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My Desktop Computer I

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz, 2 x 128KB L1 cache, 2 x 512KB L2 cache) - SGD 700
• MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (NForce4 Ultra) - SGD 295
• TWINMOS 4 x 1GB DDR400 CL2.5 RAM (TwinMOS gives 1 to 1 exchange, but they can only give CL3 RAM) - SGD 764
• MSI NX6600LE 256MB PCI-E display card - SGD 173
• BenQ 16X DVD writer - SGD 82
• LiteOn 40X CD writer
• Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA 10K RPM - SGD 307
• Maxtor 300GB SATA 7.2K RPM - SGD 232

My Desktop Computer II

• 2 x AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz (128KB L1 cache, 256KB L2 cache)
• Tyan TigerMP (AMD760MP)
• 4 x 256MB DDR266 RAM
• GeForce4 MX460 128MB AGP 4X display card
• Sound Blaster Vibra 128
• Pioneer 16X DVD writer (lend to friend)
• 2 x Maxtor 40GB ATA 7.2K RPM (1 is crashed however)

Network Storage

• LANDISK Pro with Seagate 500GB ATA133 7.2K RPM - SGD 128 + SGD 350

:( The memory error corrupts my file system! Luckily I backup my data often. So, I bought a network storage to enforce my backups. You dont want to lose any data such as your photo albums, do you? Damn it poor memory!

Cousin Cendawan changed job and got her first new salary. Our tradition is to have big feast :D. This time we had our dinner in a japanese restaurant.


The first side dish we had, worth SGD 20+. The fish bones were to be fried after we finished its meat. They took a long time to fry the fish bones, we thought they throw it to rubbish bin :p.

Cousin Cendawan and her best friend Evelyn.

Unagi Sushi set that I had, also worth SGD 20+. :p Nice and filling :) yummy

Unagi fried rice. Dont look down on this bowl of fried rice, it worths SGD 10 ;). This was the only set that helped to lower down the overall expenses (SGD 153 for 5 persons).

Cendawan's BF Mr. Thin eating steak worth at least SGD 15 I think. That whole plate had 1 and only 1 piece of steak :o. So he finished dinner the earliest.

BDD (Binary Decision Diagram) is a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). A node represents a logic function. A out-going directed edge is associated with the output of the node. Looked like a state machine ha?

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is becoming the buzz word in High Performance Computing. }:) 30x speed up results are commonly reported for various applications. Progeniq reported significant speed up on ClustalW software, a Bioinformatics application. :o

But, can you imagine using logic gates to perform tasks in a typical C program? Of course a C-to-FPGA compiler (e.g. Handel-C, Impulse C, SystemC) solves the problem. But, using FPGA does not automatically guarantee good speed up. The amount of logic gates, and the longest path in the logic gates must be minimized. These minimizations are difficult for the compiler. Hence, some efforts are required to help the compiler to achieve good performance.

The key for FPGA to success:

1. Quick conversions of existing programs for wide user coverage.
2. High performance, significantly faster than general purpose processors.
3. Portable performance to various FPGA chips.
4. Cheap is good.