If the rumors are true, Facebook will be putting ARM based servers in their upcoming Oregon data center, dumping x86 in a nearby river. In an environmentally friendly fashion, it is Oregon after all. In any case, there won’t be any x86 parts needed at the privacy specialists.

What ARM chip are they going to be using? This is where the game of connect the dots begins, and all the rumors point to Smooth-Stone, an Austin, Tx chip design startup. A few more rumors link the boards to SuperMicro, but that link is a bit more tenuous. In any case, it won’t be long before all the details are revealed.

It looks like ARM has grown up enough in raw CPU power to hit the proverbial ‘fast enough’ point for a single Facebook thread. Now it becomes a question of wattage vs threads. An Intel/AMD x86 CPU runs more threads but consumes more watts. The wattage per thread appears to have come down on the side of ARM, at least for Facebooks PHP-ish code.

The thought of this will scare Intel silly, not only did they lose a contract potentially for tens of thousands of Xeons a month because of power, but they didn’t win it with Atom. In fact, they lost it to the one rival that they don’t have a direct answer to, the ARM ISA.

If Facebook’s experiment pans out, it may change how things are done in the data center, and collapse prices. Actually, since Facebook is moving to ARM, it isn’t an experiment, so you can substitute all of the forward looking statements with more definitive ones. Things have changed in the data center, you just haven’t seen the results yet.

Source : SemiAccurate

]]> http://pradeeps.org/blog/21/extract-the-portion-of-audio-from-youtube-videos/feed 2 http://pradeeps.org/blog/14/vanish-self-destruct-your-messages-in-emails-blogs-social-networking-sites http://pradeeps.org/blog/14/vanish-self-destruct-your-messages-in-emails-blogs-social-networking-sites#comments Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:39:08 +0000 Pradeep http://pradeeps.org/blog/?p=14 I came across a technology developed by University of Washington about ‘Self Destructing Messages’. Its a small ‘system’ which can be used in Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook  to create a self destructing message that expires in a timelimit.  There is also a firefox 3.x plugin for the same. I am trying to install and try it out to see how exactly it works.

Here is a screenshot of the same.

Steps to install the system:

Step 1:  Download and install the Vanish Source from here.

Step2: Build the source.

Step 3: Install Firefox Plugin (xpi) or build the plugin yourself.

Step 4: Restart your PC.

Step 5: compose mail from going to Firefox -> Tools -> Vanish -> Create Vanish Messasge.

You have just created a Self Dstructing Message. You can configure the plugin to suit the time for self destruction.

You can find additional details of the Vanish Project here and here, including the configuration and installation.

Happy Vanishing!!!

Note: Use it with caution. This is just a prototype.

This site provides a basic understanding of using regular expressions in general and I think this is a will be a good start for novice programmers.

EDIT : here is another tutorial in perl with an inroduction to special pattern matching.

Please check back again.