Cray, known for its power and packaging prowess since 1976, when Seymour Cray bent the Cray-1 into a “C” shape, is unveiling a petascale-era cooling technology it says is more than 10 times as efficient as same-size water coils. Cray CTO Steve Scott discusses with HPCWire about this innovation and the company that was green [...]

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Advanced Micro Devices plans to announce its first desktop microprocessors produced using 45nm process technology on the 8th of January, 2009, the first day of Consumer Electronics Show. The code-named Deneb chips will not get truly high clock-speed boost, but will be able to offer substantially higher performance thanks to larger cache and architectural improvements.
The [...]

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Here is a blog post on TechCrunch titled, “Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?”, displays a chart of various technologies according to Gartner’s judgment. Here is an excerpt.
“New technologies tend to follow different trajectories of hype, hope, and despair as they are discovered by different groups of people and finally adopted (or ignored) by [...]

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NVIDIA is enabling native support for 2 and 3-way SLI on Intel X58 based motherboards…without the use of any nForce 200 chips.
Any X58 motherboard maker can submit their board for certification, which will be done by NVIDIA. If the board passes, and the motherboard manufacturer agrees to pay a certification fee (NVIDIA would not [...]

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EDN Executive Editor Ron Wilson expresses his views on research papers presented at Hot Interconnects conference.
“The lead-off session at the undeservedly little-attended Hot Interconnects conference at Stanford this morning examined the growing challenge on chip interconnect technology as today’s small-scale multicore processors evolve into chips with tens or hundreds of processor cores. Papers examined two [...]

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Nvidia’s CUDA-based computation acceleration hardware is expected to accelerate Agilent’s ADS Transient-Convolution Simulator, allowing designers to perform fast “what-if” design-space exploration using circuit-level models that can be verified against measured data and EM simulation of the artwork.
Full Story

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Michael Feldman, the editor of HPCWire writes the following article about the future of simulations in designing new products. An excerpt:
“Even a high-end PC — the one your teenage son is using — has a teraflop of performance under the hood. Of course, tapping into that performance for general-purpose computing is still a work in [...]

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The battle is heating up in solid-state drives (SSDs). An endless stream of companies are expanding or entering the SSD fray, leaving many to predict a shakeout in the arena.
Intel, Micron, SanDisk, Stec, Toshiba and countless others have recently rolled out new SSDs. On Tuesday (Aug. 27), Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said that it has [...]

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O2 Micro International Ltd. (George Town, Cayman Islands), a company with offices in Taiwan and China, has been granted U.S. patent number 7,391,237 for its FPGA architecture upgrade.
According to the patent abstract, the technology comprises an FPGA, a flash non-volatile memory and a complex programmable logic device. The Flash memory includes a first section configured [...]

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Renesas Technology America, Inc. has just made available an enhanced SH7786 dual-core 32-bit processor that delivers up to 1,920 million instructions per second (MIPS) when operating at 533MHz.
A second-generation version fabricated with a 65-nm process for high-performance multimedia equipment such as car navigation systems, the processor incorporates a DDR3-SDRAM memory interface for faster, ultrahigh-speed data [...]

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Quite contrary to rumors AMD scrapped its plans to bring dual-core K10 parts to the market, the chip maker may have already begun selling the line to its partners on the sly.
German tech site Hardware-Infos says its snooped out what appears to be the primary lineup of the processors (codenamed “Kuma”) from a listing on [...]

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Heise Online has more details on China’s Godson Multicore Processor.
“Godson is a heterogeneous multicore design: the chip consists of individual nodes, each node having four cores, four L2 cache blocks – size still unclear – and an 8×8 crossbar switch. Four connections each go to the cores and to the cache. The remaining eight are [...]

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Chinese researchers are preparing the first multicore versions of Godson, the country’s first homegrown microprocessor, with four- and eight-core designs scheduled to tape out in the coming months. China hopes to build a petaflops high-performance computer based on the Godson-3 in 2010.
The four-core version of the Godson-3 is scheduled to tape out before the [...]

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Acceleware® Corp. recently announced a new CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) based Acceleware solution for accelerating EM simulations with CST MICROWAVE STUDIO® (CST MWS). Trial tests of this new acceleration product have delivered performance gains of up to 40% compared to the current product. This faster version is compatible with current generation GPUs, delivering significant [...]

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A senior vice president of Nvidia has denied rumours that the company is planning an entry into the x86 CPU market.
Though the company has never formally suggested it might build a CPU, commentators have noted that its major competitors, AMD and Intel, offer integrated CPU and GPU platforms, and speculation has been rife that Nvidia [...]

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Fujitsu is developing an eight-core version of its Sparc64 processor, which should give a performance boost to the Sparc Enterprise Servers that Fujitsu jointly develops with Sun Microsystems Inc.
It will succeed the four-core Sparc64 VII processor released in servers from Fujitsu and Sun in July. The Sparc Enterprise Servers use Fujitsu’s chips and Sun’s Solaris [...]

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The Chronicle of Higher Ed yesterday covered the release of a National Science Foundation Info Brief on the decline of U.S. funding for academic research for the second straight year, noting that NSF declares the decline “unprecedented for this data series, which began in 1972.”
Though federal funding for academic research technically increased from FY 2006 [...]

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Researchers working in areas spanning computer architecture, programming languages, operating systems, algorithms, and more have been thinking harder about the problem of parallel computing. Why has the age-old concept of parallelism become so “hot” today? Here is an article by David Patterson, Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, giving his thoughts, and the rationale [...]

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Virtutech, Inc. today announced that its breakthrough hybrid simulation capability, which leverages its proven Simics® simulator platform, was awarded an “Editor’s Tech Choice Award” in the multicore category and a corresponding nomination for “Reader’s Tech Choice Award” by leading electronic design resource eg3.com. Voting for the eg3.com “Readers’ Tech Choice Award” is open through September [...]

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Requirements for increasing computing power and more integrated functions are driving a growing number of applications from 16-bit to 32-bit microcontrollers. This is equally true for battery powered applications, which benefit from the lower voltage supply, as well as the high performance and small die size achieved by 32-bit devices that are based on advanced [...]

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