The Intel(R) Atom(TM) Processor is a new generation of low-power processors. Their unique design makes it recommendable to optimize your applications specifically for performance on the Intel(R) Atom(TM) Processor. Only then will you be able to take full advantage of the power savings and the fullexecution performance of this micro architecture.
The most obvious difference to [...]

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By Paul Tyma for MIT Technology Review
Programming for multicore tech­nology is again not just a fantastic leap in programming, but a leap in conceiving and understanding programs. Historically, programming could be described as giving instructions to a computer on how to act upon some public data; the easier it was to get to the data, [...]

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Given the rapid advance of Moore’s Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? Here is a blog post that says, as a general rule, almost always.
“You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can’t speak to how much your servers may cost, or how [...]

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At this week’s International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) here, Fujitsu, NEC and Toshiba rolled out 32-nm processes.
Fujitsu Ltd. (Tokyo) disclosed the development of a CMOS process for 32-nm designs and beyond. In a paper, the company did not say if it had devised a high-k/metal-gate solution for the new process.
The new technology does employ a [...]

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PNY Technologies announced its new ultra high-performance graphic boards, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 by PNY and NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 by PNY. The 5800, the company says, is “the most powerful professional graphics board in graphics history.”
Both of the scalable GPU accelerated solutions are available in Genlock/framelock and HD-SDI versions. Based on NVIDIA’s second [...]

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Here is a video from Google Tech Talks (May 9, 2007), in which Rob Pike talks about a concurrent programming model called Newsqueak. I have not watched the video, but here is the abstract.
ABSTRACT
“Sometimes what you want to say is hard to write or hard to get right in the programming model you’re [...]

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Engineers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) are combining the NI LabVIEW graphical programming environment with multi-core processors to develop a real-time control system and prove that COTS technology can control the optics in the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which is currently in the design and prototyping phases. The 42 m telescope draws on [...]

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Operators of the supercomputing center at Argonne National Laboratory used innovations in both computer architecture and cooling methods to achieve over $1 million in annual energy savings for its IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. Supercomputers typically consume multiple megawatts of electricity. At 557 teraflops, Argonne’s Blue Gene/P is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, [...]

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NVIDIA has announced the availability of version 2.1 beta of its CUDA toolkit and SDK. This is the latest version of the C-compiler and software development tools for accessing the massively parallel CUDA compute architecture of NVIDIA GPUs. In response to overwhelming demand from the developer community, this latest version of the CUDA software suite [...]

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by Ansheng Liu
Here is an article that describes a silicon photonic integrated chip (PIC) that is capable of transmitting data at an aggregate data rate of 200 Gbps. Such an achievement represents a technical milestone towards the goal of realizing a single optical chip with terabits per second data transmission capability for future tera-scale computing. [...]

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Toshiba unveils a 43nm MLC SSD with 512GB of storage
Among the issues that some users have with SSDs are price and storage capacity. It’s easy to recognize that SSD perform better than a traditional HDD, but it’s very difficult to argue that the increased performance justifies the often many fold increase in price an SSD [...]

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Nvidia is clearly in with Intel: it’s announced a netbook integrated-graphics chipset designed to work with the Atom CPU.
Enter the GeForce 9400 - codenamed ‘Ion’ - which essentially knocks the socks off the Intel integrated graphics Atom-based netbooks have thus far shipped with.
For instance, Nvidia touted its part’s ability to smoothly process 1080p HD video [...]

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IBM Research is claiming the world’s fastest graphene field-effect transistor (FET), operating at 26 GHz.
Researchers at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) predicted Thursday (Dec. 18) that the higher electron mobility of carbon will eventually propel the material beyond the reach of silicon into the terahertz range greater than 100 GHz.
“We [...]

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NVIDIA and ATI battle it out for graphics card performance bragging rights and for the last few months, the performance crown according to many sources has sat on the head of ATI. ATI’s fantastic Radeon 4870 X2 was the king of the heap.
Unless ATI has something serious to pull out of its sleeve at CES [...]

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Intel probably feels that news of its next generation Xeon processors with Nehalem core has been a little thin on the ground in recent weeks. But now – most likely with the acquiescence of Intel itself – two results in the SAP Benchmark SAP SD 2-Tier Internet Configuration have appeared, which show the forthcoming Xeon [...]

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Intel’s all-new Nehalem micro-architecture has made its debut, but we won’t see mainstream desktop or notebook processors until this time next year.
You’ve heard plenty about Intel’s shiny new Nehalem microarchitecture over the past year – the modular multi-core design, the shared slab of Level 3 cache, the integrated memory controller and graphics plus all manner [...]

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Russell Hitchcock writes a brief introduction to cache coherency in multicore processors. Since each core has one or two levels of cache memories shared, maintaining shared data coherent is important. In this article, Russel writes about cache coherency protocols, such as MSI, MESI, MOSI, and directory-based cache coherency.
“What is cache coherency? In the context [...]

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(Originally posted on Aug 30, 2008)
Go Parallel published an excellent series of 6 parts on Managing Multi-core Projects. These were published between December 2006 and April 2007. I am listing them here if anyone never read those articles before or if anyone wants to revisit them again with a better understanding of multicore processors [...]

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CHIMPZILLA is working with Java systems developers to optimise the performance of Java Virtual Machines on its new Shanghai lines of processors. AMD’s Shanghai series fabbed on 45nm technology feature larger caches, a new version of Hyper Transport technology and lower power consumption. Shanghai chips also implement AMD’s Instruction Based Sampling (IBS) performance monitoring.
AMD is [...]

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Once thought of as a technology used only for computer games, NVIDIA GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs) with CUDA technology are now being used for the serious business of scientific computation. Berkeley’s Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), one of the leading distributed computing platforms in the world, is using CUDA technology to tap the [...]

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