mumbai meri jaan review
To start-off let me just first tell you that a movie could possibly have a good cinematography, nice story, and even a few good dialogues accompanied with a pleasingly nice backdrop as standalone; but it’s really rare to have them all at one place and tickling that good movie chemical reaction in a bollywood style…yup that’s really rare…but amidst all oddities a small gang of actors made our lethargic, numb, dead soul fire on ire to become belligerent against serial bomb blasts.
I cannot withhold myself but praise the actors you name any, say it Paresh Rawal, Menon, Irfan, Madhavan or Soha or even seemingly oblivious Vijay Maurya. One could really admire the depth the director has in the understanding of the human emotions. it wasn’t just someone crying beating his chest but even the subtle emotions were very precariously handled. This movie really gave us a break from the series of routine sleazy flicks. This is more of a documentary just because it contains some heavy, serious issues or else it contains all of the enigmatic charm of a great movie.
But the real worthy candidate worth praise is definitely the writer who brings forth to us different characters from downtrodden to well-off, from utopian school of thought to the bohemian, from police to media; and the series of events and psychological changes which gets kick started as aftermath of these crisis. The only scope of improvement was that the actual bomb blast could have been more visual but perhaps that too was done deliberately as the theme of the movie was to show not the obvious but the emotions and cries which other wise would have unheard-of. Again Paresh truly enthralled us with complex blend of deep thoughts amalgamated in humour and the way he passed on the messages of witholding the inter-religious confronts and to take onto the hardships of life to do something worthwhile before dying.
This movie surely could if not “would”, amass amazing amount of moolah but if it fails then it’s surely to blame onto the lack of publicity and not the movie making. Hands-off from my side to the team.
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Tags: bollywood, mumbai meri jaan, review
START-UP MENU
The cell concept was originally conceived by Sony Inc.‘s Kutaragi who thought that the computers could very well be designed as cells in a biological systems. The architecture as it exists today was the work of three companies: Sony, Toshiba and IBM joined in their hands for the sake of PS-3. IBM also brought it’s chip design expertise and in this case used a very aggressive approach by producing a fully custom design – the chip’s circuitry was designed by hand instead of with automated tools, very few other companies use this approach. IBM also has the industry’s leading silicon process which will be used in the manufacturing. Sony and Toshiba bring mass manufacturing capabilities and knowledge.
BRIEF REVIEW
This basically doesn’t really process the thread of instruction but rather it processes the cells of data or rather chunk of processes of similar types. This is sent to different cells and as a result of which the main processor has nothing to do but to instruct other cells to do its task. According to IBM the Cell performs 10x faster than existing CPUs on many applications. This may sound ludicrous but GPUs (Graphical Processors Units or Graphics cards ) already deliver similar or even higher sustained performance in many non-graphical applications [GPU10] . The technology in the Cell is similar to that in GPUs so such high performance is certainly well within the realm of possibilities. The big difference is though that Cell is a lot more general purpose so can be usable for a wider variety of tasks.
Power consumption has been estimated at 60 – 80 Watts at 4 GHz for the prototype but this could change in the production version.
An individual cell is made of a few elements. A few important of them are:->
1. One Power process element(PPE)
2. Eight(8) Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs)
3. Direct Memory Access Controller (DMAC)
4. Element Memory Access Controller(EIB)
PPE is a conventional 64 bit high clock speed dual threading capable in-order processor which sets up task for the SPE. It will use high bandwidth memory and I/O subsystems. It uses 512 k of cache but don’t underestimate it as the Cell’s PPE cache is more of a temporary holding area, where the PPE parcels the data and sends it off to a Synergistic Processing Element (SPE). Another interesting point about the PPE is that it includes support for the VMX vector instructions, (also known as “AltiVec” or “Velocity Engine” used currently in Mac). VMX can speed up anything from financial calculations to operating system functions though it (or its PC equivalents) don’t appear to be that widely used currently. One company which does use VMX extensively is Apple who use it to accelerate functions in OS X, it would not have been a huge job for Apple to utilize the PPE in the Cell.
But the RISK(reduced instruction set computing),is being used by the PPE ( for those who don’t know ;It is a belief that RISK lessens the hardware requirement and as result makes the C.P.U cheaper though on the other hand it makes the software programming a tedious job).
A 4GHz PowerPC which acts as PPE sounds like a pretty potent processor until we realize that the PPEs are really just used as controllers in the Cell – the real action is in the SPEs.
SPE :-> The real workers of the cell are these SPEs. In a demo Toshiba presented a Cell processor decoding 48 streams of video, of which only 6 of the SPEs were used for data decoding. Another was used for scaling the screen, and the last can be used for other tasks. The SPEs can function in unison, like decoding streams together, or they can be dedicated to completely separate jobs. The SPEs don’t have any cache, but they do have four 64 KB arrays of private memory, or Load Store (LS) units. This gives them a total of 256 KB of private memory. Current processor automate the use of the memory for tasks like data fetch and branch prediction, but this adds complexity and cost to hardware. The SPEs’ memory is not cache, but instead operates as flexible storage for the little processor. In Cell, programs must manage how this memory is used, and this potentially makes these functions far more efficient and specialized for the programs.
DMA channel :-> It allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory for reading and/or writing independently of the central processing unit. Many hardware systems use DMA including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards, and sound cards. Computers that have DMA channels can transfer data to and from devices with much less CPU overhead than computers without a DMA channel.
EIB :-> The EIB carries data traveling from the PPE and L2 cache to the SPEs and back again. It also connects this data to the Memory Interface Controller (MIC) and the FexIO Front Side Bus (FlexIO FSB). Through the MIC and FlexIO FSB, the EIB moves data from all those inner processors to parts of the computer outside the CPU, including system memory.
The key to the high speed is that there has been no slower part left on the processor from data processing to the critical data movement unlike earlier processor where the slower part was always hided to the consumer. But the best part of this whole new technology has still been not mentioned. Its biggest advantage would be that it will be able to use the other cell’s power installed in other parts of our house to improve our computing performance like using home theatre system’s to boost the frame rate while playing some latest game.
But the problem with all these would be the same as those as that of the multi-core processors; that the programs if not written to reap its power would just make it an average performance improvement. As the programs which could really utilize this abstract architecture would not be cake walk for programmers to code.
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vista capsule
Did you know?
• Vista incorporates a feature called live format which helps you use DVD-RW as a pen drive i.e. you can just drop down any file to get written on it and can erase any file you wish to . Just make sure that the DVD should be supporting more than or equal to 4x speed.
• Vista also supports hybrid disk which is in pipeline .Hybrid disk are the disks which are a mixture of the flash drives and traditional magnetic tape hard disk.
It supports rapidboost which allows the use of pen drives to speed up the system.
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CROSSFIRE
Crossfire, please don’t confuse it with the military term, for the sitting of weapons, so that their arcs of fire overlap. It’s all about a technology from ATI graphics, to compete with its rival NVIDIA’s Scalable Link Interface (SLI). It allows 2 PCIE graphics cards in the same computer system to be linked. The 2 cards are linked externally by a DVI like connector. The cards then work together, to render the image and hence improve graphics performance. CrossFire was first made available to the public on September 27, 2005.
To take the CrossFire advantage, you just require a CrossFire-compliant motherboard with a pair of PCI Express (PCIe) graphics cards, which can be enabled via either hardware or software. Radeon x800s, x850s, x1800s and x1900s come in a ‘CrossFire Edition’ that has ‘master’ capability built into the hardware, so they are enabled via hardware. You must buy a Master card, and then pair it with a normal card, but both must be from the same series. Radeon x1300s and x1600s have no ‘CrossFire Edition’, hence are enabled via software. Till now, FireGL cards can’t be set up in a CrossFire configuration.
As the Crossfire Master cards are expensive and in very high demand, the CrossFire Xpress 3200, allows two normal cards to run in a Crossfire setup. This chipset is capable of CrossFire through the PCI-e bus for every Radeon series below the X1900s, the driver accommodations for this CrossFire method has not yet materialized for the X1800 series, but it will be done soon, as per ATI.
Rendering modes
The CrossFire system supports four different rendering modes, which are:
• SuperTiling:
• CrossFire’s standard dual-GPU rendering mode.
• Divides the screen up like a checkerboard, allocating adjacent squares (‘quads’) to alternate GPUs.
• Supports all Direct3D applications (except OpenGL).
• Provides the least performance enhancement of the four modes, as SuperTiling does not allow the geometry of a scene to be scaled between two cards.
Note: SuperTiling only works on cards that have an even number of pixel quads.
• Scissor:
• Divides the screen into two rectangles, one above the other.
• In theory, SuperTiling should provide higher performance, because there is a better chance the work will be evenly divided between the two cards. But, the performance boost with Scissor mode is approximately equal to the SuperTiling mode.
• Commonly known as Split Frame Rendering (SFR), and nVidia refers to it in SLI.
• Alternate Frame Rendering(AFR):
• The fastest mode.
• As the name suggests, it sets one GPU to render odd frames, and one the even frames.
• It is incompatible with games using render-to-texture functions because one card doesn’t have direct access to the texture buffer of the other.
• CrossFire Super AA:
• Not designed for a large increase in frames per second.
• Intended to improve the quality of the frames rendered (hence ‘Super AA’ – super anti-aliasing).
• Able to double the anti-aliasing factor (eg. 4x, 8x and 12x) without any drop in framerate.
ATI has allowed CrossFire to be enabled on certain Intel chipsets, which boast two 16x PCI-E slots. On the other hand,SLI requires a motherboard which is SLI certified. Not only this, the new ATI CrossFire bridge has a higher bit width than SLI, while clocked a little slower. But still if an OpenGL game does not have a Crossfire profile, the AI system will default the rendering mode to Scissor, with no way to change it to a more suitable or faster mode. However SLI allows the rendering mode to be set for each application manually, even for games which do not have an existing profile.
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rapid boost
In the light of the RAID article published in the preceding edition let me bring to you the readyboost feature brought in by VISTA which incorporates the use of USB flash drive to improvise on the system performance. But before that let me help you out with few other terminologies.
1. VIRTUAL MEMORY – it is important to reiterate that all window OSs, vista included , will always make use of virtual memory, even when memory required by all the running processes do not exceed the ram. Each and every process running automatically gets its place in virtual memory named as pagefile.sys in a partition of disk. It is accessed whenever OS needs to load other important files.
2. PREFETCH – It was introduced by XP . Cache manager manages a list of directories of files used when a program is called. So when a program is called the cache manager stops the execution and it first checks out its own lists and loads the files which it thinks would be needed for the given applications and then it allows the called application to load itself. So the application finds most of the files in the memory itself which lessens the loading time. Again the cache manager directs the disc defragmenter to shift most of the files of the same applications in same region to avoid the delay caused by the disc head to move to different location.
3. SUPERFETCH – This is introduced by the vista. It overcomes the drawback of the prefetch technology. Prefetch improves the efficiency by loading the majority of the data beforehand but has to move the data to virtual memory when other applications are called. So the data from memory keeps loosing and it has to again reload the same when again called.
Here comes superfetch which also traces which application caused the data to be removed so that when that application ends it reloads the lost data on its own so that the user finds the application as responsive as before.
Superfetch also checks how often and when we use the application.
4. EMD – (extra memory device) now this process causes more use of data retrieval from the hard disc however the hard disc is slow. Here we make use of the speed and reliability of a flash drive which is relatively inexpensive and efficient.
READY BOOST PERFORMANCE ISSUE
Now people might say that faster hard disks actually has higher transfer rates to USB flash drive. It is true mostly for large sequential file reads. So ready boost is smart enough to load the larger chunks of data from the hard disc itself. Basically if the drive head of the hard disc has to move substantial amount to find small chunks of data flash drives leads the race. And you need not fear for the security reasons as the data stored in it is encrypted using AES-128. So no leakage of personal data.
P.S. -
• Not all USB drives are readyboost compatible. 2.5 mb/s to read and 1.5 mb/s for write is the minimum requirement.
• Recommended flash drive size is equivalent to the ram size of the system.
• There is no such method devised to use the power of superfetch in XP. So please don’t waste your time finding one.
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