Software developers know that the days of single-processor servers are long dead, but many still aren’t convinced their legacy applications have a future in a multi-core world. To date, only technology companies with the largest in-house IT organizations such as Google and Amazon.com have consistently been able to achieve higher performance from multi-core architectures running [...]

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As a result of a new strategic partnership with 6WIND, an embedded multicore networking software company, VirtualLogix(TM), Inc. today announced the industry’s first solution allowing network equipment providers (NEPs) to bring advanced network elements such as 4G wireless base stations or smart media gateways to market faster, ultimately speeding the delivery of Internet Protocol (IP) [...]

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National Instruments today announced open registration for the 2008 NI Technical Symposium, a series of free, full-day technical conferences that feature the latest developments in design, control, automation and test. The conferences, which take place in 28 cities in the United States, Mexico and Canada from October through December 2008, will deliver new product demonstrations, [...]

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Researchers in computer science are taking on new models and fresh subjects as they grapple with new and old challenges, according to a panel discussion that gathered four senior R&D executives at ResearchFest, an event sponsored by eBay Inc.
“One of the differences about research at Google is the extent to which researchers are embedded–everyone is [...]

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Freescale Semiconductor Tuesday (Sept. 30) launched a Customer Specific Products (CSP) business to provide custom system-on-chip (SoC) solutions based on its SoC platforms—Power Architecture processors, ColdFire controllers and i.MX platforms based on ARM technology.
“System manufacturers are consolidating silicon suppliers and looking for ways to reduce cost, streamline development and accelerate time to market,” said Dhiraj [...]

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An IBM Corp. executive questioned the new 28-nm process rollout from rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC), saying TSMC’s strategy is risky.
As reported, TSMC is rolling out its 28-nm process and has revealed a major surprise: It has pushed out or delayed its initial high-k/metal-gate offering until 28-nm, putting it behind rivals Chartered, IBM [...]

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MIPS Technologies Inc. has licensed its low-power MIPS32 M4K and MIPS32 4Kc processor cores to China’s Shenzhen Integrated Circuit Design Industrial Center, the company said Tuesday (Sept. 30).
The Shenzhen Center, one of seven IC design industry bases supported by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, helps small and medium-sized enterprises with product development, company [...]

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Claiming a 2X to 3X speed-up in overall design turnaround time compared to the previous release, Synopsys Inc. Monday (Sept. 29) released IC Compiler 2008.09.
Synopsys said the new release introduces new technology that speeds design closure, including improved timing, variation-aware clock-tree synthesis, lower power, enhanced DFM, and signoff-quality incremental design- rule checking.
Beginning with this release, [...]

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AMD has proven to be a tough opponent for Intel in the server processor marketplace. AMD said that its latest architecture dubbed Shanghai is now ready to go. Shanghai parts are quad-core processors that are targeted at the server market.
Shanghai is also AMD’s first 45-nanometer processor. AMD’s last big architecture aimed at the server marketplace [...]

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Microsoft has shared bits and pieces of how it is adding new features to its development tools to better support parallel processing. But the next release of Windows client and server also are going to incorporate changes designed to improve their parallel-processing support.
Full Story

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Spatial Corp., a leading provider of 3D software components for technical applications, announced today immediate availability of Thread-Safe ACIS Modeler, the first commercially available thread-safe 3D geometric modeling component. Thread-safe ACIS allows applications to employ concurrent threads of execution within ACIS. For compute-intensive operations, the result is near linear performance scaling on multi-core systems. Computer-aided [...]

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The thorniest problem of the computer industry will be addressed by Professor David May, architect of the Inmos Transputer, Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University and co-founder and CTO of XMOS Semiconductor.
May will argue that it is easy to use multi-core architectures to realize a wide range of applications during a presentation at the [...]

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The vision of cloud computing is simple. Just as people reach out to the Internet today to search for data, in the future they will tap into the Net’s servers to run their apps.
Some skewer cloud computing as marketing hype. Others go so far as to predict that in the next century most companies will [...]

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Professional Developers Conference (PDC 2008) will be held at Los Angeles Convention Center from October 27 to 30th. There is a symposium of interest for multicore community titiled, “Parallel Computing – A Detailed Look at How Multi-Core Architectures will Unleash Computing Power and Enable Innovation”. It consists of three related sessions on the last day [...]

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Here are links to a couple of articles on .NET Task Parallel Library written by Rod Stephens. Here is an excerpt:
“For several years, programming tools have allowed you to use multiple threads in the same program. Multiple threads may be able to run on multiple CPUs within your computer so multi-threading sometimes provides nice speed [...]

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AMD today announced the introduction of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4550 and ATI Radeon™ HD 4350 graphics cards, the latest additions to the award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series graphics line up.
AnandTech Reviews these new GPUs.
“The Radeon HD 4350 and 4550 are slotted in between integrated graphics and the set of hardware we took [...]

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Here is an interview published on Go Parallel with Claire Cates about her real-world experience integrating Intel Thread Checker and Thread Profiler into the SAS testing environment.
“Claire Cates is a hybrid in the software development world, one who holds two titles: Principal developer and performance analyst. She’s a 25-year veteran of Cary, NC-based SAS [...]

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Toshiba Corp. has enhanced its line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives (SSD) with the addition of a 256-Gbyte SSD and the launch of small-sized flash modules for netbook computers, ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) and other mobile and peripheral applications.
The company also added small size 8-Gbyte, 16-Gbyte and 32-Gbyte flash modules for netbooks to enhanced line-up. [...]

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Joseph Natoli briefly writes on his Intel Software Network blog on simplifying ways to get full performance and scalability benefits of multicore processors. An excerpt:
“As it turns out this is another good application of a SOA “Soft” Appliance, like Intel SOA Expressway. Using tooling like this allows the developer to visually define process orchestrations, setup [...]

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Here is a link to an interview by Electronic News/Electronic Business during the Design Automation Conference held earlier in June in San Diego to discuss multicore issues. We missed it at the time, but a reader pointed this to us about it. The interviewees include Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas, David Stewart, CEO of Critical [...]

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