.
The primary contribution of the Alpha design to microprocessor history was not in its architecture -- that was pure RISC. The Alpha's performance was due to excellent implementation. The microchip design process is dominated by automated logic synthesis flows. To deal with the extremely complex VAX architecture, Digital designers applied human, individually crafted attention to circuit design. When this was applied to a simple, clean architecture like the RISC-based Alpha, the combination gleaned the highest possible performance.
Where is Alpha now?
Sadly, the very thing that led Alpha down the primrose path -- hand-tuned circuits -- would prove to be its undoing. As DEC was going out of business, , its chip division, Digital Semiconductor, was sold to Intel as part of a legal settlement. Intel used the StrongARM (a joint project of DEC and ARM) to replace its i860 and i960 line of RISC processors.
The Clone Wars begin
In March 1991, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced its clone of Intel's i386DX. It ran at clock speeds of up to 40MHz. This set a precedent for AMD -- its goal was not just cheaper chips that would run code intended for Intel-based systems, but chips that would also outperform the competition. AMD chips are RISC designs internally; they convert the Intel instructions to appropriate internal operations before execution.
Also in 1991, litigation between AMD and Intel was finally settled in favor of AMD, leading to a flood of clonemakers -- among them, Cyrix, NexGen, and others -- few of which would survive into the next decade.
In the desktop space, Moore's Law turned into a Sisyphean treadmill as makers chased elusive clock speed milestones.
Where are they now?
Well, of course, AMD is still standing. In fact, its latest designs are being cloned by Intel!
Cyrix was acquired by National Semiconductor in 1997, and sold to VIA in 1999. The acquisition turned VIA into a processor player, where it had mainly offered core logic chipsets before. The company today specializes in high-performance, low-power chips for the mobile market.
Where are we now? The 2000s
The 2000s have come along and it's too early yet to say what will have happened by decade's end. As Federico Faggin said, the exponential progression of Moore's law cannot continue forever. As the day nears when process will be measured in Angstroms instead of nanometers, researchers are furiously experimenting with layout, materials, concepts, and process. After all, today's microprocessors are based on the same architecture and processes that were first invented 30 years ago -- something has definitely got to give.
We are not at the end of the decade yet, but from where we sit at its mid-way point, the major players are few, and can easily be arranged on a pretty small scorecard:
In high-end UNIX, DEC has phased out Alpha, SGI uses Intel, and Sun is planning to outsource production of SPARC to Fujitsu (IBM continues to make its own chips). RISC is still king, but its MIPS and ARM variants are found mostly in embedded systems.
In 64-bit desktop computing, the DEC Alpha is being phased out, and HP just ended its Itanium alliance with Intel. The AMD 64 (and its clones) and the IBM PowerPC are the major players, while in the desktop arena as a whole, Intel, AMD, and VIA make x86-compatible processors along RISC lines.
As for 2005 and beyond, the second half of the decade is sure to bring as many surprises as the first. Maybe you have ideas as to what they might be! Take this month's chips challenge, and let us know your predictions for chips in 2005.
The history of microprocessors is a robust topic -- this article hasn't covered everything, and we apologize for any omissions. Please e-mail the Power Architecture editors with any corrections or additions to the information provided here.
All CPU Charts 2008
CPU Charts offer the most comprehensive x86 processor comparison on the Internet. The 2008 edition includes as many as 91 AMD and Intel desktop processors, which we tested across 35 individual benchmarks under Windows Vista. The benchmarks include industry standard software as well as popular workloads across multiple application categories, allowing you to find the CPU that meets your requirements (see benchmark details below the charts). The Charts are also a valuable tool if you want to check how your computer stacks up against current hardware. The 2008 charts include three different processor generations, starting with AMD's Socket 939 Athlons and Semprons, and including all Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors that were released for Socket 775. Intel Core 2 Quad | ||||||
| TYPE | CACHE | FSB | PRICE | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz fan | 8MB | 1066MHz | $209.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz fan | 8MB | 1066MHz | $289.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz | 8MB | 1066MHz | $189.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz | 8MB | 1066MHz | $259.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz | 4MB | 1333MHz | $229.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q6700 Corsair Dual Channel TWINX 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz E.P.P. Memory (2 x 1024) | $279.99 | |||||
| Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.50GHz fan | 6MB | 1333MHz | $299.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz fan | 12MB | 1333MHz | $349.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.50GHz fan | 6MB | 1333MHz | $299.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz fan | 12MB | 1333MHz | $349.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz fan | 6MB | 1333MHz | $299.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q9650 3.0GHz fan | 12MB | 1333MHz | $574.99 | |||
| Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz | 4MB | 1333MHz | $239.99 | |||
Intel Core 2 Extreme | ||||||
| TYPE | CACHE | FSB | PRICE | |||
| Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Processor - BX80569QX9770 | 3.20GHz | 12MB Cache | $1499.99 | |||
Intel Pentium Dual Core | ||||||
| TYPE | CACHE | FSB | PRICE | |||
| Pentium Dual Core E2180 2.0GHz fan | 1MB | 800MHz | $74.99 | |||
| Pentium Dual Core E2180 2.0GHz | 1MB | 800MHz | $59.99 | |||
| Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.20GHz | 1MB | 800MHz | $69.99 | |||
| Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.50GHz fan | 2MB | 800MHz | $89.99 | |||
Intel Celeron Dual Core | ||||||
| TYPE | CACHE | FSB | PRICE | |||
| Celeron Dual Core E1200 1.60GHz | 512kB | 800MHz | $39.99 | |||
| Celeron Dual Core E1400 2.0GHz fan | 512kB | 800MHz | $59.99 | |||
AMD First to 22 Nm, Challenges Intel
Yorktown Heights (NY) - IBM and its chip development partners, including AMD, made a stunning announcement today, apparently beating Intel in the successful production of the first functional 22 nm SRAM cell. 22 nm processors are still three years out in the future, but IBM’s news is a good sign that chip manufacturer will be able to easily scale to this new level by the end of 2011. It appears that, for the first time in several decades, Intel may have to put some extra time into its research and development efforts to make sure it can keep its manufacturing lead at 22 nm and beyond.
SRAM chips are typically the first semiconductor devices to test a new manufacturing process as a precursor to actual microprocessors. The devices developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) were built in a traditional six-transistor design on a 300 mm wafer and had a memory cell size of just 0.1 μm2, which compares to Intel’s 45 nm SRAM cell size
(the test chip that was used for today’s 45 nm processors) of 0.346 μm2.
A 22 nm chip is two generations out in the future and AMD even has to catch up with Intel’s 45 nm. Intel presented the first 32 nm SRAM cell wafer in September of last year and in fact is not expected to show 22 nm SRAM cells for at least another year, while first 32 nm CPU prototypes could be shown at IDF this week.
IBM said that it is on track with its 32 nm process and promises that it will use a "leading 32 nm high-K metal gate technology that no other company or consortium can match." IBM did not provide further details to substantiate this claim, however, Intel has been using its high-K metal gate technology since the introduction of the 45 nm Penryn processors in late 2007.
While we are far from actual 22 nm and 32 nm products, it is clear that IBM and its partners are turning up the heat on Intel. For the first time in decades, there could actually be an interesting race towards a new production node.
Why would I want to hack windows?
Well, okay stupid question but why would you want to hack windows when there are all those lovely servers to take on? The answer is so simple, it often eludes people altogether. How exactly are you going to take out the server if your workstation is so crippled, you can't even use the run command? Most hacking programs are DOS based. If your friendly Admin has removed MS-DOS access, you're in trouble. You won't be able to run all those nice programs you've collected.
What if they Admin has placed some really horrible backdrop on your machine. You have a great replacement only the display properties aren't available. How do you get round that? Well, that's what this tutorial is all about : Removing restrictions on the local machine so that you can get a shot at the servers or so you can run programs that you otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Are there many restrictions that can be placed on me?
There are a surprising amount of things Admins can do to your computer to make it more restricted. To compromise of course, there are many ways to remove these annoying restrictions, one of which I worked out and removes all the restrictions although it temporarily screws up Internet Explorer's settings. Here is a small list :
Control Panel
Run command
Find command
Missing start menu programs
Fixed backdrop
No DOS access
Removed CDROM and floppy access
All of the above are a real pain in the ass. I'll go through removing these restrictions one by one.
Where do these restrictions come from?
Good question. There are two types of restriction, local and remote. The local restrictions are usually stored in the registry and are fairly easy to get round compared to the remote restrictions. These are restrictions placed on servers and are usually downloaded each time you login. They are VERY hard to get around and most are beyond the scope of this tutorial. However if I do show some of them, I'll point out that they are remote. Sometimes, the remote restrictions are enforced as local ones. This is handy to say the least.
What is the registry?
The registry is a database that Windows uses to store all its information. You can consider it as a directory. Most programs and files are registered here, along with user and system settings. Driver versions and start up programs are also found in here. Without the registry, Windows would be in trouble.
Where is the registry?
The registry consists of two files, user.dat and system.dat . Both are stored in the windows directory. There are backups of both files called user.da0 and system.da0 . If the main two are destroyed, the system copies the new versions over to replace them.
The user.dat file contains user settings. All the different parts of a users settings make up a user profile. It is these profiles that contain the information regarding what restrictions should be enforced. Every user is stored here along with all their access rights. I'll show you how to fool the system into giving you full access the easy way later.
The system.dat file strangely enough contains information about the system. This includes settings for Internet Explorer and other pieces of software such as DirectX, MS Office etc etc.
Can I edit it myself?
Yes you can, using a program called regedit. It is automatically installed and unless your friendly Admin has removed your ability to edit it, you can use this program to set anything in the registry that you want.
NOTE : If you remove the system.dat file ( which you usually have to ) some programs may have problems finding their default settings or refuse to load.
I can't edit the registry. How do I get around this ?
Well the easiest way is to simply remove user.dat and system.dat . When you reset the computer and login, it will come up and tell you that it needs to reset to repair the registry. Ignore this message and use ctrl+alt+del to get it to close without selecting 'ok'. You will see that all the restrictions have been removed. Quickly go to 'Run' and type 'command' without the quotes. This will open a DOS window and for some reason stabilises the system. Windows had a nasty tendency to crash if I didn't open a DOS window for some reason. When you reset the computer, the old registry will kick in and the restrictions will be active again. This isn't so bad because it means you can get a machine back to normal with the minimum of fuss.
I can't get to the registry files to delete them! What now?
Don't panic yet! I'll show you two ways of getting to the files. Normally if the 'Run' command is missing, you're going to have trouble getting to the C:\windows directory which holds those files. Second, you'll find that they are write protected. In the next few sections I'll show you how to get round this.
I have the 'Run' command. What next?
Type "c:\windows\" without the quotes. This will take you to the directory that contains the registry. You will most likely get a message saying that altering the files could be dangerous and could stop windows or other programs from working. Ignore that and select continue or click the hyper link. It will now show you the files.
The evil scum bags have nicked the 'Run' command! Now what?!?
Now you panic........only joking! Most Admins do take out the run command as standard. It stops normal people from going where they shouldn't be. However, we can out smart them here by using the shortcut trick. This trick will get us whatever we need and is just as powerful as the run command, except it is slightly more inconvenient.
So what's this magic shortcut trick then?
This trick is essential to a hackers toolkit. In Windows, you can create a shortcut to just about anything from a folder to a program or even a website! We can use this to our advantage. It also gets round the annoying "Access Denied" messages that explorer likes to give. Right click on the desktop, select new -> shortcut. When it asks what you want to make the shortcut to, type in "c:\windows\" without the quotes and press enter. Hit enter twice more and you will find a nice shortcut on your desktop. Click this twice and it will dump you in the Windows directory. Nice eh?
When I type in the directory in explorer, it returns "Access Denied". Why?
This means that the Admin has told explorer not to accept any requests to that folder, program or website. However for some reason explorer will let you straight through if you make a shortcut to that folder. Security is tight eh?
Okay, I've found the files.....only I can't delete them! Windows says that are protected!
When windows says protected, it means write protected. This is when you can't write or alter a file. This is done for safety reasons. No one wants to accidentally delete the registry. However because we're evil we want to and Windows is stopping us. Don't worry, the protection is lame. Right click on the file and hit properties. Once in, untick the little box next to write protected and click apply then okay. Now try deleting the file. You should find that it goes without any hassle. This works with both registry files.
Right, I've sabotaged the files. What next?
To prevent Windows catching on, just turn off the computer and switch it on again. If it starts up and the registry fixing program starts, you'll have to repeat the procedure. Sometimes it gets you, some times it doesn't. If it keeps coming up, see the next section.
My plans are being thwarted by this stupid registry checker! HELP!
This nasty little program kept catching me out. It is called regcheck and is usually found in the windows or windows\system directory. It is called from an ini file called regcheck.ini or regchck.ini . The name seems to vary from system to system though I can't see any reason why it should. You can alter the .ini file and remove the checking program. The script will complete and still the registry won't have been restored!! Tee hee!
The network is on the Internet but Cyber patrol won't let me access any hacking sites!
Cyber patrol is a royal pain in the ass! However, it is very easy to remove. Press ctrl+alt+del to bring up the task list. Select Cyber Patrol and press enter. Cyber Patrol will now bring up a window asking for a password. Damn, we've been beaten! Not so, press ctrl+alt+del again. This time because Cyber Patrol has ALREADY answered windows, it won't access again. Thus Windows thoughtfully lets us close the program. Bye bye stupid restrictions!
I can't access the disk drive or the CDROM yet I see the Admins doing it! How can I ?
This can be quite annoying. You have lots of stuff on disk or CD but you just can't access them. Why? Because some sod has removed their icons from 'My Computer'. *Sigh* I guess its no go then right? Wrong! Although you can't see the drives, they are still there. Load up ole faithful Internet Explorer and type "D:\" without the quotes and press Enter. It should display a list of the files on the CD. If it comes up with "Access Denied" or " Permission Denied" then simply make a shortcut to it. That way, you will see all the files.
When I try to access A: , the whole machine crashes on me! Why?
This happens when the floppy drive has been disabled in the BIOS ( Basic Input Output System). When you try to access it, Windows will hang and force you to reboot. There is a nice easy way of testing if the drive is open before you crash your machine. When you log in or out, check the light on the drive. If it flashes, the drive is available even if you can't see it in the drive list. If it doesn't flash, the drive has been disabled.
I MUST have floppy access! How do I get it?
The only way to get disk access is to enable the floppy drive in BIOS. This is almost ALWAYS passworded ( if not you're really lucky ). You will need a BIOS cracker and there are loads on the Internet. Check what BIOS the machine has when it boots up ( Award, AmiBIOS etc etc). Get a program for that. Obviously you will somehow need to get it on the Network and there is a cunning way to do that to!
Sneaking files onto a Network
This trick is so simple and yet so effective. Create a document that you could pass off as school work or something. Make sure it has an image file in it. Drag and drop the program file into your document and then place the Image file over it. Save as a .doc file and put it on a disk. Ask your friendly Admin to copy the file for you. Most will just copy it and those that check will just see a document with a piccy. They won't see your program. To get the program back, you need to open the document on your workstation. Drag the program back out and put it on your desktop. This trick works with any file of any type.
Right, I've got the program. What now ?
Run the program. It should give you a password. Write this down and reset the machine. As the machine checks its memory press the 'Del' button. It will then take you into the BIOS where it will prompt for the password. Enter the password that you got from the program. It should let you in. Go into the Basic options and look for floppy drive. Go to the first one. It probably says "Not Installed". Change it so it says "3 1/2 inch floppy". Quit the BIOS and save changes. When it boots up, the floppy drive will be active. Do the reverse to disable it again to stop Admins finding you and changing the password.
How can I get back all those nice programs that they removed from my start menu?
This is also quite easy. There is a program called groupconv.exe . By running this, you'll restore the default star menu along with all the usual programs and accessories. Useful if the Admin has removed some program that you prefer or want to use like Paint brush. You'll need paint to pull off the next trick.
How do I change this cursed background without using the display properties?
Not so useful perhaps but nice to have none the less. No one likes the default backgrounds but Admins tend to remove the ability to change them which is rather upsetting. To pull this off, you need access to paint. Normally this isn't removed. Open your bitmap of choice into paint. From the 'File' menu, select "Set as background". This will set your bitmap as the background. Normally this won't stay the same and will change back next time you login. Still, you get a decent background for the duration of your session.
The 'Net Plug' trick
This is a nice easy way of getting Admin rights. I've taken this from my other tutorial and pasted it here because I don't want to have to type it out again. It is a very useful technique which is why I'm duplicating it here.
This is an attack that I worked out myself before I was given Admin status. It always works and I've yet to see it fail. Make sure you are at a windows 95 or 98 machine. I doubt NT would be fooled by this trick but I don't have any NT machines so I can't test it for you.
Note : Most Admins, believe that they are the most knowledgeable about their system. Many also believe that no one else knows much about computers. In other words, for whatever reasons, they are not too concerned about us i.e. the idiots attacking their servers. Why? Because we aren't good enough. So why waste valuable time configuring security that won't be needed eh? I think I've made my point. They don't see us as a threat. You don't consider a house spider a threat so you don't go round putting up netting to keep them out. Why? You can't be bothered. The same rule applies here. Even if you are a computer genius, play it dumb. Admins like to lecture the uninitiated and would love to appear smarter than you. This is the way you want it. The Admins will think you're a nice guy or gal, totally harmless. This sometimes gives you more leverage because they like you, they'll be willing to help you. They also won't expect you to launch a huge assault on their servers either However sometimes there are some smart people out there who will notice your talents and pull you over to their side. This isn't a bad place to be and can be advantageous later.
First of all, login as yourself. Crash your computer and reset it . Walk over to your favourite admin (the one that hates you most is the best choice ) and apologise for being an idiot but the computer won't let you login and could s/he please come and take a look for you. Mumbling and grumbling they'll come over. The best way to test if it is the machine is for them to login. Of course, they'll log in as an admin or equivalent. They'll check your account and see that your account is fine. They'll tell you to log onto another machine and your account will be okay. They'll now log off and walk off in disgust thinking you are a computer moron. Not so my friend, we've just done them good and proper!
Turn off the computer and pull out the network lead. Turn it back on again. The computer will detect that you aren't on a network and will dump you at a desktop with restrictions of the last user. If this user is the admin then chances are that he or she will have full access to everything including DOS and drive access. Perfect for installing all those really kewl programs you have on a disk in your pocket......
But you aren't on the network now. That's no fun is it? Shove the lead back in and try to access a network drive. This is the bit where you hope the Admins are sloppy or not computer geniuses. Windows by default caches ALL passwords so unless the Admins have told it not to ( a key deep in the registry) then windows will have a nice copy of their password. Go into 'My Computer' and click on a drive. Whoop with glee as Netware logs you in as an Admin. Why does this happen? Well windows still holds the username and password last used to access the drive. You are logged into windows as Admin and windows knows what credentials you last gave to the server. So it supplies them for you. Likewise because you are now authenticated you know have full access to the NDS tree. Not only can you read but you can no write, modify delete etc etc. Much more fun!
Now, this is the bit where you have to be sneaky. You have to make a new account for yourself or upgrade your old one. There are pros and cons to each of your choices. If you alter your existing account and they check it for some reason ( maybe you got locked out? ) they'll notice you have admin rights and shoot you. If you make a new user, it might get found quicker but there is no way to point to you ( it was created by user admin after all tee hee ). The choice is yours. You can always do both.
I still need DOS access to run the programs. How can I get it?
Not all Admins actually remove the ability to run DOS programs, simply because they are needed. It is likely though that the shortcuts and the run command will have been removed. Also I doubt you will be able to shutdown into MS-DOS mode. So how do you call up the window?
Well, we can use our usual shortcut trick. The program that opens the DOS windows is called "command.exe" . To run the program, simply make a shortcut to "command" without the quotes. Double clicking on the shortcut will pull up the MS-DOS prompt.
I've done that but I get "This has been disabled by your system Administrator
If you get this, your Admin has locked out the ability for your user to run DOS programs. Windows is suprisingly tight on DOS access. There is only ONE way that I currently know of ( I'm always searching for new ones though) to bypass this whilst logged in as yourself. To do this, you need a program called "poledit.exe".
What the hell is poledit?
Poledit ( short for policy editor ) is the program used to alter user settings on any given computer. This program edits the user.dat file that we saw earlier. It might have occured to some Admins to block access but I have yet to see it done. Normally registry editing is barred but that seems to be only when using regedit.
Poledit is NOT installed by default. You will find it on the Windows 98 CD in the resource kit folder. The file itself isn't very big and it doesn't need any support files. You can sneak it onto the network by hiding it in a Word file. If you have CDROM access, you could just load it in, or burn the program to CD.
Poledit controls ALL the access rights such as control panel access, display properties, find and run commands, DOS access, shutting down to MSDOS mode etc etc. This tool can give them all back to you!
Okay, I've managed to get poledit onto the network. now what?
Right, run the program. It will bring up a list of users and their policies. There will probably be two policies stored there ( at least). One will be called Admin or similar and the other default. You will be user default. Now, alter the settings to whatever you want and save them. Quit the program and you should find that your access has been increased!
I think it worked but when I logged back onto the network, the old settings kicked in.
This is a pain because it means your settings are stored on the server too. When it logs in, it activates the settings you updated and then overlays the new ones from the server. Annoying huh? Well there isn't all that much you can do about it apart from use the Net Plug trick.
How does it help us here? Well, turn off the computer, unplug the network lead and turn it back on. It will automatically log you in as the last user, i.e yourself. However because there is no server, it will pull its restrictions from the local file ( which we edited of course). Plug the network lead back into the computer and try to access the drives. Even if it asks you to login again ( to access the network ), Windows isn't clever enough to pull off the
What if they Admin has placed some really horrible backdrop on your machine. You have a great replacement only the display properties aren't available. How do you get round that? Well, that's what this tutorial is all about : Removing restrictions on the local machine so that you can get a shot at the servers or so you can run programs that you otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Are there many restrictions that can be placed on me?
There are a surprising amount of things Admins can do to your computer to make it more restricted. To compromise of course, there are many ways to remove these annoying restrictions, one of which I worked out and removes all the restrictions although it temporarily screws up Internet Explorer's settings. Here is a small list :
Control Panel
Run command
Find command
Missing start menu programs
Fixed backdrop
No DOS access
Removed CDROM and floppy access
All of the above are a real pain in the ass. I'll go through removing these restrictions one by one.
Where do these restrictions come from?
Good question. There are two types of restriction, local and remote. The local restrictions are usually stored in the registry and are fairly easy to get round compared to the remote restrictions. These are restrictions placed on servers and are usually downloaded each time you login. They are VERY hard to get around and most are beyond the scope of this tutorial. However if I do show some of them, I'll point out that they are remote. Sometimes, the remote restrictions are enforced as local ones. This is handy to say the least.
What is the registry?
The registry is a database that Windows uses to store all its information. You can consider it as a directory. Most programs and files are registered here, along with user and system settings. Driver versions and start up programs are also found in here. Without the registry, Windows would be in trouble.
Where is the registry?
The registry consists of two files, user.dat and system.dat . Both are stored in the windows directory. There are backups of both files called user.da0 and system.da0 . If the main two are destroyed, the system copies the new versions over to replace them.
The user.dat file contains user settings. All the different parts of a users settings make up a user profile. It is these profiles that contain the information regarding what restrictions should be enforced. Every user is stored here along with all their access rights. I'll show you how to fool the system into giving you full access the easy way later.
The system.dat file strangely enough contains information about the system. This includes settings for Internet Explorer and other pieces of software such as DirectX, MS Office etc etc.
Can I edit it myself?
Yes you can, using a program called regedit. It is automatically installed and unless your friendly Admin has removed your ability to edit it, you can use this program to set anything in the registry that you want.
NOTE : If you remove the system.dat file ( which you usually have to ) some programs may have problems finding their default settings or refuse to load.
I can't edit the registry. How do I get around this ?
Well the easiest way is to simply remove user.dat and system.dat . When you reset the computer and login, it will come up and tell you that it needs to reset to repair the registry. Ignore this message and use ctrl+alt+del to get it to close without selecting 'ok'. You will see that all the restrictions have been removed. Quickly go to 'Run' and type 'command' without the quotes. This will open a DOS window and for some reason stabilises the system. Windows had a nasty tendency to crash if I didn't open a DOS window for some reason. When you reset the computer, the old registry will kick in and the restrictions will be active again. This isn't so bad because it means you can get a machine back to normal with the minimum of fuss.
I can't get to the registry files to delete them! What now?
Don't panic yet! I'll show you two ways of getting to the files. Normally if the 'Run' command is missing, you're going to have trouble getting to the C:\windows directory which holds those files. Second, you'll find that they are write protected. In the next few sections I'll show you how to get round this.
I have the 'Run' command. What next?
Type "c:\windows\" without the quotes. This will take you to the directory that contains the registry. You will most likely get a message saying that altering the files could be dangerous and could stop windows or other programs from working. Ignore that and select continue or click the hyper link. It will now show you the files.
The evil scum bags have nicked the 'Run' command! Now what?!?
Now you panic........only joking! Most Admins do take out the run command as standard. It stops normal people from going where they shouldn't be. However, we can out smart them here by using the shortcut trick. This trick will get us whatever we need and is just as powerful as the run command, except it is slightly more inconvenient.
So what's this magic shortcut trick then?
This trick is essential to a hackers toolkit. In Windows, you can create a shortcut to just about anything from a folder to a program or even a website! We can use this to our advantage. It also gets round the annoying "Access Denied" messages that explorer likes to give. Right click on the desktop, select new -> shortcut. When it asks what you want to make the shortcut to, type in "c:\windows\" without the quotes and press enter. Hit enter twice more and you will find a nice shortcut on your desktop. Click this twice and it will dump you in the Windows directory. Nice eh?
When I type in the directory in explorer, it returns "Access Denied". Why?
This means that the Admin has told explorer not to accept any requests to that folder, program or website. However for some reason explorer will let you straight through if you make a shortcut to that folder. Security is tight eh?
Okay, I've found the files.....only I can't delete them! Windows says that are protected!
When windows says protected, it means write protected. This is when you can't write or alter a file. This is done for safety reasons. No one wants to accidentally delete the registry. However because we're evil we want to and Windows is stopping us. Don't worry, the protection is lame. Right click on the file and hit properties. Once in, untick the little box next to write protected and click apply then okay. Now try deleting the file. You should find that it goes without any hassle. This works with both registry files.
Right, I've sabotaged the files. What next?
To prevent Windows catching on, just turn off the computer and switch it on again. If it starts up and the registry fixing program starts, you'll have to repeat the procedure. Sometimes it gets you, some times it doesn't. If it keeps coming up, see the next section.
My plans are being thwarted by this stupid registry checker! HELP!
This nasty little program kept catching me out. It is called regcheck and is usually found in the windows or windows\system directory. It is called from an ini file called regcheck.ini or regchck.ini . The name seems to vary from system to system though I can't see any reason why it should. You can alter the .ini file and remove the checking program. The script will complete and still the registry won't have been restored!! Tee hee!
The network is on the Internet but Cyber patrol won't let me access any hacking sites!
Cyber patrol is a royal pain in the ass! However, it is very easy to remove. Press ctrl+alt+del to bring up the task list. Select Cyber Patrol and press enter. Cyber Patrol will now bring up a window asking for a password. Damn, we've been beaten! Not so, press ctrl+alt+del again. This time because Cyber Patrol has ALREADY answered windows, it won't access again. Thus Windows thoughtfully lets us close the program. Bye bye stupid restrictions!
I can't access the disk drive or the CDROM yet I see the Admins doing it! How can I ?
This can be quite annoying. You have lots of stuff on disk or CD but you just can't access them. Why? Because some sod has removed their icons from 'My Computer'. *Sigh* I guess its no go then right? Wrong! Although you can't see the drives, they are still there. Load up ole faithful Internet Explorer and type "D:\" without the quotes and press Enter. It should display a list of the files on the CD. If it comes up with "Access Denied" or " Permission Denied" then simply make a shortcut to it. That way, you will see all the files.
When I try to access A: , the whole machine crashes on me! Why?
This happens when the floppy drive has been disabled in the BIOS ( Basic Input Output System). When you try to access it, Windows will hang and force you to reboot. There is a nice easy way of testing if the drive is open before you crash your machine. When you log in or out, check the light on the drive. If it flashes, the drive is available even if you can't see it in the drive list. If it doesn't flash, the drive has been disabled.
I MUST have floppy access! How do I get it?
The only way to get disk access is to enable the floppy drive in BIOS. This is almost ALWAYS passworded ( if not you're really lucky ). You will need a BIOS cracker and there are loads on the Internet. Check what BIOS the machine has when it boots up ( Award, AmiBIOS etc etc). Get a program for that. Obviously you will somehow need to get it on the Network and there is a cunning way to do that to!
Sneaking files onto a Network
This trick is so simple and yet so effective. Create a document that you could pass off as school work or something. Make sure it has an image file in it. Drag and drop the program file into your document and then place the Image file over it. Save as a .doc file and put it on a disk. Ask your friendly Admin to copy the file for you. Most will just copy it and those that check will just see a document with a piccy. They won't see your program. To get the program back, you need to open the document on your workstation. Drag the program back out and put it on your desktop. This trick works with any file of any type.
Right, I've got the program. What now ?
Run the program. It should give you a password. Write this down and reset the machine. As the machine checks its memory press the 'Del' button. It will then take you into the BIOS where it will prompt for the password. Enter the password that you got from the program. It should let you in. Go into the Basic options and look for floppy drive. Go to the first one. It probably says "Not Installed". Change it so it says "3 1/2 inch floppy". Quit the BIOS and save changes. When it boots up, the floppy drive will be active. Do the reverse to disable it again to stop Admins finding you and changing the password.
How can I get back all those nice programs that they removed from my start menu?
This is also quite easy. There is a program called groupconv.exe . By running this, you'll restore the default star menu along with all the usual programs and accessories. Useful if the Admin has removed some program that you prefer or want to use like Paint brush. You'll need paint to pull off the next trick.
How do I change this cursed background without using the display properties?
Not so useful perhaps but nice to have none the less. No one likes the default backgrounds but Admins tend to remove the ability to change them which is rather upsetting. To pull this off, you need access to paint. Normally this isn't removed. Open your bitmap of choice into paint. From the 'File' menu, select "Set as background". This will set your bitmap as the background. Normally this won't stay the same and will change back next time you login. Still, you get a decent background for the duration of your session.
The 'Net Plug' trick
This is a nice easy way of getting Admin rights. I've taken this from my other tutorial and pasted it here because I don't want to have to type it out again. It is a very useful technique which is why I'm duplicating it here.
This is an attack that I worked out myself before I was given Admin status. It always works and I've yet to see it fail. Make sure you are at a windows 95 or 98 machine. I doubt NT would be fooled by this trick but I don't have any NT machines so I can't test it for you.
Note : Most Admins, believe that they are the most knowledgeable about their system. Many also believe that no one else knows much about computers. In other words, for whatever reasons, they are not too concerned about us i.e. the idiots attacking their servers. Why? Because we aren't good enough. So why waste valuable time configuring security that won't be needed eh? I think I've made my point. They don't see us as a threat. You don't consider a house spider a threat so you don't go round putting up netting to keep them out. Why? You can't be bothered. The same rule applies here. Even if you are a computer genius, play it dumb. Admins like to lecture the uninitiated and would love to appear smarter than you. This is the way you want it. The Admins will think you're a nice guy or gal, totally harmless. This sometimes gives you more leverage because they like you, they'll be willing to help you. They also won't expect you to launch a huge assault on their servers either However sometimes there are some smart people out there who will notice your talents and pull you over to their side. This isn't a bad place to be and can be advantageous later.
First of all, login as yourself. Crash your computer and reset it . Walk over to your favourite admin (the one that hates you most is the best choice ) and apologise for being an idiot but the computer won't let you login and could s/he please come and take a look for you. Mumbling and grumbling they'll come over. The best way to test if it is the machine is for them to login. Of course, they'll log in as an admin or equivalent. They'll check your account and see that your account is fine. They'll tell you to log onto another machine and your account will be okay. They'll now log off and walk off in disgust thinking you are a computer moron. Not so my friend, we've just done them good and proper!
Turn off the computer and pull out the network lead. Turn it back on again. The computer will detect that you aren't on a network and will dump you at a desktop with restrictions of the last user. If this user is the admin then chances are that he or she will have full access to everything including DOS and drive access. Perfect for installing all those really kewl programs you have on a disk in your pocket......
But you aren't on the network now. That's no fun is it? Shove the lead back in and try to access a network drive. This is the bit where you hope the Admins are sloppy or not computer geniuses. Windows by default caches ALL passwords so unless the Admins have told it not to ( a key deep in the registry) then windows will have a nice copy of their password. Go into 'My Computer' and click on a drive. Whoop with glee as Netware logs you in as an Admin. Why does this happen? Well windows still holds the username and password last used to access the drive. You are logged into windows as Admin and windows knows what credentials you last gave to the server. So it supplies them for you. Likewise because you are now authenticated you know have full access to the NDS tree. Not only can you read but you can no write, modify delete etc etc. Much more fun!
Now, this is the bit where you have to be sneaky. You have to make a new account for yourself or upgrade your old one. There are pros and cons to each of your choices. If you alter your existing account and they check it for some reason ( maybe you got locked out? ) they'll notice you have admin rights and shoot you. If you make a new user, it might get found quicker but there is no way to point to you ( it was created by user admin after all tee hee ). The choice is yours. You can always do both.
I still need DOS access to run the programs. How can I get it?
Not all Admins actually remove the ability to run DOS programs, simply because they are needed. It is likely though that the shortcuts and the run command will have been removed. Also I doubt you will be able to shutdown into MS-DOS mode. So how do you call up the window?
Well, we can use our usual shortcut trick. The program that opens the DOS windows is called "command.exe" . To run the program, simply make a shortcut to "command" without the quotes. Double clicking on the shortcut will pull up the MS-DOS prompt.
I've done that but I get "This has been disabled by your system Administrator
If you get this, your Admin has locked out the ability for your user to run DOS programs. Windows is suprisingly tight on DOS access. There is only ONE way that I currently know of ( I'm always searching for new ones though) to bypass this whilst logged in as yourself. To do this, you need a program called "poledit.exe".
What the hell is poledit?
Poledit ( short for policy editor ) is the program used to alter user settings on any given computer. This program edits the user.dat file that we saw earlier. It might have occured to some Admins to block access but I have yet to see it done. Normally registry editing is barred but that seems to be only when using regedit.
Poledit is NOT installed by default. You will find it on the Windows 98 CD in the resource kit folder. The file itself isn't very big and it doesn't need any support files. You can sneak it onto the network by hiding it in a Word file. If you have CDROM access, you could just load it in, or burn the program to CD.
Poledit controls ALL the access rights such as control panel access, display properties, find and run commands, DOS access, shutting down to MSDOS mode etc etc. This tool can give them all back to you!
Okay, I've managed to get poledit onto the network. now what?
Right, run the program. It will bring up a list of users and their policies. There will probably be two policies stored there ( at least). One will be called Admin or similar and the other default. You will be user default. Now, alter the settings to whatever you want and save them. Quit the program and you should find that your access has been increased!
I think it worked but when I logged back onto the network, the old settings kicked in.
This is a pain because it means your settings are stored on the server too. When it logs in, it activates the settings you updated and then overlays the new ones from the server. Annoying huh? Well there isn't all that much you can do about it apart from use the Net Plug trick.
How does it help us here? Well, turn off the computer, unplug the network lead and turn it back on. It will automatically log you in as the last user, i.e yourself. However because there is no server, it will pull its restrictions from the local file ( which we edited of course). Plug the network lead back into the computer and try to access the drives. Even if it asks you to login again ( to access the network ), Windows isn't clever enough to pull off the
Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT review (for Gallaxy
The GeForce 9500 GT has a 'G96' core and comes with 32 shader processors, the frequency for the reference models will be 650MHz, and quite interesting it's shader domain will be clocked at 1650MHz, which is pretty good for a budget product. Memory frequencies are at the disposal the board partners but we can report gDDR3 being run over a 128-bit bus in 256 and 512 MB configurations.
Just like the rest of the series 9 products, this product isn't all about the performance increase within it's segment, but thing of PCIe 2.0 compatibility, lower power consumption and better PureVideo HD decoding.
So what we'll do today is present you a quick performance review of this little card. The card we'll test is an actual retail sample from the folks at Galaxy technology. This is the Galaxy GeForce 9500 GT Overclock edition by the way.
Next page please, but not before you've had a peek.
Intel CPU
8086: The First PC processor
The 8086 was the first x86 processor—Intel had already released the 4004, the 8008, the 8080 and the 8085. This 16-bit processor could manage 1 MB of memory using an external 20-bit address bus. The clock frequency chosen by IBM (4.77 MHz) was fairly low, though the processor was running at 10 MHz by the end of its career.
The first PCs used a derivative of this processor, the 8088, which had only an 8-bit (external) data bus. An interesting aside is that the control systems in the US space shuttles use 8086 processors and NASA was forced to buy some from eBay in 2002 since Intel could no longer supply them.
| Code name | N/A |
| Date released | 1979 |
| Architecture | 16 bits |
| Data bus | 16 bits |
| Address bus | 20 bits |
| Maximum memory | 1 MB |
| L1 cache | no |
| L2 cache | no |
| Clock frequency | 4.77-10 MHz |
| FSB | same as clock frequency |
| FPU | 8087 |
| SIMD | no |
| Fabrication process | 3,000 nm |
| Number of transistors | 29,000 |
| Power consumption | N/A |
| Voltage | 5 V |
| Die surface area | 16 mm² |
| Connector | 40-pin |
80286: 16 MB Of Memory, But Still 16 Bits
Released in 1982, the 80286 was 3.6 times faster than the 8086 at the same frequency. It could manage up to 16 MB of memory, but the 286 was still a 16-bit processor. It was the first x86 equipped with a memory management unit (MMU), allowing it to manage virtual memory. Like the 8086, it did not have a floating-point unit (FPU), but could use a x87 co-processor chip (80287). Intel offered these processors at a maximum frequency of 12.5 MHz, whereas their competitors reached 25 MHz.
| Code name | N/A |
| Date released | 1982 |
| Architecture | 16 bits |
| Data bus | 16 bits |
| Address bus | 24 bits |
| Maximum memory | 16 MB |
| L1 cache | No |
| L2 cache | No |
| Clock frequency | 6–12 MHz |
| FSB | same as clock frequency |
| FPU | 80287 |
| SIMD | No |
| Fabrication process | 1,500 nm |
| Number of transistors | 134,000 |
| Power consumption | N/A |
| Voltage | 5 V |
| Die surface area | 49 mm² |
| Connector | 68-pin |
386: 32-Bit and Cache Memory
Intel’s 80836 was the first x86 with a 32-bit architecture. Several versions of this processor were offered. The two best known are the 386 SX (Single-word eXternal), which had a 16-bit data bus, and the 386 DX (Double-word eXternal) with a 32-bit data bus. Two other versions are worth noting, though: the SL, which was the first x86 to offer management of a cache (external) and the 386EX, used in the space program (the Hubble telescope uses this processor).
| Code name | P3 |
| Date released | 1985 |
| Architecture | 32 bits |
| Data bus | 32 bits |
| Address bus | 32 bits |
| Maximum memory | 4096 MB |
| L1 cache | 0 KB (controller sometimes present) |
| L2 cache | no |
| Clock frequency | 16-33 MHz |
| FSB | same as clock frequency |
| FPU | 80387 |
| SIMD | no |
| Fabrication process | 1,500-1,000 nm |
| Number of transistors | 275,000 |
| Power consumption | 2 W @ 33 MHz |
| Voltage | 5 V |
| Die surface area | 42 mm² @ 1µ |
| Connector | 132 pins |
The 486: An FPU And Multipliers Too
The 486 is emblematic of a certain generation who were first discovering computers. In fact, the very famous 486 DX2/66 was long considered the minimum configuration for gamers. This processor, released in 1989, ushered in several interesting new features, like an on-chip FPU, data cache, and the first clock multiplier. The former consisted of an x87 coprocessor built into the 486 DX (not SX) series. An 8 KB Level 1 cache was built into the processor (write-through type, then write-back with slightly better performance). There was also the possibility of a Level 2 cache on the motherboard (at the bus frequency).
The second generation of 486s had a CPU multiplier, since the processor operated faster than the FSB, with DX2 (2x multiplier) and DX4 (3x multiplier) versions. Another anecdote: the “487SX” sold as an FPU for the 486SX was actually a full 486DX that disabled and took the place of the first processor.
| Code name | P4, P24, P24C |
| Date released | 1989 |
| Architecture | 32 bits |
| Data bus | 32 bits |
| Address bus | 32 bits |
| Maximum memory | 4096 MB |
| L1 cache | 8 KB |
| L2 cache | Motherboard (FSB frequency) |
| Clock frequency | 16-100 MHz |
| FSB | 16-50 MHz |
| FPU | On chip |
| SIMD | No |
| Fabrication process | 1,000–800 nm |
| Number of transistors | 1,185,000 |
| Power consumption | N/A |
| Voltage | 5 V–3.3 V |
| Die surface area | 81 - 67 mm² |
| Connector | 168 pins |
The SSD Power Consumption Hoax
Flash SSDs Don’t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime – they Reduce It
Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren’t there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD.
Could Tom’s Hardware be Wrong?
No, our results are definitely correct. We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs. In an effort to determine the actual impact on notebook systems, we took four SSDs that we had available in our test lab, and ran a series of Mobilemark benchmark runs on a Dell Latitude D630 notebook. We found runtime differences of up to one hour (!) when using a flash SSD compared to a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5” notebook hard drive.
Will this Slow Down the Flash Memory Hype?
We don’t think so. Flash is cool, because it’s expensive, and because it does provide significant performance advantages (when SLC flash is used). But while our results are interesting for most users, they will be shocking to road warriors. You will see very clearly in the benchmark section that theory and real life are sometimes entirely different.
We still believe that flash-based drives will be the future for the performance segment, but they must not become a key component for energy-efficient notebooks and ultra-portables — where performance is secondary — as long as their average power consumption is higher than that of conventional 2.5” notebook hard drives. In fact, even a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5” drive provided better overall battery runtime than most of the flash SSDs we put through the Mobilemark test.
Memoright SSDs: The End of Hard Drives?
The HDD is Beaten
About six months ago, we reviewed Mtron’s Flash SSDs (Solid State Drives), which were the fastest hard drives for desktop PCs until the launch of Western Digital’s new VelociRaptor. Although the VelociRaptor is a conventional hard drive and therefore it cannot offer the extremely quick access times of transistor-based storage media, it is the best choice for most applications - and it offers almost 10 times the capacity at a fraction of the SSD drive’s cost. However, we found an even better drive for the real enthusiast: the Memoright SSD MR25.2-032S, which leaves any other conventional hard drive in the dust as far as performance goes.
It has become difficult to keep track of the developments in the Flash SSD storage market. Flash SSDs look and behave like mechanical hard drives, except that flash memory devices store data in the same way that your motherboard’s firmware device stores BIOS information. USB thumb drives use flash memory as well. Flash memory can offer good throughput and virtually zero access time, although write throughput and write access times can be clearly slower than the read values. While Flash memory doesn’t generate as much heat as a hard drive spinning at high revolution speeds and it’s also extremely robust, the media does not yet offer the capacities that PC hard drives are expected to have. A 2.5” notebook hard drive, for example, can store up to 500 GB and a 3.5” desktop drive’s capacity can total up to 1000 GB.
However, flash-based drives can come in 3.5”, 2.5”, 1.8” or even smaller sizes. Remember that memory cards such as CompactFlash, SD or memory sticks are all based on flash memory. Flash memory typically requires much less power than a conventional hard drive does, and it withstands shocks, such as when a laptop is dropped, better than conventional drives. Flash SSD storage capacities have reached 128 GB, although only 32-GB flash SSDs have moved into a price range that can be considered affordable.
But why do we make such a big deal about SSDs in the first place? There are two simple reasons: performance and energy efficiency. While traditional hard drives do not directly accelerate processing performance for CPU-intensive tasks or graphics performance, they have a very noticeable impact whenever the operating system, applications or application data are launched or terminated. Once software can be executed or data can be accessed from within the system’s main memory, the core components can show their potential. Until this is the case, data has to be loaded or stored from or to the hard drive, which is why we still have to wait seconds or even minutes for Windows or applications to start. Flash SSDs can significantly reduce user idle time by providing a good mix of quicker data access and good throughput. Lastly, flash memory devices can be more energy-efficient than conventional hard drives. However, an SSD’s energy power consumption depends on the number of flash components the device has for its capacity. Flash memory’s power consumption also can vary (MLC, SLC – see next page).
We already looked at various Flash SSD offerings from Samsung, Sandisk, Ridata and the Korean manufacturer Mtron, which has been offering the fastest flash SSD drives to date. Executives from SSD specialist DV Nation
read our review of the Mtron drives and offered flash SSD from Memoright for our tests. A company representative said the devices would be an even better choice. He was right
ow Can Battery Runtime Be Shorter?
It’s important to answer this question, because it doesn’t seem like this should be the case. Most flash SSDs show power requirements in idle and when under load that are comparable to those of conventional 2.5” notebook hard drives. A typical 2.5” hard drive based on rotating magnetic platters usually requires between 0.5 W and 1.3 W when it runs idle, and from 2 W to around 4 W when it is under maximum load. Peak load occurs when the actuator has to move the heads back and forth on the disc surface due to lots of random accesses.
Let me emphasize a part of my last sentence: “when the actuator has to move the heads.” It’s important to understand that a conventional hard drive will only reach its maximum power requirement when you’re requesting random data that’s distributed all over the medium. In the case of sequential reading or writing, hard drives will not require much more than the idle power, as there is no energy-intensive acceleration and deceleration of the actuator.
Flash SSDs Only Know Two Power States
In contrast, flash SSDs only seem to know two states: active or idle. We don’t have specific information on this, but we received confirmation from two vendors that many flash devices don’t feature power saving mechanisms yet. On the one hand, the entire industry is looking to improve MLC flash to enable larger flash SSDs at sufficient performance levels. On the other hand, wear leveling algorithms are more important than power saving features, as durability may be an issue with SSD drives.
So while conventional hard drives may operate at relatively low power when little movement is required — such as during sequential read access — flash based drives do not. They will draw their maximum power level constantly when in use, and as a consequence, simply spend more total time drawing maximum power than conventional drives.
The Return of the Original Microsoft Geek Icons, 30 Years Later
Microsoft employee in 1978
27th june now in 2008 all 
Comments: Front row (left to right): Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Miriam Lubow, Marla Wood, and Paul Allen. Back row: Bob O'Rear, Steve Wood, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin, and Jim Lane. Not pictured is Bob Wallace, who has passed away.
Hacking the Eee PC
ASUS' diminutive sub-notebook, the Eee PC, has so far exceeded expectations and is sold out virtually everywhere. Its simple interface and wallet-friendly pricing have contributed to making the Eee the most popular gadget this season.
It's in the hands of the power user that the Eee really shines. With hardware support already taken care of, the Eee offers an opportunity for beginning-to-intermediate Linux users to customise themselves a flexible Linux-based tool using the Eee's easy or full desktop mode.
In this article, we take you through tweaking your Eee, although in the interest of preserving your warranty, most of the hacks here are focused on software. The first and most important hack is to read the manual that came with your Eee to make sure you're completely up to date on everything. When you read the manual (because you are going to read it, right?), you'll notice that ASUS mentions the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Alt-T to launch a terminal. Gaining root on the default Eee install is as simple as issuing the command:
sudo -s
There is no password; any person who can open a terminal is able to gain root.
ASUS' easy mode uses a customised IceWM (www.icewm.org), a standard X11 window manager that's been around for a very long time. It's relatively easy to customise to your liking. The first step is creating a directory for local modifications. Open a terminal using the aforementioned keyboard shortcut, and type:
mkdir ~/.icewm cp /etc/X11/icewm/* /home/user/.icewm/
This creates a local customisation directory and copies the ASUS IceWM configuration into it, ready for you to modify. As not all of the software that ships with the Eee is accessible through the easy mode launcher, the first useful thing to tweak on the Eee is to add the IceWM panel menu and edit it to add those applications that aren't exposed through the easy mode interface.
To enable the menu, edit ~/.icewm/config, and scroll down to the option named TaskBarShowStartMenu. Change the 0 in the uncommented value to 1, and save the file. You need to restart your Eee for the menu to show up:
# Show 'Start' menu on task bar # TaskBarShowStartMenu=1 # 0/1 TaskBarShowStartMenu=1
Figure 1. The IceWM Menu, with the Menu File in the Background
To edit the menu, open ~/.icewm/menu in your favourite editor. The menu format is pretty simple, following the syntax:
prog label icon command
where label, icon and command are replaced with the appropriate entries for the application you want to launch. For example, to add an entry that launches Konsole, the KDE terminal emulator, you would create an entry as follows:
prog Konsole konsole konsole
Submenus are described with the following syntax:
menu "Label" { } Program entries or further submenus are defined between the curly braces.
The first thing we all thought on using the Eee when we first received it was “the Windows XP theme doesn't look attractive on XP, let alone on Linux. How the heck do we change this abomination?”
You'll be pleased to know that this is extremely simple, now that the menu is enabled. The biggest theme repository for IceWM is at themes.freshmeat.net/browse/925, with hundreds of themes from which to choose. Once you've downloaded a theme, create the folder ~/.icewm/themes, and extract the theme to that folder. It will now be selectable from the IceWM menu under Settings→Themes.
Figure 2. A broad selection of attractive themes are available for IceWM.
You can find a wide range of other customisations by reading the comments in the ~/.icewm/preferences file. Some notable ones are showing the workspace switcher on the panel and adding a CPU meter. Traditional window manager settings, such as focus model, are available as well.
With a built-in Webcam, it's a shame that the Eee PC didn't ship with the Linux beta of Skype that allows video calling. It is, however, easy to install by hand. Navigate to www.skype.com/download/skype/linux, and elect to download not the current stable version, but the beta. When it asks you to select your distribution, download the package for Debian Etch. Once you've downloaded it to disk, open a terminal and navigate to where the file was saved. Type the following to install the package:
dpkg -i skype-debian_2.0.0.27-1_i386.deb
The version number of the package may have changed since the time of this writing. As this upgrades the version of Skype already installed, the Skype launcher will launch the new version.
Figure 3. Some Linux mascots take time out from their busy schedule to test video calling for us.
During the course of adding applications to the menu, the observant will notice that the Eee ships with most of KDE installed. During its development phase, the Eee exposed an option to enable a full desktop mode with a complete KDE 3.4 desktop. The most elegant solution for enabling the full desktop is to install a package that does the configuration for you from wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:getkde. This package essentially downloads the packages for kicker and ksmserver, and modifies the ASUS startup scripts. It adds an option to log in to full desktop mode from the easy mode shutdown dialog. To get back into easy mode, there is an option in the K menu. This page also details the manual methods for enabling full desktop mode.
Figure 4. A Full KDE Desktop
Adding more software from a Xandros or Debian repository is the next logical step in customising the operating system that ships with the Eee. For us, the Eee requires only the addition of Emacs and Subversion to be a great portable hacking tool. You can use any Debian Sarge repository or a Xandros 4.0 one, as shown below. There are a few caveats though. As the Xandros running on the Eee is heavily customised by ASUS, it's very easy to end up with the Eee in an unbootable state if you allow apt to upgrade too much. Although it's not a complete solution, apt pinning can be used to ensure that the ASUS repository always takes priority for a package.
Add your repository to /etc/apt/source.list with your favourite text editor as root, either your local Debian Sarge repository or the Xandros one below:
deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/4.0/pkg xandros4.0-xn main ↪contrib non-free
Then, create the file /etc/apt/preferences, and add the lines:
Package: * Pin: origin update.eepc.asus.com Pin-Priority: 999
As apt sources default to a lower priority, this ensures that packages from the ASUS repository are prioritised. It's still possible though to break your Eee by installing packages willy-nilly. If it looks as though an action is going to upgrade a large number of packages, especially if it looks like what it's upgrading is all of KDE, cancel the change.
This limitation can be extremely frustrating if you want to make more drastic changes to your Eee PC's installed packages. Another option is to install a generic Linux distribution on the Eee. eeeXubuntu (wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu:eeexubuntu:home) is a version of the Xubuntu 7.10 distribution with Eee-specific drivers integrated and tweaks for low-resolution displays. It's an excellent choice if you want a more modern distribution on your Eee but would prefer not to compile the drivers from ASUS by hand.
The wiki page has in-depth instructions on how to create a bootable USB stick for your Eee. Boot your Eee from the USB stick by pressing Esc at boot time to get to the boot options menu, and from the GRUB bootloader, select the option to load eeeXubuntu with Eee-specific drivers and fixes. From there, it's all very familiar. Click the Install icon on the desktop once the live CD loads, and navigate your way through the Ubuntu installer.
If your Eee has 512MB or more of memory, you probably can get away with not creating a swap partition. In our testing, running Firefox, Pidgin and Thunderbird, the Eee was using approximately 300MB of memory, minus buffers/caching. If your Eee has 1,024MB or more of memory, you'll never notice the difference.
Opting out of swap, however, does have the side effect that hibernate to disk is disabled. The Eee does have suspend to RAM support under eeeXubuntu, but this level of suspend does consume a fair amount of battery. Leave your Eee suspended for 24 hours, and expect to see your battery down to half when you resume it.
Figure 5. eeeXubuntu is a customised Xubuntu for the Eee PC.
The simplest and most rewarding Eee hardware mod is upgrading the built-in memory. Note: this mod requires removing a sticker that claims its removal will void your warranty. According to a public statement by ASUS at usa.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=9223, this is not the case, and upgrading your memory will not void the warranty on your Eee. However, Linux Journal takes no responsibility for any damages to your Eee or loss of warranty incurred by following this advice.
The Eee PC takes a single SODIMM of DDR2667, in either 512, 1,024 or 2,048MB. That's right, the Eee PC can be upgraded to an impressive 2GB of memory.
To upgrade the memory on your Eee, you need a set of small electronics screwdrivers and a clean surface that's safe for handling static-sensitive equipment.
If you haven't installed memory before, Linux Journal recommends you enlist the help of a professional or a hardware-minded friend.
Ensure that the Eee is shut down (not suspended), and unplug it from the power. Turn the Eee upside down and remove the battery.
Using a very small Phillips screwdriver, remove the two screws in the memory panel. One is covered by a sticker that will tear easily if you simply remove the screw as though the sticker was not there.
Use a small flatblade screwdriver very carefully or a fingernail to lever up the memory compartment. Put the memory compartment cover and the screws to one side.
To remove the memory that shipped with your Eee, carefully use a pair of small screwdrivers or your fingers to lever the clips outward. The memory module will pop upward when it is free of the clips. Remove the module from the slot, taking care to touch only the very outside edges of the module.
Figure 6. Removing the Module
Place the module aside in a static-safe place, and remove the new module from its packaging. Place it in the slot at a 45-degree angle, as shown in Figure 7, taking care that the notch on the module matches the key on the slot. When the module's base is securely slotted in, it can be carefully lowered into position by pushing the top corners of the module backward with your fingers, so that it lies flat against the Eee's motherboard. The metal clips should snap over the sides of the module with a satisfying click when it's properly in place. Once the memory is secure, replace the memory compartment cover and ensure that all sides have clicked down.
Figure 7. Installing the New Module
If you're anything like us, at this point, you'll hunt all over the desk searching for the screws only to find them 20 minutes later stuck to the magnetic closure on the MacBook. Replace the two screws to secure the memory compartment cover, and insert the battery again. It's always a good idea to run memtest86 over any new memory you install, which is an option from any recent Ubuntu live CD or the eeeXubuntu bootable USB stick if you made one earlier.
It's pretty easy to see how the Eee has taken the personal computer market by storm. It's cheap, friendly and oh-so-very hackable, with something for everyone. There are myriad other hacks not covered here, from installing Linux distributions and adding the drivers yourself to soldering additional gadgets to the motherboard. In fact, that's what we're off to do right after we submit this article—solder a mutilated Bluetooth dongle to the motherboard, as now we won't get in trouble if we break it.
Have fun hacking your Eee, but remember—installing Windows is cruel to Eee PCs and not endorsed byLinux Journal!
Core 2 Duo E8400 Dual Core Processor
| Description: | Core 2 Duo E8400 Dual Core Processor | |
| Manufacturer: | Intel | |
| Lowest Price: | $191.10 | |
| User Reviews: |  (4.93 / 5.00) (Read 14 Reviews) | |
| Rebates: | (None) | |
 | Quick Glance | |
| Intel Socket T (LGA775) | ||
| Intel Core 2 Duo | ||
| 2 | ||
| 1333MHz | ||
| 3000 | ||
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How To Overclock Your Graphics Card
Introduction
Overclocking is more popular than ever. And since it’s so easy to boost the frequency of your Intel processor, it would be a shame not to. But CPUs aren’t the only components that can be overclocked. The GPUs on graphics cards can also be speeded up, and so can their memory. And since an affordable card only differs from more expensive ones in its clock speed, overclocking can be your key to some real savings.
Overclocking a GPU is a less common process than overclocking a CPU, and above all, it’s more complex. One of the reasons for that is that a graphics card’s BIOS is not as easily accessible as a motherboard’s. This article will shed some light on the different methods that can be used and the results you can expect when overclocking your graphics card.
Software or Hardware Overclocking?
It turns out that there are several ways to overclock your graphics card. We’ll take a look at each one in turn. First of all, you should know that you can overclock your card either temporarily, using Windows software utilities, or permanently by flashing your BIOS.
The Flexibility of Software
The first method is the best known. There are numerous utilities for AMD/ATI and Nvidia graphics cards. Their functions are often similar. The best ones let you set the operating speed of the GPU and the memory, but also the cooling power, and some let you load complete overclocking profiles and configurations of 3D functions to suit the application you’ll use. In fact, these utilities multiply the possibilities offered by the cards’ drivers. This implies that the ForceWare or Catalyst drivers are not totally ignorant of overclocking... And in fact, Nvidia and especially ATI are emphasizing overclockability more and more, which has become a strong sales argument. Software overclocking is very flexible to use (generally all you do is slide the frequency cursors and click "OK"), but it’s not free of drawbacks. It depends on a memory-resident program. That program consumes a small part of system resources, and can crash. The programs can contain bugs, or be incompatible with certain cards, certain driver versions or certain operating systems. What’s more, each time you re-boot the system you have to reconfigure everything.
Under the Hood
In short, a more permanent, more robust solution would be preferable – as with CPU overclocking, which won’t change unless you voluntarily modify the motherboard’s BIOS. And in fact, it works the same way with a graphics card. Permanent overclocking requires a change to the settings that are "hard-wired" in the card’s own BIOS. But while all you need to do to access your motherboard BIOS settings is press F1, F2 or Del when your PC is booting, the graphics card’s BIOS is not that easily accessible. You need a special utility to read and edit settings and save the new version, which will then be written to the card itself by flashing with yet another utility. Sound complicated? It may be, but it’s not at all impossible. And we’re here to tell you how to do it.
Keep Cool and Spend Your Money
However, if all this scares you, you can always go with a factory overclocked version, when the vendor does it for you. Models like this are extremely common, since third-party graphics cards manufacturers have found overclocking to be one way to set themselves apart from the competition. Certain ones, like XFX, may even owe all their success to the wide range of overclocked models they offer. But you should know that most of the time, pre-overclocked cards make you pay a lot for the few extra performance percentage points they offer.
Test configuration
Our tests were run on our reference system with an Asus P5E3 motherboard, an Intel QX6850 processor and 2 GB of Crucial DDR3. The operating system installed was the 32-bit version of Windows Vista SP1. For each card, we used the most recent versions of the drivers available at the time of the test – that is, ForceWare 174.53 and Catalyst 8.3.
Overclocking Nvidia: GeForce 9600 GT
But enough talk – let’s get down to brass tacks. We’re going to show you how to overclock your graphics card using two examples of recent cards – not that overclocking is only possible with new GPUs. It just seemed to make more sense to focus on today’s technology rather than yesterday’s.
Choose your weapons: GeForce 9600 GT and RivaTuner
We’ll start with a card from Nvidia, a GeForce 9600 GT. This card, which we tested at its recent launch, is based on a G94 GPU, a version of the G92 used in the GeForce 8800 GT and GTS V2 512 MB launched late in 2007. The G92 was itself a version of the G80 in the original GeForce 8800s that hit the market late in 2006. In other words, this is a processor with a well-known architecture and overclocking utilities that have been available long enough for us to become familiar with. The key utility for overclocking a GeForce is RivaTuner (downloadable here), an application that’s been around for some time and that gets its name from the Riva, the first GPU Nvidia produced a few years before the GeForce series. So, RivaTuner is perfectly mature and compatible with all Nvidia GPUs, and it’s updated very regularly. It’s a must-have.
Once you’ve downloaded, installed and launched the utility, click the little arrow to the right of “Customize,” in the second drop-down list entitled "Driver Settings." Select the icon that looks like a graphics card, "System settings."
The dialog that opens more or less speaks for itself. You can see three cursors – Core Clock, Shader Clock and Memory Clock.
Their function needs no explanation. But we should stop and take a closer look at the second one, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the architecture of Nvidia graphics processors. Since the GeForce 8, Nvidia GPUs have used two different clocks. One affects only the scalar ALUs (the famous stream processors) that form the unified shader units. The other affects the rest of the GPU. By default, these two frequencies are related by a ratio of approximately 2.5 (the ALUs run faster). This value isn’t universal to GeForce 8s, however, since the frequency increases by stages, as we’ll see later on.
With RivaTuner, you can increase the Core and Shader frequencies while keeping the 2.5 relation (you can also try changing that proportion). It’s not necessarily worthwhile, but it can give you a few extra MHz, since each portion of the GPU can have different frequency limits. In practice, though, you shouldn’t expect to gain all that much.
Trial and Error
Since each individual chip has its own capacities, there’s no way to know in advance what frequency you can push your GPU to and still maintain stable operation. So, overclocking has to be done gradually – by increments of 20 MHz, say. You start by increasing the speed of the GPU (and the shaders). At each level, quickly test the stability of the system by launching an application that makes a lot of 3D demands, such as a game. It goes without saying that the rest of your configuration has to be perfectly stable before you can judge the quality of the overclocking of your graphics card. Too much overclocking will cause the game to simply crash, or else cause artifacts of various types (such as groups of pixels of the same color, refresh faults, untrue colors, etc.)
Once you’ve found the limits of the GPU, it’s time to tweak the memory. You can increase memory in slightly larger frequency increments than for the GPU – for example 50 MHz. If at some point you start seeing artifacts, go back to the previous level and bump the frequency up by a smaller amount (say 20 MHz).
Take care, though, because the frequency you feed into RivaTuner won’t always be the one it actually applies to the graphics card. On certain processors, including all GeForce 8s, the evolution of the frequency is not linear; it moves in stages. So, in our case, setting the GPU (Core) to 725 MHz or 735 MHz works out to the same thing – an actual frequency of 729 MHz. On the other hand, a change that appears slight can in fact cross a threshold and bump up the frequency by some 10 MHz. This somewhat delicate operation is not a real problem, since RivaTuner can check the actual frequencies. For that, go to the "Hardware Monitoring" menu (see above).
Average gains
In our case, the G94 of our reference GeForce 9600 was pretty cooperative. Clocked at 650 MHz from the factory, it was able to be increased to 767 MHz and remain stable. This had the shaders running at 1920 MHz. We tried desynchronizing, but were only able to gain 30 MHz. We were able to increase the memory from 900 MHz to 1116 MHz. On the bottom line, that works out to a jump of 18% for the GPU and shaders and 24% for the memory. Not bad, but not excellent either. It was enough of a gain, however, to catch up with the performance of an 8800 GT, which is 15% faster than the 9600 GT in its factory state.
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