Archive

Archive for December, 2008

New MacBook & MacBook Pro sleep issues

December 9th, 2008

Ven, the graphical designer that work with me on the company website, has problems with it’s new MacBook Pro Unibody.

some MacBook Pro seems to be insomniacs

some MacBook Pro seems to be insomniacs

Typically the MacBook Pro go to sleep when lid is closed, and then wake up minutes later, overheating while closed (fans doesn’t seems to start!), and surface where really hot when he discover that.

We found many witnesses of some related problems on the Web, with new MacBook or MacBook Pro refusing to go awake from sleeping mode, rebooting when awaking, awaking themselves and overheaten, making battery dies in hours (while theorically in sleep mode), and so on.

After the trackpad problems, the GeForce 9600M GT videocard black-screen of death, the third-party RAM problems, now there’s sleep/awaking problems!

These new MacBook & MacBook Pro seems really badly conceived from scratch.

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Mac OS X, Virus & Intego

December 8th, 2008

There’s some discussions about Mac OS X and the need (or not) of any antivirus.

There has been an old support message from Apple that has been removed, the position of the company is that “Mac OS X is secure and doesn’t need an Antivirus”. Intego reacted on it’s blog to communicate about the need to install an antivirus (prefereably their) on Mac OS X.

Intego

Intego

For myself, I think an antivirus is not useful for many reasons, and my experience with VirusBarrier X3 & NetBarrier X3 from Intego was catastrophic, from start where there wasn’t any activation key on the retail package (and needed :-( ), to the end one week later when I uninstall it to retrieve some kind of stability and usability of my Mac.

From this time, I don’t want to put Intego’s software into my Macs, all is just fine :-)

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PHP Quebec

December 5th, 2008

I was on PHP Quebec monthly meeting and I have the chance to assist to two good presentations, Evan Prodromou for it’s website identi.ca an open-source microblogging distributed platform, and a presentation of Mercurial distributed source-code versioning system.

Finally the interesting common point is that they are both open-source, open platforms, using/open to distributed peer networking. The key trend seems to use software as service, and interoperate as peers.

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Future Trend : CPU+GPU

December 4th, 2008

You probably have heard of AMD/ATI project to create chip that integrates a CPU and a GPU on a single die, an AMD Phenom X2 CPU associated to an ATI Radeon 3xxx GPU. It’s interesting and it’s a future trend. But maybe not the way AMD intended to be!

The major part of my computer use is to read and answer emails, use instant messengers, visit web pages, type some texts, thing that don’t need a dual-core 2.4Ghz CPU with a GeForce 8600M GT GPU, and could be handled by a 400Mhz single-core CPU associated with an integrated GPU.

For me, the next trend to improve autonomy and reduce consumption will be to aggregate a 400Mhz x86 cpu core inside the chipset, associated with an integrated GPU core similar to theGeForce 9400M found in new MacBook line-up.
Intel doesn’t announce anything, nor AMD, but both have great economics x86 cores to put into a chipset, and even nVidia has x86 cpu cores that could fit into their chipsets :-)

The main idea is to put the main CPU, or CPU+GPU couple in deep sleep mode as frequently as possible and let a low-cost processor handle some low-level actions, such as scrolling on a web page, handling mouse events, maybe even enter text on email client or lightweight word processor, to play music, to view a movie, to be able to extend the battery life as long as possible.

In this case, the integrated GPU will play a major role, not because of it’s graphic ability but for it’s programmability (CUDA, OpenCL, …), decompressing music, decompressing movie and accelerating the display, decompressing JPEG or PNG and generating displayable bitmaps, etc.
The GeForce 9400M integrated GPU for example could deliver quasily the same level of raw computing power of a dual-core Core2 Duo at 2.4Ghz, consuming far less, and giving a 400Mhz x86 cpu core the ability to do basic multimedia functions (including movie play even in H.264 or MPEG-4) without relying on a main CPU.

All these things are actually working, existing technologies that are just waiting to be put together to deliver better autonomy to our laptops :-)

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nVidia’s GPU again!

December 3rd, 2008

The old MacBook Pro equipped with nVidia’s GeForce 8600M GT have some problems to resist it’s own heat, some laptops finishing with a black screen ou fuzzy lines after 3D games play, needin’ motherboard replacement. Apple extended their GPU warranty to 3 years, not solving the problem at all.

MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro w/ GeForce 9600M GT

The new MacBook Pro comes with a nVidia’s GeForce 9600M GT that seems to be overheaten (again), ending with black screens. Hopefully the laptop seems to be alive after a reset.

But the main reason to choose a MacBook Pro over a MacBook is the integrated GeForce 9600M GT 3D GPU able to give 3X to 5X more game speed, or to enable real CUDA computations.

What will Apple do this time?

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