Intel-based Mac

Now that Apple computers have started using Intel chips, is it time for business to replace their Windows PCs with MACs? May be not, at least for short term.

One of the reasons Steve jobs has decided to go with Intel is the more limited supply of PowerPC than Intel's Pentium processors, as well as temperature issue on PowerPC. Currently, x86 processor families have very good performance, comparable to high performance RISC processors, although these x86 CPUs are still considered CISC.

For Apple users, the migration news is all good: The new computers using Intel's Core Duo dual-core chips offer two to five times the performance of previous Apple computers and Apple is selling their PCs for the same price as its older, slower computers (based on G4/G5).

I have compared performance between the PowerPC-based MAC and Pentium-4 based PC in term of performance and quality of graphic, Apple is still the winner. The performance is somehow is higher on Apple, I think this is something to do with the Unix-based O/S (Mac X) instead of patch-and-stitch Windows. The Mac X was designed from ground-up with ease-to-use and performance in mind, while Windows XP is more or less inherits the nightmare of Windows 95 and NT. Not to mention that Mac X is also more secure.

Another beauty of Mac is its consistency. All the shortcuts are consistent and work the same throughout all applications, while on Windows this is not the case. Linux, in this case, is the worst. Commands on vi, for instance, mostly are different than emacs, etc. Another beauty of Mac is truely PnP feature. With Windows, we still have to spend some time to click here-there to make a device work. Forget that in Apple World!

Now, more and more commodity products are being used by Mac. From standard USB, graphic card, hard drive and now the CPU itself. I expect price on Mac will go down a bit because of this (unless Mr. Jobs wants to be mega billionaere).

I think, soon people will develop some kind of emulator to run Windows-based applications (sort of WINE in Linux), and guess what? more customers change their religion to MAC.

Connecting WRT54G router to another Router Wirelessly

As I posted before, I was unable to make my Linksys WRT54G router to connect to another wifi router (NETGEAR WG11) wirelessly, eventhough I downloaded a firmware that was supposed to support WDS. Yesterday, I tried again after reading an article at AnandTech: HOWTO: Use Linksys WRT54G as a Wireless Ethernet Bridge.

I downloaded all of the firmwares on www.dd-wrt.com, but only one firmware I tried, as the documentation told me to try the generic version first. After resetting my router, I saw the web menus of the router changed totally. There are more options/features available, but I was just concentrating on how to make my Linksys router could communicate and act as a bridge to my NETGEAR router as the Internet Gateway router.

I disabled all security settings, make ESSID and channels on both routers the same and then add MAC address of Linksys router in the NETGEAR's Allowed Address List. After that, I selected AP on Linksys. I checked the status, but still Linksys showed the signal is 0 dBm. After disabled security, surprisingly, after I check network status on the Linksys, it showed there was some signal. Cool, I said. But, still it did not get any IP address from NETGEAR.

I then bravely select "client-bridged", and it worked now! But I still don't know how to connect to my Linksys router, because it is now acting as a bridge and there is no IP assigned it. It is acting as a transparent bridge (connecting to NETGEAR wirelessly), and my other PC connected to the Linksys got assigned IP address from the NETGEAR.

Anyway, I am now happy because I can now used it to bridge other PCs which do not have wireless cards and the location inhibit them to connect to the Internet router by wire. I still don't know whether this wireless bridge really works as a bridge (able to connect more than one wired PCs to other PCs connected to another router) or just acts as a 'extender'. Will post again later after I've found out.

Game Emulator

A number of open-source developers has established a project called "Multiple Emulator Super System" (MESS) to develop an emulator to make Linux PC able to play old games. Sounds cool, heh?

The Official MESS Home Page

Here are some screenshots of the page. Look at those games, man...they are really old (some of them are like pre-historic games :-)

http://www.mess.org/messscrs.html

AMD64 3400+ is faster than Pentium EE?

I just realized that my AMD 6400+ laptop was actually faster than Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 3.72 GHz CPU after reading the following link:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/21/the_mother_of_all_cpu_charts_2005/page24.html

Connecting Holux GM-210 GPS Receiver to Laptop

I bought my portable GPS receiver a few years ago. It was designed to connect to my Sony CLIE NX80V PDA. Somehow, since then I almost never used it. Perhaps because it was too cumbersome to put in my card. I thought I could connect to my laptop, but no it couldn't, because the connector is different.

Now, somebody has posted a way to connect it.

http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~igor/GPS2Clie.html

Some Optimization Flags on GCC

Yesterday, I was playing around with some optimizations options supplied by GCC (ver 4.0.2) on my AMD64 laptop. I created a very small code to compute sin(x) * cos (x). As we know, Pentium and newer processors support a FP machine code to compute these two functions simulatenously in single mnemonic code: FSINCOS.

the code is as follow:

#include

inline double fsincos(double x)
{
return sin(x)*cos(x);
}

First, I compiled it to assembly source with no optimization enabled, just using defaults as follow:

> gcc -c -S fsincos.c -o fsincos.s

and then open the generated assembly code in fsincos.s. Overthere I saw somewhere it called internal library functions for sin and cos trigonometry functions as I expected. I then recompiled it with full optimization flags enabled:

> gcc -c -S -mtune=athlon64 -mfpmath=sse -msse3 -ffast-math -m64 -O3 fsincos.c -o fsincos64.s

Suprisingly, it still called GNU's "sin" and "cos" math functions!. What? I said (not loud, though). I checked again the gcc man page, nothing special about these things. Hm....let's try to add "387" in the mfpmath, I said in my mind.

So, the command is now as follow:

gcc -c -S -mtune=athlon64 -mfpmath=387,sse -msse3 -ffast-math -m64 -O3 fsincos.c -o fsincos64.s

Voila! now the assembly code called inline FP code "fsincos" in it. Since then, I add an environment variable in the enviroment as follow:

export CFLAGS="-mtune=athlon64 -mfpmath=387,sse -msse3 -ffast-math -m64"
export CPPFLAGS=$CFLAGS