Well assuming they left the pins accessible (at least on home routers they are nearly always brought out to pads for a header, I dunno about the pro stuff) and you have a suitable firmware image you can take control of the processors IO BUS over the JTAG (or similar) port and use it to program the flash chip. Such programs are sometimes reffered to as "debrickers"
You can either flash a full firmware image this way (doable but very slow) or you can program a minimal boot image and then install everything else through another method (more complex but potentially easier)
That should be enough to clean it out unless the bad guys have made serious hardware changes to the equipment.
If i'm behind a statefull firewall that disallows incoming connections from the net a lack of OS security updates doesn't worry me as much as a lack of browser security updates. Especially with a browser like firefox that tends to use it's own code for almost everything.
Yeah there could be a vulnerability in the TCP/IP stack but afaict they are a lot less common than browser vulnerabilities and harder for a compromised website to exploit.
We use the RoHS to keep the hippies quiet(er). Afaict manufacturers use the lead-free solder everywhere because it's the only way to make products legally sellable in europe and it's cheaper for them to take the higher cost and failure rate of lead free solder everywhere than to set up two totally different production and stock handling processes for different markets.
I would disagree. It's a major deal for me that the PS3 is so much quieter. The 360 is so loud that when we had both in the house people used the PS3 by preference, and if we wanted to play a game casually, it was always a PS3 game that got played. It also looked nicer:) Afaict this depends heavily on which generation of each console you have (they both got cooler and hence quieter with later revisions) and whether you install games to the HDD on the 360? (apparently the xbox 360 DVD drive is pretty noisy)
I've owned a PS3 for a while and recently got an XBOX 360 (got it for GTA episodes from liberty city just before they revealed it would be coming to the PS3:( ) and found the 360 is much quieter in long runtime playing (they are about equal until the PS3 warms up and revs the fan), I put this down to two things, firstly the fact that I copied the game (only played one so far) to the HDD before playing and secondly that the 360 I have appears to be a jasper (the latest most power efficiant generation)
I'd say a much bigger disincentive to console gamers online than losing thier subscription money is losing the ability for thier console to connect to the service at all.
I'm talking of the PS3 and XBox 360, of course, as it's my understanding that the Wii is backwards compatible already. This generation each console maker has done some form of backwards compatability, each has done it differently.
The PS3 emulates the PS1 in software pretty well though their are glitches (in particular i've had problems with video/audio sync in spyro cutscenes). Early models supported PS2 games as well though dedicated hardware but this was later gimped by doing some of it in software (we europeans never got the ungimped version:( ) and then dropped. Sony has no consoles before the PS1.
The xbox 360 handles backwards compatability through the use of a software emulator tweaked to each particular game. This means that not all games are supported and you need an internet connection (and ofc this will also create a problem if MS ever drops said download service) and I'm pretty sure you need a hard drive too (both to download the tweaked emulators and to provide space for emulating the original xboxes hard drive). MS has no consoles before the xbox.
The wii has very good (i'm not aware of any issues with it other than lack of support for some rare addons like the lan adaptor and the gameboy player and the need to obtain a gamecube controller if you don't already have one) backwards compatability with the gamecube which is hardly surprising as hardware wise it's little more than an overclocked gamecube. Some games from earlier nintendo consoles (and other systems too) are also offered through the emulation based virtual console but this requires repurchasing them and afaict there is no easy way to transfer them from one wii to another.
Yes a few consoles support some level of BC and the virtual console type things improve things further but the situation with games is still far worse than with video etc. If I want to play through the ratchet and clank series with decent performance I need either a PS3 with the proper BC (which where I live means an import of an early model from across the pond, and afaict most americans who have them to sell will only do so to other americans) or both a PS2 and a PS3. Until they recently rereleased secret agent clank on PS2 I'd have also needed a PSP.
If I want to play all the 3D GTA games (inc the episodes) at the moment I need at least two consoles (basically either a PS2 or PSP and an xbox 360, if the sony console is a PSP then the 360 needs a HDD). Admittedly that will change soon though when the exclusivity deal runs out (then it could be done on a PS3 with BC though I don't know how well those games run under it).
Can you name a movie series that I have to go to the trouble of buying multiple peices of playback hardware to watch through? Can you imagine a movie studio giving an exclusive license to one brand of DVD player (yeah I know there was the HD format war but all through that the studios kept releasing conventional DVDs that played everywhere)
Ratchet and clank (and from what i've read online the sequals too but i've never tried it, my PS3 doesn't have backwards compatability) is very laggy on the part hardware part software BC. The early levels are playable (though not pleasant) but completing the game with such a handicap would probablly be insanely difficult (the person I know who tried it gave up and bought a PS2)
Afaict the americans and japanese got backwards compatablity on all the initial models and a gimped version (part software part hardwa
We europeans got a much worse deal on it, we only ever had it on one model (the premium 60GB one which was considerable more expensive than the 40GB standard model) and it was the gimped version. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of PS3's on this side of the pond have no backwards compatability.
I don't know when they disabled the functionality According to wikipedia the versions with gimped backwards compatibility were released in american in mid 2007 and those with none at all in late 2007. So if we assume the old models cleared pretty quick (unfortunately it's virtually impossible to find out when models stopped being available) it's about 6 months with good BC, 6 months with gimped BC and 2 years with no BC.
Combine that with the even worse situation in europe and i'd be VERY surprised if the majority of PS3 consoles had backwards compatability.
I've had mine for about 4 years now. Umm at least according to wikipedia the PS3 has only been out for just over 3 years (it was released late 2006, it's now early 2010)
I did not know I could play Game Cube games on the Wii. Now that I do know I can "borrow" some of my younger brothers GC games while he's away at university. Thanks. Be aware that you need a gamecube controller to play gamecube games on the wii.
Video... Back in the day is was an analog signal Yes
that was digitized to 1's and 0's and was therefor you could perform the opposite opperation and make it back into analog and it would play just fine, yes? If you spent a heck of a lot of money building up the infrastructure to store and retrieve those ones and zeros yes. At the consumer level we just stored the analog video signal directly (well nearly directly) on tape.
So now we have camera's that have a light sensitive chip that gets all its charged area's scanned n times per second and therefor we skip the analog part since we directly have 1's and 0's, yes? The ADC may be on the chip or it may be a seperate chip close-by running in lock-step with the chips pixel clock but yeah you get a stream of digitial data from it.
So I assume that the amount of data being pulled off the chip is rather large and therefor is it beneficial that it is compressed, aka zipped or some other compression algorithm. lossless general purpose compression algorithms like deflate (used in zip) aren't going to cut it with the type and volume of data you get from a video sensor.
Using JPEG on each frame individually (MJPEG) brings it down to sizes that are tolerable for capture but not much good for storing a movie library and way too big for use on the internet.
Using interframe redundancy elimination along with JPEG like techniques (early MPEG) brings it down a bit more but again not really far enough to get acceptable quality video at bitrates that allow reliable realtime web viewing.
Now I have had the occasion to work on still images and I would imagine the "raw" format is just those bits uncompressed, yes? Thats pretty much what a camera raw file is yes, of course noone tends to do any significant work with an image in that state since it reflects all the odities of the sensor. So it gets converted to a more traditional image format (which is even larger)
So is it a true statement that all one really needs is a compression tool to make the video file a reasonable size for transmission, yes? There are three problems
1: making a codec that is good enough to enable acceptable video quality at acceptable bitrates (theora has acheived this afaict though it's not quite as good as H.264) 2: avoiding all known patents in the area while doing so (afaict theora has tried to do this, there is still a risk of a submarine patent or a patent being interpreted more widely than someone expected though*) 3: convincing the other side (MS, Nokia etc) to accept it (nokia at least currently claim it's a submarine patent risk).
HTML5 is a markup standard. Where it pertains to video is in the standardization of video-related markup, i.e. the "video" tag, not video formats. The problem is a standard video tag is of limited use if there is no baseline codec that a web developer can use and expect any web browser to render it.
MPEG and ISO come from a world where it is considered acceptable to make descisions that force everyone who wants to use your standard to pay license fees. That doesn't fit well with the free and open nature of the web. They are even considering requiring license fees for merely distributing the files rather than just encoding and decoding them at some point in the future!
Some FOSS projects take the approach of ignoring patents and this works for smaller more under the rader projects but it's a risky strategy. Those behind the projects could end up facing huge legal problems at any time. A further complication is that while the expiry of patents is a good thing in general patent holders sometimes get very litigious when thier patent is about to run out and extracting money from it becomes a case of now or never.
So the obvious thing for those creating the web standards to do would be to make the baseline format one that was developed to avoid relying on patented technology. Unfortunately certain major vendors refuse to implement it claiming it is a "submarine patent risk". So the HTML 5 guys are left with a choice between not specifying a baseline format at all or alienating one of the major groups of implementers.
The problem is there are lots of books out there where it is not reasonably practical to get in touch with the copyright holder. Hell with some of them the copyright holder probablly doesn't even know they own it (BTW does anyone what happens legally to a copyright a company owns but doesn't know they own when said company goes bankrupt?).
IIRC Google decided to make such books available anyway claiming that doing so was fair-use (a somewhat tenuous claim) and someone sued them over it, got the case made a class action and tried to settle the case in a very pro-Google way.
I really wonder if they initiated the class action deliberately to let them get things settled in Googles' favour, if they did then it's a blatant abuse of the class action system.
I think you misunderstand me, most threads aren't blocked because they need access to data. They are blocking because they are waiting for something to happen (the user doing something, a network packet coming in, a timer tick, a soundcard asking for more audio data etc). Just look in task manager and see all those 0% entries in the CPU column.
Desktops are rarely doing more than one intensive job at a time and even more rarely doing more than two. This means that unless your apps can break an individual job into multiple threads (and as I said above the number of threads shown in task manager is no indication of whether an app will do this) or you run a lot of background batch tasks adding cores (particularly beyond the first two) has little benefit.
One problem I see coming up is energy, roughly speaking (Newtonian physics) kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity
So if you double your exhaust velocity (and keep your energy losses the same) you double your propellant efficiency but halve your energy efficiency.
In other words if you want a spaceship with high acceleration and high propellant efficancy you are going to need to find a shitload of power from somewhere....
For compatibility with brittle programs, Vista and 7 label whatever drive they booted from "C." No vista labels whatever drive they were installed on C and break horribly if that mapping is lost (say by sliding the partitions arround with gparted to move the freespace from one partition to the next);)
If you have UAC disabled things work just about well enough to launch regedit and fix the mappings. If you have UAC enabled then you'll need to boot another windows install launch regedit, load the registry from the broken install and edit it.
At least that was the situation with vista with no service packs, I haven't tried it with later vista service packs or win7.
but iirc the sam database has a fixed location relative to the windows dir and on the majority of machines the windows dir is in one of a few places. If you can get the sam file you can probablly read out a list of accounts on the system and make a good guess at the user profile locations (while your at it you can also pass the password hashes to lophcrack).
More importantly though you could read other sites cookies (which you normally don't have access to), the systems account database (which you can then pass to l0phcrack and then pipe the results to your SMB and remote desktop clients)
Afaict the major browsers do not offer compatible embedding interfaces so if you want to actually embedd a html view (rather than just adding a window to the users sea of browser windows) you pretty much have to pick one engine.
"which would have been 3 sets of dual cores." The have been previous intel hex-core processors which were three dual-core dies in one package.
This is one die though it does seem to have two seperate L3 caches. feeding off a central memory controller and queue (with the two QPI interfaces on the other end of the L3 caches).
These multicore processors won't be running web browsers, unless it's because they're hosting a dozens of virtualized desktops that users are working on over the network. While it looks like there will be a xeon version of this chip for two-socket server/workstation systems it looks like there will also be a single-socket version for the high-end desktop market.
The blunt fact is that neither intel or amd can make the individual cores that much faster so they have pushed multicore into the mainstream. Other than netbooks/nettops I haven't see a new machine with a single core processor in ages and even quad-core processors are seen in fairly low end systems these days. While i'm sure initially these 6-core CPUs will be very expensive I'd expect to see them in midrange desktops in the next few years.
Well... take a peek @ your Taskmgr.exe (with the processes tab open & the threads column selected + viewable)...
You'll probably see pretty much as I do here, and, as I have for YEARS now no less: That most of the processes running on your system now have 2-N threads running PER PROCESS already No they have 2-N threads per process, afaict there is no indication in task manager how many of them are running/runable.
Most threads spend most of their time blocked waiting for some kind of event, while occasionally doing some quick action in response and then blocking to wait for an event again. The number of tasks doing serious processing work is usually in the range 0-1 unless you either start multiple intensive tasks at once or you have software that is specifically designed to take advantage of multiple processors/cores.
Ah, so you don't realize that the cheapest Celeron nowadays is a dualcore 2.5 GHz No it isn't at least it isn't if you shop at newegg. A quick look at newegg shows the cheapest celeron as being a 1.8GHz single core though it is a core 2 based device.
If we ignore the improvements from core 2 to core i7 and assume the time taken to perform his workload is inversely proportional to CPU speed and core count then the celeron would have taken 9 hours 36 minuites, depending on his commute time and working day length it may or may not have finished by the time he got home from work.
According to toms hardware a core 2 duo at 3GHz will give over 45FPS on the settings they used. If we assume framerates are linearly proportional to the processor speed then a 1.6GHz C2D would give 24FPS
Given that toms hardware didn't use minimum settings the minimum processor requirements seem to be a reasonable reflection of what is barely adequate to play the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Well assuming they left the pins accessible (at least on home routers they are nearly always brought out to pads for a header, I dunno about the pro stuff) and you have a suitable firmware image you can take control of the processors IO BUS over the JTAG (or similar) port and use it to program the flash chip. Such programs are sometimes reffered to as "debrickers"
You can either flash a full firmware image this way (doable but very slow) or you can program a minimal boot image and then install everything else through another method (more complex but potentially easier)
That should be enough to clean it out unless the bad guys have made serious hardware changes to the equipment.
If i'm behind a statefull firewall that disallows incoming connections from the net a lack of OS security updates doesn't worry me as much as a lack of browser security updates. Especially with a browser like firefox that tends to use it's own code for almost everything.
Yeah there could be a vulnerability in the TCP/IP stack but afaict they are a lot less common than browser vulnerabilities and harder for a compromised website to exploit.
No they aren't but using a browser that is no longer getting security updates doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.
We use the RoHS to keep the hippies quiet(er).
Afaict manufacturers use the lead-free solder everywhere because it's the only way to make products legally sellable in europe and it's cheaper for them to take the higher cost and failure rate of lead free solder everywhere than to set up two totally different production and stock handling processes for different markets.
I would disagree. It's a major deal for me that the PS3 is so much quieter. The 360 is so loud that when we had both in the house people used the PS3 by preference, and if we wanted to play a game casually, it was always a PS3 game that got played. It also looked nicer :)
Afaict this depends heavily on which generation of each console you have (they both got cooler and hence quieter with later revisions) and whether you install games to the HDD on the 360? (apparently the xbox 360 DVD drive is pretty noisy)
I've owned a PS3 for a while and recently got an XBOX 360 (got it for GTA episodes from liberty city just before they revealed it would be coming to the PS3 :( ) and found the 360 is much quieter in long runtime playing (they are about equal until the PS3 warms up and revs the fan), I put this down to two things, firstly the fact that I copied the game (only played one so far) to the HDD before playing and secondly that the 360 I have appears to be a jasper (the latest most power efficiant generation)
I'd say a much bigger disincentive to console gamers online than losing thier subscription money is losing the ability for thier console to connect to the service at all.
I'm talking of the PS3 and XBox 360, of course, as it's my understanding that the Wii is backwards compatible already.
This generation each console maker has done some form of backwards compatability, each has done it differently.
The PS3 emulates the PS1 in software pretty well though their are glitches (in particular i've had problems with video/audio sync in spyro cutscenes). Early models supported PS2 games as well though dedicated hardware but this was later gimped by doing some of it in software (we europeans never got the ungimped version :( ) and then dropped. Sony has no consoles before the PS1.
The xbox 360 handles backwards compatability through the use of a software emulator tweaked to each particular game. This means that not all games are supported and you need an internet connection (and ofc this will also create a problem if MS ever drops said download service) and I'm pretty sure you need a hard drive too (both to download the tweaked emulators and to provide space for emulating the original xboxes hard drive). MS has no consoles before the xbox.
The wii has very good (i'm not aware of any issues with it other than lack of support for some rare addons like the lan adaptor and the gameboy player and the need to obtain a gamecube controller if you don't already have one) backwards compatability with the gamecube which is hardly surprising as hardware wise it's little more than an overclocked gamecube. Some games from earlier nintendo consoles (and other systems too) are also offered through the emulation based virtual console but this requires repurchasing them and afaict there is no easy way to transfer them from one wii to another.
Yes a few consoles support some level of BC and the virtual console type things improve things further but the situation with games is still far worse than with video etc. If I want to play through the ratchet and clank series with decent performance I need either a PS3 with the proper BC (which where I live means an import of an early model from across the pond, and afaict most americans who have them to sell will only do so to other americans) or both a PS2 and a PS3. Until they recently rereleased secret agent clank on PS2 I'd have also needed a PSP.
If I want to play all the 3D GTA games (inc the episodes) at the moment I need at least two consoles (basically either a PS2 or PSP and an xbox 360, if the sony console is a PSP then the 360 needs a HDD). Admittedly that will change soon though when the exclusivity deal runs out (then it could be done on a PS3 with BC though I don't know how well those games run under it).
Can you name a movie series that I have to go to the trouble of buying multiple peices of playback hardware to watch through? Can you imagine a movie studio giving an exclusive license to one brand of DVD player (yeah I know there was the HD format war but all through that the studios kept releasing conventional DVDs that played everywhere)
Ratchet and clank (and from what i've read online the sequals too but i've never tried it, my PS3 doesn't have backwards compatability) is very laggy on the part hardware part software BC. The early levels are playable (though not pleasant) but completing the game with such a handicap would probablly be insanely difficult (the person I know who tried it gave up and bought a PS2)
Afaict the americans and japanese got backwards compatablity on all the initial models and a gimped version (part software part hardwa
We europeans got a much worse deal on it, we only ever had it on one model (the premium 60GB one which was considerable more expensive than the 40GB standard model) and it was the gimped version. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of PS3's on this side of the pond have no backwards compatability.
I don't know when they disabled the functionality
According to wikipedia the versions with gimped backwards compatibility were released in american in mid 2007 and those with none at all in late 2007. So if we assume the old models cleared pretty quick (unfortunately it's virtually impossible to find out when models stopped being available) it's about 6 months with good BC, 6 months with gimped BC and 2 years with no BC.
Combine that with the even worse situation in europe and i'd be VERY surprised if the majority of PS3 consoles had backwards compatability.
I've had mine for about 4 years now.
Umm at least according to wikipedia the PS3 has only been out for just over 3 years (it was released late 2006, it's now early 2010)
I did not know I could play Game Cube games on the Wii. Now that I do know I can "borrow" some of my younger brothers GC games while he's away at university. Thanks.
Be aware that you need a gamecube controller to play gamecube games on the wii.
Video... Back in the day is was an analog signal
Yes
that was digitized to 1's and 0's and was therefor you could perform the opposite opperation and make it back into analog and it would play just fine, yes?
If you spent a heck of a lot of money building up the infrastructure to store and retrieve those ones and zeros yes. At the consumer level we just stored the analog video signal directly (well nearly directly) on tape.
So now we have camera's that have a light sensitive chip that gets all its charged area's scanned n times per second and therefor we skip the analog part since we directly have 1's and 0's, yes?
The ADC may be on the chip or it may be a seperate chip close-by running in lock-step with the chips pixel clock but yeah you get a stream of digitial data from it.
So I assume that the amount of data being pulled off the chip is rather large and therefor is it beneficial that it is compressed, aka zipped or some other compression algorithm.
lossless general purpose compression algorithms like deflate (used in zip) aren't going to cut it with the type and volume of data you get from a video sensor.
Using JPEG on each frame individually (MJPEG) brings it down to sizes that are tolerable for capture but not much good for storing a movie library and way too big for use on the internet.
Using interframe redundancy elimination along with JPEG like techniques (early MPEG) brings it down a bit more but again not really far enough to get acceptable quality video at bitrates that allow reliable realtime web viewing.
Now I have had the occasion to work on still images and I would imagine the "raw" format is just those bits uncompressed, yes?
Thats pretty much what a camera raw file is yes, of course noone tends to do any significant work with an image in that state since it reflects all the odities of the sensor. So it gets converted to a more traditional image format (which is even larger)
So is it a true statement that all one really needs is a compression tool to make the video file a reasonable size for transmission, yes?
There are three problems
1: making a codec that is good enough to enable acceptable video quality at acceptable bitrates (theora has acheived this afaict though it's not quite as good as H.264)
2: avoiding all known patents in the area while doing so (afaict theora has tried to do this, there is still a risk of a submarine patent or a patent being interpreted more widely than someone expected though*)
3: convincing the other side (MS, Nokia etc) to accept it (nokia at least currently claim it's a submarine patent risk).
* That risk is very hard to avoid completely.
HTML5 is a markup standard. Where it pertains to video is in the standardization of video-related markup, i.e. the "video" tag, not video formats.
The problem is a standard video tag is of limited use if there is no baseline codec that a web developer can use and expect any web browser to render it.
MPEG and ISO come from a world where it is considered acceptable to make descisions that force everyone who wants to use your standard to pay license fees. That doesn't fit well with the free and open nature of the web. They are even considering requiring license fees for merely distributing the files rather than just encoding and decoding them at some point in the future!
Some FOSS projects take the approach of ignoring patents and this works for smaller more under the rader projects but it's a risky strategy. Those behind the projects could end up facing huge legal problems at any time. A further complication is that while the expiry of patents is a good thing in general patent holders sometimes get very litigious when thier patent is about to run out and extracting money from it becomes a case of now or never.
So the obvious thing for those creating the web standards to do would be to make the baseline format one that was developed to avoid relying on patented technology. Unfortunately certain major vendors refuse to implement it claiming it is a "submarine patent risk". So the HTML 5 guys are left with a choice between not specifying a baseline format at all or alienating one of the major groups of implementers.
The problem is there are lots of books out there where it is not reasonably practical to get in touch with the copyright holder. Hell with some of them the copyright holder probablly doesn't even know they own it (BTW does anyone what happens legally to a copyright a company owns but doesn't know they own when said company goes bankrupt?).
IIRC Google decided to make such books available anyway claiming that doing so was fair-use (a somewhat tenuous claim) and someone sued them over it, got the case made a class action and tried to settle the case in a very pro-Google way.
I really wonder if they initiated the class action deliberately to let them get things settled in Googles' favour, if they did then it's a blatant abuse of the class action system.
I think you misunderstand me, most threads aren't blocked because they need access to data. They are blocking because they are waiting for something to happen (the user doing something, a network packet coming in, a timer tick, a soundcard asking for more audio data etc). Just look in task manager and see all those 0% entries in the CPU column.
Desktops are rarely doing more than one intensive job at a time and even more rarely doing more than two. This means that unless your apps can break an individual job into multiple threads (and as I said above the number of threads shown in task manager is no indication of whether an app will do this) or you run a lot of background batch tasks adding cores (particularly beyond the first two) has little benefit.
One problem I see coming up is energy, roughly speaking (Newtonian physics) kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity
So if you double your exhaust velocity (and keep your energy losses the same) you double your propellant efficiency but halve your energy efficiency.
In other words if you want a spaceship with high acceleration and high propellant efficancy you are going to need to find a shitload of power from somewhere....
For compatibility with brittle programs, Vista and 7 label whatever drive they booted from "C." ;)
No vista labels whatever drive they were installed on C and break horribly if that mapping is lost (say by sliding the partitions arround with gparted to move the freespace from one partition to the next)
If you have UAC disabled things work just about well enough to launch regedit and fix the mappings. If you have UAC enabled then you'll need to boot another windows install launch regedit, load the registry from the broken install and edit it.
At least that was the situation with vista with no service packs, I haven't tried it with later vista service packs or win7.
but iirc the sam database has a fixed location relative to the windows dir and on the majority of machines the windows dir is in one of a few places. If you can get the sam file you can probablly read out a list of accounts on the system and make a good guess at the user profile locations (while your at it you can also pass the password hashes to lophcrack).
More importantly though you could read other sites cookies (which you normally don't have access to), the systems account database (which you can then pass to l0phcrack and then pipe the results to your SMB and remote desktop clients)
Afaict the major browsers do not offer compatible embedding interfaces so if you want to actually embedd a html view (rather than just adding a window to the users sea of browser windows) you pretty much have to pick one engine.
"which would have been 3 sets of dual cores."
The have been previous intel hex-core processors which were three dual-core dies in one package.
This is one die though it does seem to have two seperate L3 caches. feeding off a central memory controller and queue (with the two QPI interfaces on the other end of the L3 caches).
These multicore processors won't be running web browsers, unless it's because they're hosting a dozens of virtualized desktops that users are working on over the network.
While it looks like there will be a xeon version of this chip for two-socket server/workstation systems it looks like there will also be a single-socket version for the high-end desktop market.
The blunt fact is that neither intel or amd can make the individual cores that much faster so they have pushed multicore into the mainstream. Other than netbooks/nettops I haven't see a new machine with a single core processor in ages and even quad-core processors are seen in fairly low end systems these days. While i'm sure initially these 6-core CPUs will be very expensive I'd expect to see them in midrange desktops in the next few years.
Well... take a peek @ your Taskmgr.exe (with the processes tab open & the threads column selected + viewable)...
You'll probably see pretty much as I do here, and, as I have for YEARS now no less: That most of the processes running on your system now have 2-N threads running PER PROCESS already
No they have 2-N threads per process, afaict there is no indication in task manager how many of them are running/runable.
Most threads spend most of their time blocked waiting for some kind of event, while occasionally doing some quick action in response and then blocking to wait for an event again. The number of tasks doing serious processing work is usually in the range 0-1 unless you either start multiple intensive tasks at once or you have software that is specifically designed to take advantage of multiple processors/cores.
Ah, so you don't realize that the cheapest Celeron nowadays is a dualcore 2.5 GHz
No it isn't at least it isn't if you shop at newegg. A quick look at newegg shows the cheapest celeron as being a 1.8GHz single core though it is a core 2 based device.
If we ignore the improvements from core 2 to core i7 and assume the time taken to perform his workload is inversely proportional to CPU speed and core count then the celeron would have taken 9 hours 36 minuites, depending on his commute time and working day length it may or may not have finished by the time he got home from work.
According to toms hardware a core 2 duo at 3GHz will give over 45FPS on the settings they used. If we assume framerates are linearly proportional to the processor speed then a 1.6GHz C2D would give 24FPS
Given that toms hardware didn't use minimum settings the minimum processor requirements seem to be a reasonable reflection of what is barely adequate to play the game.