Windows XP still most used OS

Microsoft's Windows XP is still comfortably the most popular operating system after gaining a larger share of the market in January, new stats have shown.

Despite Redwood's best efforts to convert users to Windows 7, the decade-old XP OS still had 47.19 per cent of all PC and Mac users in January, up from 46.5 per cent in December.

Windows 7, which had sold over 400 million licenses as of last summer making it the fastest-selling operating system ever, has 36.4 per cent of the market, according to figures from NetApplications.

With the next generation Windows 8 OS set to go public this year, it seems unlikely that Windows 7 will be able to overhaul XP before that transition takes place.

No support for XP beyond 2014

Microsoft is still attempting to convince businesses and home users to upgrade to Windows 7 before Windows 8 arrives, with the company dropping support for XP in just two years time.

Over 8 per cent of personal computer users are still on Windows Vista and, as bad as Vista proved to be, it still has a bigger market share than Apple's Mac OS X.

The Macintosh software has 6.39 per cent of all users, which is actually up an entire percentage point from one year ago.

iPhone 4S Preliminary Benchmarks: ~800MHz A5, Slightly Slower GPU than iPad 2, Still Very Fast

Apple's ability to control the entire information chain, down to the point of limiting leaks, appears to be gradually slipping as it grows as a company. Case in point are the numerous hardware and performance leaks surrounding the newly launched iPhone 4S. Little did we know that several weeks ago we were staring at photos of the 4S' PCB, and more recently we've seen the first performance results from Apple's first A5 based smartphone thanks to a few eager users around the web. We've compiled these results here from various sources (all linked below) and compared them to our existing database of tests.

The results are pretty much as expected. Javascript performance finally catches up to Tegra 2 based Honeycomb devices, while general CPU performance is significantly higher than the iPhone 4. I suspect Ice Cream Sandwich will bridge the Android smartphone gap (the Honeycomb equipped Gtab 8.9 is here to give you an idea of where a more modern Android browser ends up).

Keep in mind that all of these tests measure performance of the software stack in addition to the hardware. In particular the web browser tests depend largely on browser optimizations, which is why we see differences between similar hardware running different browser versions. Also note that all results were run at stock, with the stock browser. Finally, although these browser tests were captured on video we'll still be running our official tests once our 4Ses arrive and will update accordingly.

Update: We made a mistake in our original presentation of the SunSpider numbers and compared the iPhone 4S' 0.9.1 results to our existing database of 0.9.0 scores. We have since updated the graph to compare directly to our 0.9.1 numbers. The rest of the results are unaffected. I apologize for the confusion. The distribution is a lot tighter than before, however the relative standings don't really change. I still fully expect ICS to narrow a lot of this gap between iOS and Android devices - if we look at the lone Honeycomb result you get an indication of that. Note that we always run our benchmarks on a stock OS/browser configuration. 

Using some of the integer and fp tests of published Geekbench scores we can already conclude that Apple is shipping a lower clocked A5 in the iPhone 4S than it does in the iPad 2. This naturally makes sense as the iPhone 4S has a much smaller 5.25 Whr battery. Based on the Geekbench results it looks like the iPad 2 is clocked around 25% higher than the iPhone 4S, pegging the latter's clock speed at 800MHz.

A lower clock not only means higher yields from the factory, but likely a lower operating voltage as well. Dropping a CPU's core voltage, yields a greater-than-linear decrease in power consumption, making the marginal loss in clock speed a good choice. At a lower operating frequency than its Android competitors, Apple does have to exploit its strengths in software to avoid any tangible performance penalties. Apple has traditionally done this very well in the past, so I don't expect the loss of frequency to be a huge deal to the few who do cross-shop iOS and Android.

Unsurprisingly, memory bandwidth doesn't appear to have gone up either compared to the iPad 2's A5 (taking into account scaling due to CPU clock increases). The Samsung part number on the iPad 2's A5 indicates two LPDDR2-800 die on package, it's safe to assume that whatever Apple clocked the memory interface at in the iPad 2 remains unchanged in the iPhone 4S.

The GPU results tell a similar story courtesy of some early GLBenchmark 2.1 results. The 960 x 640 results are useless as they are bound by vsync at ~60 fps. Luckly GLBenchmark 2.1 added an off-screen render mode at 1280 x 720 where we can really see the differences between the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S A5 implementations:

Here the iPad 2 holds a ~21% performance advantage, which once again I assume to be all related to clock speed. Also note the huge advantage over the existing iPhone 4. The GPU power in the 4S should be more than enough to run any well written, current generation title at well north of 30 fps on its display.

We'll be reviewing the iPhone 4S in the coming weeks, stay tuned!

Source: GLBenchmark Database, Geekbench Database, Macrumors

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Intel, AMD still rivals

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) recently launched a new line of the pieces of waiter and of consumer, the most revolutionary processors of waiter since Pentium there calls them is of pro almost 15 years.

Xeon 5500 series erases pieces of Xeon of precedent-generation in almost each reference mark which you throw to it.

Is the war of processor finished thus? Did Intel gain? Not, and not yet.

Advanced Micro Devices is to the bottom at present, but hardly outside.

It directed speed races clearly recently, concentrating more on products of graphs. And him 's working with its own pieces of the second generation, which will be produced with financial fresh bottoms by its arm of manufacture recently turn-with far.

While waiting, AMD can cling to some markets of place where it always shows the muscle, such as systems of monster of eight-processor and waiters bottom-of-the-range.

Especially, him 's not really a battle head with head at present.

The whole market of piece is thus beaten downwards by this recession and the reductions by resulting from budget of technology that you can think at Intel and AMD like rivals wedged in the same boat.

It seems more the reasonable one to try to raise the back all the market lost instead of the massacre above some points of market share.

He 'time of S to make a larger meat pie. Fights above the sections later.