If that doesn’t work check out these two awesome threads on crunchbang as one guy is helped out by this amazing community and taken through his problem step by step, trying every solution along the way(any of which might work for you)

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/15278/solved-mpd-client-cant-connect-timeout

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/150347/

On the CPU side, the A10-4600M packs a quad-core powered “Piledriver” CPU clocked at 2.3 GHz with 4MB of L2 cache, a TDP of 35W and features Turbo Core Technology, capable of bringing the clock speeds up to 3.0 GHz. On the GPU side,  you’ll find an integrated Radeon HD 7660G clocked at 685Mhz with 384 Radeon cores, which can be coupled with a discrete Radeon HD 7670M for Crossfire.

I could go off about the AMD A10-4600, comparing to the A10-5800k but like they say a picture is worth 1000 words, so here’s a couple grand worth on this new Trinity APU.

This laptop has 8GB of Ram on it a 1TB drive and with a clock speed of 2.3GHZ it’s probably the 4600M APU which would come with 4MB L2 cache, four cores and four threads as well as support for 64-bit and a TDP of 35W.

So there we have it ladies and germs, details are indeed starting to emerge as the new AMD ultrathins and AMD notebooks powered by the Trinity APU are starting to be released.  While I won’t be lining up to get my hands on one, I’ll certainly be doing my homework and be buying one as soon as possible.. Expecially at this cost

Did a little reading around and found some mentions of having to remove alsa from my /etc/mpd.conf file but that seemed a little drastic to me as for whatever reason I think the idea of having it as an option is a good idea.  I remember in GMP you can choose alsa or pulse and so sure enough I restarted MPD, connected GMP to the server and went into the server drop down menu and unchecked alsa (shortcut key ctrl+1) .. Sure enough the music played fine.

If you are wondering why I am using MPD and not Amarok or the like check out my post here: http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2012/03/01/getting-mpd-to-work-with-pulse-audio-in-debian-squeeze/ - You’ll be happy you did if you care about system efficiency like the rest of us who can’t afford powered rigs with oodles of ram

While you may be thinking that you know all there is to know about the Accelerated Processing Unit or APU, as made famous by AMD, I’m here to tell you that perhaps there’s just a few tidbits that you don’t know just yet.  While it is easy to think that the Accelerated Processing Unit is the love child of AMD, with their Llano Cores, their Bulldozer Cores and their new Piledriver Cores, it wasn’t AMD that birthed such a technological marvel.  AMD are just the ones who marketed it the best.  I mean with named like the AMD Trinity or the AMD Piledriver it’s hard not to expect that to stick in your head over(cue unenthusiastic voice) Northbridge or, wait for it, Ivy Bridge.  Hmmm, a big powerful dirty machine that’s slamming beams into the ground or a serene bridge with a bit of ivy growing up the side of it?  Which of these names do you think will stick in the minds of male computer enthusiasts around the world?  And then there’s the AMD Trinity which just brings up either images of Divinity or hot chicks in skin tight black vinyl outfits kicking serious ass.  You have to admit that while Intel is certainly winning the CPU war AMD is cleaning up in the marketing department

So anyways, I digress, back to the APU.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now while the term APU or Accelerated Processing Unit really came into the lime light in 2011 with the introduction of AMD’s APUs, most notably Llano the term accelerated processing unit or APU was first used in a public context with respect to accelerated computing in 2006, and prior to that in various presentations and business plans written by Joe Landman of Scalable Informatics.  In fact some of you may remember this little device called a Playstation 3 which was powered by IBM’s Cell processor which itself is an APU.  In fact a point can probably be made that one of the driving reasons why we have high end APU’s from AMD like the Trinity set to be released on May the 15, 2012 costing so little is because of the millions and millions of PS3′s being sold and the demand for APU like components driving up competition and driving down costs from manufacturers of accelerated processing units.  As well as an enormous amount of R&D funded in part by Sony for this release.   Other examples of previous APU chips are Examples include AMD Fusion, IBM CELL, Intel HD Graphics, and NVIDIA‘s Project Denver.   Although it can be argued that AMD is leading the charge at this point and definitely delivering the largest improvements and gains to the APU tech as a whole.  AMD is banking heavily that these Accelerated Processing Units are the future and by all counts they definitely seem to be.  It doesn’t seem a matter of If APU’s will become the norm but simply a matter of when.. I mean if you can tap into the insane power of the computers GPU to handle regular non-graphical complications when needed without requiring somethign complicated like CUDA then why the hell wouldn’t you want that?  But when you consider what the accelerated processing unit brings in terms of power and heat reductions the possibilities for implementation into the mobile arena are huge, and that is definitely where computing seems to be going.

For more on the Accelerated Processing Unit or APU and a better description into how it works, check out an earlier post dedicated to that the topic: http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2012/05/03/what-is-an-apu/

]]> http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2012/05/04/the-accelerated-processing-unit/feed/ 0 http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2012/05/04/improving-wireless-stability-and-connectivity-in-debian-squeeze-with-atheros-ar9287/ http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2012/05/04/improving-wireless-stability-and-connectivity-in-debian-squeeze-with-atheros-ar9287/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 22:36:36 +0000 admin http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/?p=1071 [continue reading...]]]> Well ever since moving to my new apartment here the landlords wifi has just been atrocious.  I mean I lived down in Colombia, I’ve piggy-backed off wifi signals in Croatia, i’ve backpacked around the world jerry rigging blackberries as tethers in developing countries in the middle of no where and this wifi here is BY FAR the worst I have ever experienced.  So today, enough was enough and I went on a hunt to improve it.. Here are the 5 things that I did to improve it.

• Remove the power saving feature: iwconfig wlan0 power off
• Disable some fancy encryption module: sudo modprobe -v ath9k nohwcrypt=1
• Go into your router and have it broadcast in wireless G only.  The N spectrum is notoriously horrible in apartment buildings or where there is a lot of competition.  Besides if you need more than 54 Mbits of transfer then you should really be plugged in with cat5e and not going over the airwaves.
• Get WICD installed.  More often than not if the network manager can’t connect WICD will be able to and rarely vice versa.  You should note that you need to right click on the traditional network manager and uncheck ‘enable wireless’ or WICD won’t be able to connect on it’s own.  Overall I find WICD to be just that, fucking wicked when it comes to wifi and 9 times out of 10 it will work where gnomes network manager won’t
• Specify your own DNS.  always use Google DNS when possible.  You should be able to edit the connections properties in wicked and specify 8.8.8.8 for the primary DNS and 8.8.4.4 for the secondary

Hope that helps.  I’m using an Acer Aspire 5253 e-350 btw and as of writing this post I haven’t been dropped from my connection once which

next rename .Skype to .Skype_saved and restart skype

You will be able to login correctly but not mcuh good without all your stuff so copy _saved directory over the regular one and see if that helps.

If it doesn’t then check this out:

You need to find out what is using yuor skype files at the moment whichi s causing skype to fail to load

One command to reveal such Skype lockfile-hogging processes is:

$ lsof | grep .Skype

This is going to tell yuo the process that is jamming up the gears.. Just kill it and you’re free!

INPAI had a chance to test out the new A10 5800k APU, and supporting socket FM2 motherboard and did some pretty nice comparisons to the A8-3850. INPAI put the two chips through SuperPi 1M, to measure single-thread performance, and 3DMark 06, to measure embedded-GPU performance. In SuperPi, A10-5800K crunched SuperPi 1M in 23.775 s, the A8-3850 did the same in 26.039 s. With 3DMark 06, the A10-5800K scored 9396 points, while the A8-3850 scored 6223. The inference that can be drawn out of this little test is that the new Trinity A10-5800k has significantly faster graphics, not so much CPU (taking into account A10-5800K cores were clocked over 30% higher than those of the A8-3850).  One thing you might notice is the memory configuration on these two machines, it does seem a little strange the the Llano based machine is goign to have 8GB of ram while the AMD Piledriver APU machine powered by the A10 5800K only has 2.

Here are the pictures front that test:

Now for some juicy details care of CPU-World

The chip will come packed with 4Mb of L2 Cache, along with an HD7660D graphics solution, which falls within a 100W thermal design power (TDP). When compared to AMD’s A8-3850, the A10-5800k shows a big performance boost on the GPU front upwards of 50% or more, while the CPU performance increase is minor at best sitting around 18% or less.

Now I wrote a much more detailed article about the Trinity Benchmarks this week and instead of me going on about how high the A10-5800K scored in those APU benchmarks I’ll just link to that article here:

http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2012/04/27/amd-trinity-a10-cpu-benchmarks-and-gpu-benchmarks/

So there we have it, a little deeper look into AMD’s new Trinity Core A10 5800k , hopefully that unlocks a few more nuggest of insight into your potentially new AMD APU on your shopping list

So what sets these apart from convention cpus?  Well the big distinction here is that these chips are designed from the ground up, they are not an iteration on a previous design.  Everything was thrown away and started from scratch and done so with amazing ingenuity.  The most amazing thing that sets an AMD APU apart from traditional chips AMD(who bought ATI some years back if you remember) has combined the GPU and the CPU into one chip, or more precisely they have integrated a GPU into a CPU as from what I understand they are more stacked onto each other than just all melted into one.  The advantages of such a marriage are profound, especially when you consider that both of these components are now seamlessly sharing both resources on the board and power.  The power savings is where these bad boys really shine and we are seeing upwards of 50% power consumption drops with this next generation of AMD’s APU’s over a traditional setup and the efficiency is just going up.  Because of this device makers are able to start packing HUGE graphical power into devices that would have otherwise not have had the battery or space for it(remember with the GPU and CPU in one now they take up less space on the motherboard than before as well) or the ability to handle the heat generated by a traditional CPU and GPU setup.. It’s even better when you consider that the new Piledriver cores are basically equipped with 2 ATI GPU’s running in what could be called a quasi-crossfire setup.  So you have a quad-core chip with 2 graphics cards and you can easily fit it in a tablet and see the same battery life as before.   To put that into perspective that is more powerful than a high end desktop PC was say 3-4 years ago and it could hypothetically fit in a cellphone.

The other great thing here is that because AMD is the underdog in the industry they are the ones not only pushing this technology hard as it could represent a competitive advantage but they are also offering it for a song and a dance..  The estimated pricing on the new Piledriver or Trinity ultrathins, ultrabooks or laptops is around the $500 mark.  At that price it doesn’t take much to jump in on the APU train and see what all of the fuss is about.  So stop asking yourself: “What is an APU” and start seeing what the benefits of them are.  If it’s about time for a machine upgrade for you then now is a great time to do it as we haven’t seen this level of innovation since the last major shift in metal-gate transistors.

Now you know the benefits of an APU, you may be thinking about purchasing one of these fancy new processors. Upgrading to a new processor is never inexpensive, however. Is an APU worth your money?

The answer is yes, but on the other hand, it doesn’t matter if you upgrade now or later. You are, eventually, going to end up owning an APU no matter what you do. All of Intel’s processors from here on, with the exception of the Atom processor, will be APUs. AMD’s entire line of processors will be updated to APUs by the end of this year. And Nvidia, which recently announced intentions to create a line of ARM processors for desktops, will of course be creating an APU.

In fact, you may want to wait, if only because this technology is relatively new. Both Intel and AMD are hard at work on new products that further leverage the advantages of this design, and AMD’s desktop APU is unlikely to become available before the summer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Later this year the company’s poorly-received Bulldozer line will be replaced by Vishera, and there look to be no further refreshes to its high-end desktop CPUs on the horizon. it makes sense, really, given the rumors we’ve seen over the past couple of months, as AMD looks to distance itself as a direct competitor to Intel, leverage its graphics know-how, and work on improving its low power x86 implementations for thinner laptops and tablets.

Also due out this year are AMD’s 32nm Trinity APUs, which will replace the company’s Llano line. We had the opportunity to test Trinity back at CES, and came away impressed with the APU after an extreme multi-tasking demonstration. We’ve since heard that the low-voltage variety likely to find its way into ultra-thin laptops won’t be quite such a workhorse — the low-voltage 17W Trinity is on-par with the 35W Llano chip — but we should at least see improved battery life there. Interestingly, both the standard and low voltage varieties are set to be available in dual- and quad-core configurations.

Although AMD could have announced the presence of Trinity and Brazos 2.0 parts in the channel sooner, it would have been largely irrelevant. AMD needs its APU chips to be integrated into laptops and embedded devices and what Hughes’ announcement really means is that machines with Trinity and Brazos 2.0 processors are just weeks away from hitting store shelves.
AMD is banking heavily on its APU chips to help it compete against Intel. While AMD enjoyed success with Llano and Brazos processors in 2011, it needs to push on and execute well, as Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge processors will also include a bump in the graphics department

AMD’s “Brazos 2.0” Accelerated Processor Unit (APU) family will be used for essential desktop and notebook, netbook, tablet, all-in-one and small desktop form factors. This allows us to address a fast-growing segment of the PC market where AMD’s APUs have proven success with the original “Brazos” line-up – the C-Series, E-Series and Z-Series APUs. We will add plenty of new features to the “Brazos 2.0” APU family, including increased CPU and GPU performance, longer battery life, a bevy of integrated I/O options and improvements to AMD Steady Video technology. “Brazos 2.0” is scheduled to hit the market in the first half of 2012.

As for next year, the company seeks to standardize around moving its APUs and GPUs over to the 28nm process, except for a continuation of its lone quad- and octo-core high-end 32nm family of CPUs, codenamed “Vishera.” Starting with Trinity, that A-Series of Fusion chips will be known as “Kaveri” in its third iteration, and will be offered in 35W, 25W and 17W flavors. “Kabini,” the follow-up to Brazos, will have two- and four-core models, and carries the vague promise of “better graphics” and lower power consumption. In the case of both the Kaveri and Kabini families, AMD will begin integrating the fusion controller hub, allowing for a more bona fide system on a chip. At the lower-power end of the spectrum, the “Temash” platform will succeed the Z series, but we don’t know much about it except that it will be targeted at fanless tablets, fanless clamshells and other thin form factors expected to deliver exceptionally long battery life.

2013 brings major evolution to the client roadmaps as the vision presented by Rory, Mark and Lisa today begin to manifest – including moving our low power APUs to a system on a chip (SoC) design with the AMD Fusion Controller Hub integrated right into a single chip design.

In the performance APU category our third-generation APU, “Kaveri,” will employ “Steamroller” (the evolution of AMD’s “Piledriver” core architecture) x86 cores for enhanced instructions per clock and power advantages. Applications that take advantage of GPU accelerate will give users an amazing experience thanks to our Graphics Core Next and new Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) enabling features for easier programming of accelerated processing capabilities.

In the low power category, the “Kabini” SoC APU takes over for “Brazos 2.0.” This second generation low power APU integrates “Jaguar” x86 cores for augmented performance and energy efficiency. These APUs will also benefit from select HSA features and functionality.

We keep on innovating for the ultra-low power space in 2013. Our second generation, ultra-low-power “Temash” SoC APU will follow “Hondo” for tablet and other fanless form factors. This APU will also leverage the “Jaguar” low-power x86 cores and HSA features.

We at AMD strongly believe these roadmap updates help us time new product introductions with customer design phases to hit key sales cycles across a range of form factors and experiences. We are moving with the market and on the path to deliver exceptional productivity and user experience in a wide array of form factors.