ComputerWorld last week published an article titled, “Intel, AMD multicore chip sales may be slowed by software“. Same article has been published again today (with a few changed words) with a new title.
“Trying to boost the IT capabilities at his digital forensics company, Brian Dykstra invested in servers equipped with quad-core processors. After all, [...]

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Herb Sutter, known for his articles on concurrency, published an article on Lock-free code on August 5th. Herb continues his exploration of lock-free code–this time focusing on creating a lock-free queue.
“When writing lock-free code, always keep these essentials well in mind:
* Key concepts. Think in transactions. Know who owns what data.
[...]

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The internet has made global marketing and distribution of products easier than ever and it has nurtured a market for new offerings like Flex and Silverlight that deliver cross-platform rich Internet applications. But against the colorful backdrop of a dynamic industry—a spotlight on managed and dynamic code and colorful new toys is cropping up every [...]

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Sigma Designs, a fabless semiconductor provider of system-on-chip solutions, has introduced the SMP8644 media processor system-on-chip, designed for feature-rich consumer products including next-generation IPTV set-top boxes, IP cable set-top boxes, and Blu-ray players.
According to the company, the SMP8644 provides improvements in performance coupled with a the broad array of interface capabilities required to support interactivity, [...]

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ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) has agreed to develop a system-on-chip design platform of physical intellectual property at the 32-nm and 28-nm nodes for the Common Platform technology alliance of International Business Machines Corp., Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. for distribution to their customers.
ARM is set to be the first element [...]

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insideHPC points to a link to a blog by Sarath, a software professional from India, about integrating CUDA with Visual C++.
in Windows world, most of the developers are much satisfied with the IDE Visual Studio. So may have to leave the world of command line compilation and source editing in favor of improving our productivity. [...]

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The one-processor system model that dominated electronic system design since 1971 is now thoroughly obsolete. Today’s SOC designers readily accept the idea of using multiple processors in their complex systems to achieve design goals and use the terms “control plane” and “data plane” to describe how these various on-chip processors are used on the chip. [...]

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Here is a link to a nice recent talk on “Parallel Programming Patterns” by UIUC’s Ralph E. Johnson. (This post also has a few related links to Parallel programming patterns)
The abstract of the talk is:
“Parallel programming is hard. One proposed solution is to provide a standard set of patterns. Learning the patterns would help people [...]

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Getting the right people for the job has always been a challenge. But now, companies see it not only as a challenge, but a big concern that they themselves need to address.
Not surprisingly, India Inc. is reaching out to university campuses to improve the quality of teachers and teaching. To meet this goal, many companies [...]

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Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been recognized as a promising architecture to accommodate tens, hundreds or even thousand of cores. As a result, a number of NoC architectures have been and are being proposed.
On one hand, this diversity offers designers a large selection of possibilities. On the other hand, this raises an urgent need to fairly evaluate [...]

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Several entities, including IBM Corp. and Intel Corp., are exploring a new technology called co-polymer lithography in an effort to extend Moore’s Law.
Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have also made a major contribution to this field. UCSB claims to have developed a novel, self-assembly [...]

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VirtualLogix has announced VLX real-time virtualization software support for the Multicore Association’s recently approved specification for multicore communications API (MCAPI).
Multicore Association offers a neutral forum for vendors interested in, working with, or proliferating multicore-related products, including processors, infrastructure, devices, software, and applications. Through its Web site, the consortium has made available its Multicore Communications API [...]

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Physicists in Japan have come up with a new way to manipulate magnetisation, which could produce less energy-hungry memory for future computers. Inside magnetic materials, tiny regions known as domains behave like individual magnets, and can have their north-south orientation flipped by a magnetic field.
Today’s computer hard discs work by using electromagnets to flip clumps [...]

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According to industry sources, AMD has decided to modify the naming scheme for their 45nm desktop processors. While AMD is keeping the Phenom X3 and Phenom X4 branding, the model numbers have changed from four digits to five digits in length.
This new numbering system has caused some confusion, but 1xx00 for lower end and 20xx0 [...]

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Embedded systems design tool provider CriticalBlue has partnered with Toshiba Corp. to customize elements of CriticalBlue’s multicore technology that will be used by developers targeting Toshiba’s multicore Venezia platform. “The first phase of the program has been completed and a second phase has been defined and still being developed further,” said CriticalBlue. The complete Venezia [...]

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Brennan Spies writes about various problems that current concurrency paradigm experiences and mentions a few potential approaches for solving the problem.
“We’ve all heard the same story: the “free lunch” for developers is over. The exponential rocket ride of single-processor performance is no longer feasible, and in order to sustain Moore’s Law, scaling out with more [...]

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Source: HPCWire
“Can hardware acceleration save Wall Street? Well, not as quickly as a multibillion-dollar bailout might, but there was plenty of discussion at this week’s HPC on Wall Street conference about the advantages specialized hardware can bring to market analysts and traders. Sellers of these products were all over the place, their booths were busy, [...]

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Here is a comparison of several processors (Source: XTLabs) that may become a basis for systems like that: Intel Atom 230, Intel Atom 330, and VIA Nano L2100.
“When Intel announced their new Atom processor architecture this April, they predicted that there would appear new class of devices called network computers (netbooks and nettops) and spread [...]

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The dramatic increase in compute power unleashed by multicore processors will enable applications that blend virtual representations of the real world with information that meets users’ contextual needs, Microsoft’s top researcher said at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thursday (Sept 25).
But to realize this vision, the computer science community must master the transition to parallel [...]

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MISRA C++:2008 was finally released on June 5, 2008, following 3 years of work by a group of willing volunteers. They set out to craft a set of rules for the safe use of C++ in critical systems and did so under a glare of public comment. But the roots of this new standard go [...]

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