LCD monitor calibration website

So I recently purchased a DELL U2410 24" LCD display to complement the existing DELL 2209WA 22" LCD. As I do a lot of graphics / web design work that requires very accurate colour representation, the DELL monitors certainly come up with the goods! They are both h-IPS (In Plane Switching) panels, as opposed to the cheaper TN (Twisted Nematic) type which is most commonly found these days.

The main benefit of IPS panels is that it provides excellent viewing angles, and this particular DELL U2410 also provides full coverage of the sRGB colour space with 10bit colour processing, meaning that it's capable of displaying lots of colours accurately!

I calibrated these displays, and you can also do this with your monitor. Firstly, install the WCS colour profile which is supplied by the manufacturer (also available via Windows Update). Then calibrate the brightness, contract, and gain levels for each channel, Red, Green, and Blue - Windows 7 users can use the Monitor Calibration tool found under the Control Panel area (or type "dccw.exe" in the start bar). I found this website provided some valuable tests: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ also.

AMD Displays Die-Shot of Upcoming Eight-Core "Orochi" Processor for the First Time

Based on the upcoming Bulldozer architecture, it's 2 years behind schedule but we're looking forward to it just the same!



AMD "Orochi" design is the company's next-generation processor for high-end desktop and server markets. The chip will feature eight processing engines, but since it is based on Bulldozer micro-architecture, those cores will be packed into four modules. Every module which will have two independent integer cores (that will share fetch, decode and L2 functionality) with dedicated schedulers, one floating point unit with two 128-bit FMAC pipes with one FP scheduler. The chip will have shared L3 cache, dual-channel DDR3 memory controller and will use HyperTransport 3.1 bus. The Orochi chips will use new AM3+ form-factor and will require brand new platforms.

Source: X-bit Labs

Seven Keyholders to the Internet

Did you know that the fate of the internet rests in the hands of seven individuals dispersed around the globe? Well it’s a fact and not a well known one for sure. In the event of a cataclysmic event that disrupts the internet, they are the ones that gather to restart it. In the event of a terrorist or other attack on the Internet, the key holders will be flown to an undisclosed location in the USA. Each key contains a fragment. If at least five are united, they will form a master key that can restore the Internet.

The keyholders come from USA, Canada, Britain, Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, China, and the Czech Republic.

Source: Tom's

Silicon Photonics - The Future of Interconnects

Imagine all that copper cabling replaced with high speed optic fibre. Intel have announced chips that can do just that - with 4 light sources capable of 50 Gpbs transfer.

Light is a wonderful medium as it's not affected by electromagnetic interference, unlike traditional copper cables which carry electric current.

By adding more light sources this technology can scale into the Terabit/second range towards truly high-speed computing.

Source: Tom's Hardware

Latency maps

Could this be a new frontier in digital art?

When I/O latency is presented as a visual heat map, some intriguing and beautiful patterns can emerge. These patterns provide insight into how a system is actually performing and what kinds of latency end-user applications experience. Many characteristics seen in these patterns are still not understood, but so far their analysis is revealing systemic behaviors that were previously unknown.

Source: ACM

Interview with Intel re 48-core SCC chip (codename Larrabee)

Intel's shipping samples of its experimental 48-core processor (codename Larrabee). They are calling it a SCC "Single Chip Cloud computer". Some notable design features no floating point processor and clock speed around 1.6 GHz. It's interesting to see the future of this design, it seems highly suited for server consolidation / virtualisation applications. See the link below.

Of course the graphics card companies have been moving towards programmable architecture, their chips are highly suited for parallel applications also. Perhaps the CPU that we know of today (highly optimised single threaded) will become a "co-processor" of the future, much like the "math co-processor of the 80s).

Source: X-bit labs

Some very interesting heat transfer technologies

Article features a many carbon based nano technologies, very promising!

Source: FrostyTech