Robert X. Cringley writes an article for Jan/Feb 2009 issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine.
“”When Anwar Ghuloum came to work at Intel in 2002, the company was supreme among chip makers, mainly because it was delivering processors that ran at higher and higher speeds. “We were already at three gigahertz with Pentium 4, and [...]

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Renewable energy and emerging semiconductor technologies like memristors were among the top industry stories in 2008 on EE Times.com. Here are a couple of links in that list of top stories:
MIT claims 24/7 solar power
‘Missing link’ memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?
Full Story

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Embedded.com posts the ten most popular design articles on their website during the past year, based on which stories were most visited and most viewed on the site.
“Your choice of design articles reflects an even balance between traditional programming and software development issues and hardware specific software topics.
#1: The art of FPGA construction
Working [...]

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Microsoft Corp. last week applied for a patent that spells out a “pay as you go” concept under which users would be charged for both the software they run and the computing horsepower they use.
According to the patent application filed last week with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the “Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience” scheme [...]

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Far from slowing down because of the worldwide economic crisis, PC technology evolution (and particularly the videogaming peripherals one) continues to break records and Gigaflops, opening usage scenarios that was solely related to super-computers just a few years ago. Such scenarios are currently colliding with the opposite development of standards and API competing with each [...]

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by EETimes
Despite economic difficulties across the chip industry, FPGA makers didn’t have it so bad in 2008. Altera Corp. announced increases in sales and net income for Q3 2008 over Q3 2007. John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera, asserts that market slowdowns can be growth opportunities.
How did Altera achieve growth in Q3 08 [...]

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Simon Peyton-Jones of Microsoft Research has written many papers on Haskell, a functional programming language. One of his papers provides a tutorial on parallel and concurrent programming in Haskell. Abstract of the paper:
This practical tutorial introduces the features available in Haskell for writing parallel and concurrent programs. We first describe how to write semi-explicit parallel [...]

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by Brian Sletten
As multi-core and multi-CPU systems become more prevalent, the opportunity to perform several tasks at once is now a reality. Unfortunately, the way most systems are designed it is not as easy as having another thread take a task on. The programming language you use needs to ask the execution environment to schedule [...]

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There’s no denying that writing scalable code is difficult. When the processors involved are multiplying by the day, some tactics become inevitable, such as using locks and setting up message queues between systems.
At the fringes of the scalability world, Erlang is being lauded as a programming-level solution to the problem. But even for its proponents, [...]

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Taking advantage of its 45 nanometer (nm) manufacturing and reinvented transistor prowess, Intel Corporation introduced a tremendous amount of new products, and achieved several R&D, environmental and corporate milestones this year. In addition to new products for Intel’s traditional laptop, PC and server businesses, the company introduced a myriad of chips and technologies for new [...]

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By Dean Evans
There’s been a lot of talk this year about the potential of parallel computing in the home. Nvidia, Intel and AMD are all pushing the idea of using the GPU on a graphics card to offload data-intensive tasks from the CPU.
The Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT, for example, features 64 programmable shader cores. For [...]

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The multi-core revolution is poised to change the way computing takes place, both on the server and the desktop, with the x86 microarchitecture shrinking and the number of cores per processor increasing, writes Pratap Vikram Singh.
The quad-core chips that have sat at the top of the microprocessor heap for almost two years are now about [...]

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From the Cilk Arts Blog:
“For the coder who has everything…we just shipped the 1st release of Cilk++ for Linux!
Cilk++ is best suited for applications that meet the following criteria:
1. Application performance is compute bound
2. Performance can be improved by accelerating serial (i.e., single-threaded) portions of the application
[...]

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SCDsource posts a list of predicted trends for 2009 in electronic system level (ESL) design.
1. Analog/mixed-signal design gains speed and automation
2. ESL goes mainstream with synthesis and virtual platforms
3. Low power design moves up to ESL
4. Silicon virtual prototypes move beyond floorplanning
[...]

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We started MulticoreInfo.com at the end of April 2008 and published more than 1350 posts linking to useful resources of multicore related information. Among those, we believe the following top 10 posts stood out in our view and were viewed by many readers.
1. Managing Multi-Core Projects : A Six Part Series
2. Updated CPU Charts 2008: [...]

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Gleichmann Electronics has added six new MCUs to the 78K0/KY2-L and 78K0/KA2-L 8-bit microcontroller families and six extremely low power consumption 16-bit MCUs of the 78K0R-KF3-L and 78K0R/KG3-L series.
The new 8-bit MCUs, manufactured by NEC Electronics, feature a standby current consumption of 0.7 A and a low operating current of 260 A at 1 MHz [...]

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Despite economic difficulties across the chip industry, FPGA makers didn’t have it so bad for Q3 08. Altera Corp. announced increases in sales and net income for Q3 08 over Q3 07. John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of the board of Altera, explains how market slowdowns can be growth opportunities, and describes the company’s [...]

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The single-socket server space has been a niche part of the server space, just as machines with more than four sockets has never been a particularly high volume part of the market. The advent of multicore processors and faster system and memory buses have made single-socket servers more appealing to a certain class of customers.
A [...]

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As anyone who has worked on a group project knows all too well, not all team members contribute equally to the success of a project. And now Virginia Tech researchers have found the same holds true for the cores in multicore processors.
Depending on how your code is distributed across seemingly identical cores, the speed at [...]

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Green computing is becoming important for HPC, not only for reasons of energy conservation and cost reduction, but also because data centres are reaching the limits of power available to them. Paul Schreier examines steps being taken to cut HPC power requirements.
“In our report on the grid computing facilities at CERN [1], we noted that [...]

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