Samuel Moore writes an article for IEEE Spectrum magazine (Nov 2008) discussing how adding cores slows data intensive applications.
“With no other way to improve the performance of processors further, chip makers have staked their future on putting more and more processor cores on the same chip. Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, [...]

[Read more →]

“Let’s say that we’ve slickly written our code to apply divide-and-conquer algorithms and concurrent data structures and parallel traversals and all our other cool tricks that make our code wonderfully scalable in theory. Question: How do we know how well we’ve actually succeeded? Do we really know, or did we just try a couple of [...]

[Read more →]

Gemini Design Automation, a start-up company focused on the challenges of verifying complex analog and mixed-signal designs, today unveiled a fast SPICE-accurate simulation technology specifically developed to leverage the throughput advantages of multi-core computing. The company claims that its native multi-threaded technology has demonstrated run times and capacity of up to 30x that of earlier [...]

[Read more →]

Peter Tröger published a Technical Report discussing the trends and challenges of Multi-core Era including parallel hardware and parallel software. Here is the abstract of the report.
“Since the very beginning of hardware development, computer processors were invented with ever-increasing clock frequencies and sophisticated in-build optimization strategies. Due to physical limitations, this ‘free lunch’ of speedup [...]

[Read more →]

Author: Michael Feldman, the editor of HPCwire
As far as technology maturity goes, GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) is just a baby. But there’s already an effort underway to produce an industry standard for this new programming model: OpenCL. With people still kicking the tires on NVIDIA’s CUDA and AMD’s Brook+ GPU programming languages, [...]

[Read more →]

If you are interested in downloading and watching video of Microsoft’s PDC 2008, follow the link.
Full Story
Related Links
How to download PDC Sessions using DownThemAll! Firefox addon

[Read more →]

Today’s memory technology gives designers so many choices, and so many tradeoffs. That’s the good news and the bad news, and it’s only going to get more difficult, as new technologies move to market.
That was the message of a keynote address at the Embedded Systems Conference delivered by Jeff Bader, Director of Marketing for the [...]

[Read more →]

High on many developer’s and development manager’s minds these days is being able to utilize multicore CPU’s that have become ubiquitous in today’s computers.
It comes down to concurrency - a challenge that computer science has been grappling with for decades with limited and modest success. An “easy” way to get concurrency on modern hardware [...]

[Read more →]

Author: Jack Ganssle for Embedded.com
“In 2008, embedded systems engineers still struggled with development issues. Welcome to the year 2028–life isn’t perfect, but it’s better.
Welcome to the 40th anniversary issue of Embedded Systems Design “magazine.” That last word is an anachronism only oldsters recognize. For three decades ESD produced a magazine, which, in its early years, [...]

[Read more →]

Intel will release details of its 32nm chip fabrication technology in just over a month’s time. But AMD will be on hand to talk up its 22nm process.
Representatives from the chip giant will be presenting a paper at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), which kicks off in San Francisco on 15 December. They [...]

[Read more →]

WHAT: Jack Harding, chairman, president and CEO of eSilicon Corporation, will participate on a panel discussion at the 6th Annual System on Chip (SoC) Conference, Exhibit and Workshop. He joins executives from AMD, LogicVision, Texas Instruments, Mentor Graphics and Tensilica in a session entitled “Hardware and Software Challenges for Multicore SoCs in Leading-Edge Applications.” The [...]

[Read more →]

X-bit labs compares various quadcore processors including Core 2 Quad Q9400, Core 2 Quad Q9300, Core 2 Quad Q8200, Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition.
“We have already mentioned multiple times that the launch of the new Intel Core i7 family will inevitably affect the entire processor market. And it is [...]

[Read more →]

From the early days of SOCs (systems on chips), when the devices were simply single-chip integrations of board-level microcomputers, their architectural evolution has followed a single clear path. Architects added memory. They integrated application accelerators to execute specific, clearly defined tasks with greater speed and less energy. They introduced more complex interconnect structures and DRAM [...]

[Read more →]

Robert Reed discusses task scheduler partitioning with Intel TBB.
“I thought I was ready to dig into the scheduler using the tools I’ve built so far. But I was disturbed by some of the concurrency diagrams my current data collector and post-processing program generated. Here’s a typical case:
This diagram to the left appears [...]

[Read more →]

This story was published last week. We missed it, but posting it a little late. Although it is not related to multicore, this story and research related to alternative energy sources is cool.
“Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun’s visible light energy. [...]

[Read more →]

Xilinx, Inc. announced (on Oct 29th) its Virtex-5 FXT FPGA ML510 Embedded Development Platform for developing high-performance embedded systems driven by dual processors. Built around the Virtex-5 FXT FPGA platform with its two integrated Power PC(R) 440 processors and supported by Linux and VxWorks operating systems, the new development platform provides software and hardware design [...]

[Read more →]

The LabVIEW Community is soon coming together for the India LabVIEW Conference 2008 to be conducted across 20 cities. Be part of this unique knowledge-sharing Forum and network with over 1000 scientist and engineers from all over India.
National Instruments specially invites you to participate in the knowledge sharing at the India LabVIEW [...]

[Read more →]

James Reinders is an expert in the area of parallelism, Intel’s leading spokesperson on tools for parallelism, talks about hardware threads.
“In discussing the ins and outs of parallel programming, we need to distinguish between the terms processor, processor core and hardware threads. It is easy to be imprecise and say ‘processors’ sometimes when we mean [...]

[Read more →]

In a series of articles, Asaf Shelly discusses about how parallel operating systems are. Part I of this series described how the original design of Windows User Mode was highly advanced and suitable for the parallel world, but in time the concepts and goals behind this design were lost and forgotten. Part II of the [...]

[Read more →]

“The Next Big thing? The memristor, a microscopic component that can “remember” electrical states even when turned off. It’s expected to be far cheaper and faster than flash storage. A theoretical concept since 1971, it has now been built in labs and is already starting to revolutionize everything we know about computing, possibly making flash [...]

[Read more →]