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Antivirus Morro

Microsoft’s has finally announced it’s free anti-virus software and is ready for launch. The company was already testing its software with the help of the beta testers and just last week it announced to the testers that now it was time to go public.

Microsoft tried to market Live One Care, three years age, which just did not take off and became a commercial flop. So it had announced that it will be instead available for free somewhere in 2009.

Codenamed Morro, but primarily called Microsoft Security Essentials, it has everything that you would normally find in other anti-virus products but the difference is its free. It features anti-virus, scan-on-demand, anti-spyware and protection in real-time.

The software which was code-named Morro after the famous Brazil’s beach Morro de Sao Paolo, will surely hurt the sales revenue of Symantec and McAfee, which makes most of their profit from their products for Windows PCs from protection against viruses and attacks by hackers. Its most probable that Microsoft will be shipping their latest Windows OS bundled with the anti-virus and charge some service fee in the near future.

The software can be installed on Windows XP SP2 or later versions, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Once it goes live, it’ll be available as a download from Microsoft’s official website

The Next Generation Chips being developed by IBM might just be the answer for the speed hungry and the limitation posed by today’s technology to further pack more speed into a chip without more power consumption and keeping it small.

IBM Research and the California Institute of Technology announced a scientific breakthrough that can be a major leap to enable semiconductor industries to pack extra speed & power into the tiny computer chips, & at the same time making it more energy efficient & less expensive in manufacturing

IBM Scientist have been experimenting to use DNA and Advance Nano technology to build tiny circuits which can then form the basis for the chips and high-speed processors. Consequently this will lead to better efficiency in terms of power consumption by the chips and also to integrate larger number of circuits inside a chip.

The Semiconductor industry till now had been facing the problem of developing lithographic technology for creating chips that are smaller than 22 nanometer. But this new method of using DNA’s scaffolding is that the carbon nanotubes might get deposited & get itself assembled in exact patterns joining/sticking to DNA molecules which might just be the answer in crossing the “below 22 nm” mark.

While citing that the high cost involved in shrinking circuits for performance was hampering in keeping up with Moore’s law and also a concern for the industry, Narayan, manager, Science & Technology, IBM Research, said that this breakthrough will lead to development of high end chips that are not only cost effective but also fulfill the high demands of today’s world for efficient and more powerful processors.

Intel Co has unveiled their much awaited GPU(Graphics Processor Unit) “Larrabee” at the Intel Developers Forum(IDF) 2009. Intel had for long stuck to their mainstream chips and processors development, but with this release they have atlast announced their entry into the Graphics segment which had long been dominated by Nvidia and Amd with their GeForce and Radeon product.

The GPU running a multi-core (six) 32nm Gulftown processor system demonstrated its capability by ray-tracing in real-time Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. Larrabee differs from other GPU’s in the market in the sense that it’ll be using x86 instruction with its own specific extensions.

Cache coherency will be one of the features in the cores and will be also including least of the hardware’s specialized graphics and without performing any blending in software or clipping and even z-buffering, it uses a tile-based approach of rendering.

While the demonstration was quite overwhelming, Intel did not disclose any details on the highly anticipated chip.

However Intel confirmed that Larrabee Architecture would eventually be integrated with Desktop CPU at some point but for now it will debut purely as a “GPU”. The Larrabee GPU is scheduled to release around second half of next year and expected to compete with ATI and Nvidia GPUs, the current market leaders.