I was busy at work today, however, it was a quiet day with both my secretery and one of the partners away ((there were not together I might add)). On one project I'm trying to drop an access road down to a level where I plan to place some houses. Problem is the drop is over 7.5m and there are limits to how steep such an access road can be, as well as maintaining adequate widths on straight and curved sections of the route. I'm tempted to scrap the access road down, in favour of off-road parking. Not only am I far from being a road engineer, any route down is bound to be a very costly exercise. Even creating off-road parking will be expensive to build due to the need for a huge retaining wall...just not quite as expensive as creating a long single carriage road winding down the site at a 20% gradient ((1:5)).

The other project is a small ((240m.sq.)) light-industrial unit. Basically a series of boxes that small businesses could move into. Nothing spectacular.

Intel are moving away from their traditional processor naming system. Currently, they name processors using type and speed - i.e. Pentium4 3.0GHz. However they're soon to be changing all that to a model number system, like AMD use...and generally as is seen in the electronics industry anyway, which reflects more on the overall performance of the processor...not just the speed it runs at. Afterall, there are now three Pentium4 2.8GHz processors which I think are based on NorthwoodB Springdale/Canterwood and Prescott chipsets where the main differences are the amount of cache, FSBs of 400/533/800 and a few new instructions. Even I'm confussed these days and to be honest, specifying an Intel CPU/mobo combination can be awkward.

I've read the new system will work something like this...
- Pentium 4 520 (2.8 GHz)
- Pentium 4 530 (3.0 GHz)
- Pentium 4 540 (3.2 GHz)
- Pentium 4 550 (3.4 GHz)
- Pentium 4 560 (3.6 GHz)
...and these are for the Prescott based Pentium 4 processors. I've got a NorthwoodB Canterwood based Pentium 4 3.0GHz. It would have a model number to reflect it's overall performance against the whole range of Pentium 4 processors...which most likely would mean its model number is lower than the new prescott running at 3.0GHz - which is good because I can instantly see that overall, the new prescott 2.8GHz actually actually faster. Not sure they're gonna go back to the older chips and rename them all, though certainly for the future, this will be a good move. Motherboards can then specify they support Intel CPUs of a certain model range, which would make specifying matching parts easier.

Again, AMD have been doing this already, as have Apple and more commonly, other electronic products have tended to use model numbers anyway. So while it may be a little wierd at first, in the long run, everyone will benifit...and AMD can stop telling Intel they're not being friendly to the majority of people who can't read all those nitty-gritty specifications in order to find out what they're actually buying in a CPU.