Thursday, July 15, 2010

Patch Tuesday Will Fix Flaws in XP, Windows 7, Servers

July's light Patch Tuesday will fix remote-code vulnerabilities in Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows Server versions. The four bulletins will also patch Microsoft Office, especially a flaw in Outlook. Security researchers are irked by Google engineer Tavis Ormandy, who gave Microsoft just five days to fix the Windows XP vulnerability. Microsoft is preparing for July's Patch Tuesday, which centers on Windows and Office. With only four bulletins -- compared to 10 bulletins with a record-tying 34 vulnerabilities in June -- IT Relevant Products/Services admins can breathe at least a partial sigh of relief.

Nvidia PhysX Software is Ancient, Slow for CPUs

PhysX for CPUs is built on x87. Not the best choice on modern day CPUs, it seems.

Nvidia's acquisition of Ageia in 2008 was a strategic move to boost the marketability of its GPU offerings. With the discontinuation of the dedicated PhyX boards, the acceleration moved to the GeForce GPU as a differentiation factor that set it apart from AMD's ATI cards.

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460

At the very end of May we saw NVIDIA’s first effort to expand Fermi beyond the $300 space with the GeForce GTX 465, a further cut-down GF100 core priced at launch at $279.
Unfortunately for NVIDIA, it wasn’t even a lackluster launch – while GF100 performs quite well with most of its functional units enabled (i.e. GTX 480), disabling additional units isn’t doing the GPU any favors. Furthermore disabling those units does little to temper the chip’s high power draw – something that’s only reasonable on the higher-end cards – resulting in a card that ate a lot of power while losing to AMD’s Radeon HD 5850.
In short, the GTX 465 is a lesson of how you can only cut down GPU so far. NVIDIA went too far, and ended up with a part that had GTX 285 performance and GTX 470 power consumption.