Well I just cancled my Clear 4G account.  It started off great.  I was getting 20mb download speeds on my mobile device, and although my home Motorola modem was flaky after first it started working fine.  Well then the fun comes.  As 4G devices get more popular it was clear that in Central Austin, North Central or Allendale to be more precise, there was too many users, and not enough bandwidth.  If I wanted to stream Netflix forget about it.  If I wanted to stream my security cameras from Tek Republik, well, forget that too.  Then the heat of the Summer came, and in addition to Clear throttling Netflix, or anything, it became obvious that the towers were going down, and it has been widely theorized that this was due to the heat.  What was a great deal for two devices at $55 a month for unlimited bandwidth is no longer the case.  

I'm trying Time Warner again 35MB down, and 5MB up for $49.99 in the hopes it works right.  It is going to take them a whopping 11 days to get the install done, and I can not do it apparently.  I don't like that at all.

Grande and Uverse are available across 2222 from me at my sisters house.  Grande has 110MB down for $110 a month.  Yeah, I'm not joking.  I've been trying to get Grande for 5 and half years, as long as I've had their fiber at Tek Republik.  They have not moved past 2222 in that amount of time.  Literally a few hundred feet.  So why are we stuck with Time Warner, or ATT DSL in Allendale?  Why after 5 years is there still no fiber.  Why can't they cross the road?  After spending hours on the phone yesterday with ATT, and Grande, I have no answers.

What I do have though is a lawyer and a porn video company claiming we torrented a racy video over Clear, and distributed it, and we owe them $50.  I don't use torrent.  Sorry, it is full of viruses.  What I do is stream video.  In fact I never downloaded MP3s, and I couldn't care less about watching movies.  I don't have the spare time to manage data. I have two businesses to run.  I have a daughter to raise, and a child on the way.  I want to stream.  Of course I think my extensive DVD, CD, and Blu Ray collection attests to that.  As does my Netflix, Pandora, Hulu, Amazon Video, and Last.FM.  

So who pulled this video down?  Is it someone who hacked my network?  Is it a past roomate?  Its not my 6 year old daughter.  It is not my wife.  It is not me.  My laptop at home is used for email, Netflix, and for my daughter to play games.  In fact since I've gotten a Roku it has mostly been used for email, and web browsing.  Not that I'm ever home.  I'm usually at work or onsite somewhere.  Anyway, if you get a call from 786-879-7449 its probably them.  Some anonymous lawyer aid with no real proof you did anything.  I'm going to fight it.  

As reported by SemiWiki GF is set to present their new 28nm HKMG process and ecosystem at DAC in San Diego next week.

 

“We have been in production of real HKMG products for months,” said Mojy Chian, senior vice president of design enablement at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “We have been leveraging this experience by collaborating with ecosystem partners to build this knowledge into the design infrastructure and tools we provide to customers at 28nm. This focus on early design-technology co-optimization and silicon validation will translate to accelerated time-to-market for the next generation of power-sensitive consumer electronics and mobile devices.”

 

According to John Fruehe of AMD in his latest blog.

 

• AMD Opteron processors:             11 (44%)
• Intel Xeon processors:                    8 (32%)
• IBM PowerPC processors:             4 (16%)
• Fujitsu SPARC processors:             1 (4%)
• AMD Opteron + IBM Cell:             1 (4)

In the CPU-only realm only Sun SPARC has scored higher on the industry standard LinPack benchmark.

 

From the site:

LINPACK is a collection of Fortran subroutines that analyze and solve linear equations and linear least-squares problems. The package solves linear systems whose matrices are general, banded, symmetric indefinite, symmetric positive definite, triangular, and tridiagonal square. In addition, the package computes the QR and singular value decompositions of rectangular matrices and applies them to least-squares problems. LINPACK uses column-oriented algorithms to increase efficiency by preserving locality of reference.

LINPACK was designed for supercomputers in use in the 1970s and early 1980s. LINPACK has been largely superceded by LAPACK, which has been designed to run efficiently on shared-memory, vector supercomputers.

 

AMD has been a staple of the Top500 since Opteron was released in 2003. Cray has created the most scalable HPC architecture including the Gemini interconnect that is said to scale out to HALF A MILLION CPU cores.

Upcoming versions of AMD Cray SCs are the XK6, their first truly hybrid SC made by combining AMDs Opteron 6200 (Codenamed Bulldozer) processors and NVidia’s Tesla X2090 (Codename Fermi) GPUs. Cray estimates this to provide up to 50PF (PetaFlops) of LinPack performance.

 

Users of the Cray systems include the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the Lawrence Livermore Labs; the Oak Ridge National Lab; the Finnish Meteorological Institute and many others as these installations lease out “rack space” too many universities around the world.

The 6200 Opterons look to continue this trend as the NOAA reported the latest upgrades to their XE6 system will take it from 260TFlops to 386 TFlops using Interlagos 16 core CPUs. A new XE6 will be added natively based on Opteron 6200 processors and will achieve a theoretical 720TFlops. Cray’s current champ, the Jaguar achieves 1.7PetaFlops of performance, slightly behind the 2.4PF of the Tianhe GPU Hybrid but well behind the new leader, the SPARC based K Computer in Japan’s Riken Institute, which scores 8.1PF, though it does so with 2X the cores and power.

Llano, AMDs new APU for mainstream laptops and desktops is making lots of noise in the retail world just scant weeks after its launch it is in the guts of no less than 5 mobile Best Buy models ranging from $529-679.

Not to be outdone, online retailer Newegg is sporting 6 of these APU beauties from Toshiba ranging from the dual core A4 to the quad core A6, perfect systems for students, video enthusiasts and even light gamers as the 240 SP Radeon HD6400 series along with a high clocked A4 has shown to provide frame rates for games like WoW, Sims Online and others.

Notebooks of this power and price were impossible before Llano and its early appearance denotes a real push by the major OEMs to get these chips in their inventory. AMD though does plan an aggressive ramp of the A, C and E series APUs and phase out all AM3 processors by the middle of next year so we can expect to see more and more APU-based systems as the year progresses.

 

HP is up first with the A8-3500M-equipped DV6-6135dx, but following behind is the new Toshiba A6-3400M-equipped L775D-S7210. They both weigh in at under $700 with the HP model costing a svelte $679 and the Toshiba slims that price down to an admittedly anorexic $579. Both models come complete with Radeon HD 6000 graphics. The HP system has 6GB RAM, 400 SPs (Shader Processors) running at 444MHz while the Toshiba gets by with 4GB RAM and 320 SPs ticking away at 400MHz. The HP system truly ups the ante, providing a Radeon HD 6750 for Dual Graphics gaming goodness. Not to be outdone, Toshiba tosses in a 17.3” LCD up from the 15.6 of the HP model.

The Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design web site reports that the big players in SOI wafers are prepared for mass production of FD-SOI wafers. AMD is said to be adopting FD-SOI rather than the FinFETs of Intel and TSMC.

IBM, STMicro, GlobalFoundries, Renesas, and Toshiba all have signed on for the wafers while SOITEC – the largest manufacturer of SOI wafers has begun its production along with MEMC of St Louis and SEH in Taiwan – the largest overall wafer producer.

One thing the SOI Consortium and Intel agree on: bulk silicon CMOS “is not going to cut it past the 22nm node.”