HB blog

AMD officially announced first Quad Core 45-nm Opteron CPUs code name “Shanghai”.

They are not only up to 35% faster than previous line but also consume 35% less power. In addition improvements in virtualization can increase performance up to 40%.

They use improved Direct Connect Architecture in conjunction with HyperTransport 3.0 and AMD-V including new Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature.

New 45-nm process allowed to increase L3 cache size up to 6M.

newegg leading online retailed for conputer related equipment now expands in Canada.

New site is accessible here:

It was a while I did not check the status of the project, but after I opened my application it detected new version and prompted me do I want to update.

So now I have version 0.9.3. Here are the changes made from my last update:

0.9.3 (2008-10-07):

• fix an issue with opening non-ascii files
• updated Japanese and Brazilian translation

0.9.2 (2008-10-06):

• ability to disable auto-update check
• improved text rendering - should fix problems with overlapping text
• improved font substitution for fonts not present in PDF file
• can now open PDF files with non-ASCII names
• improvements to DDE (contributed by Danilo Roascio)
• SyncTex improvements
• improve persistence of state (contributed by Robert Liu)
• fix crash when pressing ‘Cancel’ when entering a password updated translations

As usual latest version can be downloaded from official web site.

Microsoft is rushing to release Windows 7…

After market success of Apple MAC OS X and Asus EeePC using alternative operating systems the ecossytem arround M$ succes is seeking for alternatives.

BusinessWeek reports that HP is trying to improve Vista or even replace it with another OS  possibly assembled by HP engineers.

HP has their own HP/UX unix based OS used in their high end servers so probably they will reuse their expertize in that field to release ..ux based OS.

Here is the next tests I’ve made on the same machine with same browsers as in the trevious tests. This test is benchmarking java script performance. And here is source of the test. Relusts are:

Opera

• Array object 391
• Date object 63
• Error handling 46
• Math object 63
• RegEx object 219
• String object 234
• DOM 172
• Ajax declarations 156
• Total Duration 1344

Firefox

• Array object  66
• Date object  42
• Error handling  89
• Math object  58
• RegEx object 191
• String object 726
• DOM  269
• Ajax declarations 378
• Total Duration  1819

Chrome

• Array object 273
• Date object 213
• Error handling 8
• Math object 17
• RegEx object 67
• String object 39
• DOM 55
• Ajax declarations 413
• Total Duration 1085

IE

• Array object 250
• Date object 79
• Error handling 187
• Math object 203
• RegEx object 531
• String object 110
• DOM 328
• Ajax declarations 703
• Total Duration 2391

Safari

• Array object 47
• Date object 78
• Error handling 219
• Math object 172
• RegEx object 125
• String object 31
• DOM 47
• Ajax declarations 156
• Total Duration 875

And the verdioct is:

Safari is the fastest in this test, followed by Chrome, Opera, Firefox and as usual IE is last one.

Side note: In the tests I’ve remarked that only opera and IE correctly(retained the formatting) copied the data in clipboard.

After first comparison let’s compare how fast browsers render CSS. We used following file running from local computer:

css-rendering-benchmark-2500-positioned-divs

File found here.

Here are the results:

• IE - 937ms
• Opera - 422ms
• Firefox - 730 ms
• Chrome - 337ms
• Safari - 141ms

The last two varied a lot in the measurements and the value is the one most frequently appeared.

Comments

As you can see results are similar to the previous tests. from bottom to top. IE, FF, Opera, Chrome and Safari wins.

Other tests will follow so subscribe to RSS feed .

Recently Google announced their own browser called Chrome. It seems pretty fast and promising, but still do you want to give all your information to Google…

But this post is not privacy related. After having so many browsers on the market probably you wonder which one is the best. Lets do some tests.

Test

One of the tests available is ACID available at http://www.acidtests.org/.

Latest version of the test is ACID3.

So lets started.

Participants

• IE 7
• FF 3.0.1
• Safari 3.1.2
• Opera 9.52
• Chrome Beta 0.2.149.29

What will be the testbed?

All tests are executed on Windows XP SP3

Results

Here is the showcase:

As you can see IE had real problems.
How the others will do?

Firefox is doing OK

Safari is doing really good….

For now Opera has highest score…

How Google browser will score?

Conclusion

As you can see none of the browsers did not pass ACID3 test. Chrome as Beta is better than FF and Safari, but still behind Opera. As for the other participant IE this was the only browser who did not pass even ACID2 test.

Does someone remember those ASCII pictures we used to print on old printers. Like this one:

db   db d8888b.  .o88b.  .d88b.  .88b  d88.    d888888b d8b   db d88888b  .d88b.
88   88 88  `8D d8P  Y8 .8P  Y8. 88'YbdP`88      `88'   888o  88 88'     .8P  Y8.
88ooo88 88oooY' 8P      88    88 88  88  88       88    88V8o 88 88ooo   88    88
88~~~88 88~~~b. 8b      88    88 88  88  88       88    88 V8o88 88~~~   88    88
88   88 88   8D Y8b  d8 `8b  d8' 88  88  88 db   .88.   88  V888 88      `8b  d8'
YP   YP Y8888P'  `Y88P'  `Y88P'  YP  YP  YP VP Y888888P VP   V8P YP       `Y88P'

Spammers get more and more creative… and start using this art to trick spam filters.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk continue to improve his PDF viewer.

Shortly after releasing 0.9, 0.9.1 is released for download.

Here are the improvements from previous version:

• improved rendering of some PDFs
• support for links inside PDF file
• added -restrict and -title cmd-line options (contributed by Matthew Wilcoxson)
• enabled SyncTex support which mistakenly disabled in 0.9
• misc fixes and translation updates

Download it

And welome TraceMonkey - new Mozilla JavaScript engine.

It will be introduced in Firefox 3.1.

It will bring near to native performance for the heart of Web 2.0 - JavaScript.

In tests published in mozilla blogs (Brendan’s blog) it is clear that it will be lighting fast in comparison to FF 3.

Actual numbers vary from 2 to 37 times faster.