LSM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE! If you do not currently receive LSM on a bi-monthly basis, you can easily do so totally free of charge by entering your email address in the box below and clicking the 'Subscribe' button.	Welcome Ed – Jonathan Burnside Welcome to the 3 rd issue of LSM. Hopefully some of our readers are still in country, and not relaxing under a palm tree in a foreign land. For those of you who are left slaving away in a hot sticky office (like the LSM team) we have two very interesting articles for your perusal. With the popularity of broadband increasing in the UK we thought we would try to shed a little more light on the subject by asking the question “What is broadband?”; and in doing so hopefully make you stop and think about whether your business is making the most of today’s communication technology. Our second article delves into the world of CPU’s (computer processors) and tries to steer you through the jargon, so that you come out of the other side with a little more knowledge and a little less apprehension. If you have any topics you would like us to cover in forthcoming issues then please click on the ‘Feedback’ button, this will present you with a form that you can fill out and submit to us. We’ll look forward to hearing from you.


Broadband - What is broadband by Yuri Tang ©2004 The answer most people would give would be similar to this: “a connection to the internet that is much faster than the normal dial-up modem, and it is always connected.” This answer is correct but there are other aspects to consider. Broadband can help communication, information and entertainment evolve. I have detailed some of these below: Voice-over-IP will bring more phone lines at lower costs and other aspects have been discussed such as, integrating voice messages with emails. Web-based video-on-demand , for example, full-length films for streamed or downloaded viewing, or 24-hour news when desired. Interactive TV is around today but has not reached the full potential of its capabilities. It is believed that the web will be available on television sets. Should this happen, the possibilities could be endless, such as videoconferencing from the comfort of the lounge from your own home. There are different ways to get broadband, these include Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL), wireless, and satellite. DSL is the most common way to get broadband, as it uses ordinary phone lines. DSL will allow you to be connected to the Internet, while talking on the phone simultaneously. Satellite gives the same results as DSL, the difference is that a satellite dish is used to connect, instead of telephone wires. The adoption of broadband in the UK has been slow compared to other countries. This is not due to it being a new technology or that its coverage is limited. Broadband now covers around 85 per cent of the country, with this expected to rise to 99.7 per cent by next year. In the UK there are around four million connections, with a forecast of this doubling by next year. Out of all companies and organizations in the UK, only around 18 per cent have a fast connection (not necessarily broadband), and the majority of these are large companies, though medium- sized companies are turning to broadband. UK Broadband is near the bottom of the G7 league table, according the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Though the latest figures show the UK has moved from 22 nd to 17 th in terms of adoption and remains 6 th among the G7 countries. What are the benefits? It could be said that people are not fully aware of the benefits of broadband. The common benefits are the faster connections, it is always connected and the fixed cost, gives people peace of mind. It is claimed the businesses that have broadband installed are saving 52 days a year in productivity. Other than the faster connection, there are a number of other benefits that can allow different working methods, such as, working from home while connected to the companies network, remote back-up, videoconferencing and accessing multimedia applications via the Internet. For companies in some other countries that have broadband, they could never go back to a dial- up modem for it has become an integral part of there working lifestyle. The problem with adoption in the UK could be partly put down to lack of understanding of broadband. UK businesses are suffering and many don’t even know it!

Processors - Clearing the Confusion by Yuri Tang ©2004 Have you every gone to purchase a PC and been confused about the different processors that are available, and are not sure of the difference between them? If so, the aim of this article will go some way to give you a better understanding of the various processors. The first microprocessor was released back in 1971, called the 4004. This was developed for Intel by Marcian E. Hoff, with a speed of 108 KHz. Nowadays there are three main different types of processors available these are Pentium, Celeron and Athlon. The Pentium and the Celeron are produced by Intel and a company called AMD make the Athlon processors. In 1993 the Pentium processor was born and its speed was 60 MHz. This seems very slow nowadays but back then, it was one of the fastest around. During this time up until 1997, there were a number of releases of the Pentium, such as the Pentium Pro and the Pentium MMX. The fastest speed the Pentium reached was the 200 MHz mark. The Pentium was replaced with the Pentium 2 in 1997 with introductory speeds of 233, 266, 300 MHz. Also, at around this time Intel also released the Celeron processor. It was not long before the Pentium 2 became obsolete. In 1999 the Pentium 3 was released running 450 and 500 MHz, this was strongly rivalled by the AMD K6-III release with a speed of 400 MHz. The Pentium 3 and Celeron processors are still widely used to this day and reaching speeds of 1.26 GHz and more. The ‘war’ between AMD and Intel really began in 1999, with the introduction of AMD’s Athlon processor which boast a speed of 750 MHz. AMD, with the success of the Athlon, went onto rival Intel’s Celeron with the AMD Duron. To this day Intel has moved on from the Pentium 3 to the Pentium 4 which can reach speeds of up to 3 GHz. To briefly describe the differences between the processors. The only major difference between Intel’s processors, the Pentium and Celeron, is the size of the cache memory on the chip. This is the same with AMD’s Athlon and Duron. The Athlon can be compared to the Pentium and the Duron is similar to the Celeron. What is cache memory? Cache memory is memory built into the processor. The processor moves data to and from this memory as it works. This means data can be moved much faster than if it was being moved to or from the main system memory, so performance is increased. AMD or Pentium? Both are more or less on a par, though some will argue that AMD is better than Intel in a number of aspects. The most noticeably difference between the two is that AMD’s processors are half the price of Intel’s, but Intel is more widely known worldwide than AMD. The battle between the two will continue, and speeds will constantly get faster. Today’s processors will be ‘yesterday’s news’ in the ‘blink of an eye’, as each will try to improve and produce new processors.

unsubscribe

Vol 1, Issue 3: Monday, 2nd August 2004