ARM, a company already synonymous with excellence in CPU design, continues to show success in delivering highest performance ARM® Mali™ graphics processing unit (GPU) technology and today outlined its vision to shape the future of the next generation of graphics processing and mobile gaming against the backdrop of the 22nd annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) [...]

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Ilya Mirman of Cilk Arts writes an article on their blog listing the Top 7 Reasons Not to Go Multicore… with our inner conscience providing the counterpoints! Here is the list.
1. Parallel Computers are Like Ripped Jeans or Parachute Pants
2. I’m a Pacifist and Don’t Believe in Pre-emptive Strikes
3. I’ll Climb on the Bandwagon Later
4. [...]

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Driven by such general macro trends such as Internet everywhere, IP everywhere and Seamless Mobility, in its 15-year assessment of semiconductor technology requirements, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors projects that as technologies and structures push the limits of Moore’s law and productivity, new semiconductor approaches to scaling and new functionality on- and off-chip will [...]

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Adding more processing cores has emerged as the primary way of boosting performance of server and PC chips, but the benefits will be greatly diminished if the industry can’t overcome certain hardware and programming challenges, participants at the Multicore Expo in Santa Clara, California, said this week.
Most software today is still written for single-core chips [...]

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Everybody’s talking about supercomputing on the desktop – and in particular, whether it will be GPUs that achieve that goal. We think that general-purpose computation on GPUs (an idea known as the GPGPU) might be the most important computing trend over the next 10 years.
As claims go, it’s a biggie. But if you want proof [...]

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Google Tech Talks has a video of Mark D. Hill (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill) discussing his corollary to Amdahl’s Law for multicore chips [Hill & Marty, IEEE Computer 2008]. It models fixed chip resources for alternative designs that use symmetric cores, asymmetric cores, or dynamic techniques that allow cores to work together on sequential execution.

At the end [...]

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by Herb Sutter for Dr. Dobb’s Journal
“Explicit threads are undisciplined. They need some structure to keep them in line. In this column, we’re going to see what that structure is, as we motivate and illustrate best practices for using threads — techniques that will make our concurrent code easier to write correctly and to reason [...]

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by Geoffrey James
For the past decade, Electronic System Level (ESL) has been widely seen as the future of EDA. And no wonder! Think of the productivity gains if chip designers could define what they want a chip to do… not how the circuitry is supposed to do it. Alas, the promise [...]

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The transition to multicore processors in communications and networking systems is expected to be a slow one due to complex and fragmented nature of the underlying technology, predicted a technology analyst. Processors with four or more cores will probably represent little more than 10 percent of the communications systems market in 2012, according to Linley [...]

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A new company Optimitech came up with new technology aiming to relieve the pain of multicore utilization for a broad auditory.
“Auto-Parallelizer is a tool that looks for parallelizable parts of source code of applications written in a sequential manner and language. In some cases it modifies the source code to maximize the number of such [...]

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A possible IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. merger, where IBM is looking to acquire Sun Microsystems for around $6.5 billion, makes business sense and has significant implications for the SPARC and POWER microprocessors.
EETimes India briefly discusses the impact of consolidation on SPARC processors.
“An IBM-Sun combination raises several interesting technology questions underneath the business and [...]

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by EDN Executive Editor Ron Wilson
One of the fundamental ideas of multicore architecture is that by switching cores on and off or by throttling them, you can match the performance and power consumption of the chip almost exactly to the real-time needs of the task load, to a degree that is not feasible with huge [...]

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By Warren Webb, Technical Editor - EDN
As the economic slowdown takes its toll on development budgets, embedded-system designers are turning to FPGA (field-programmable-gate-array) technology to shorten design cycles, combat obsolescence, and simplify product updates. By taking advantage of a huge and growing arsenal of FPGA-development tools, reusable-logic elements, and off-the-shelf modules, designers can craft high-performance [...]

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By Rik Myslewski for the Register
Multicore Expo Sever virtualization is at the top of most IT admins’ to-do lists, but it’s still has a long way to go in the development of management software, I/O technology, and storage technology before its full value can be realized.
Sun’s Distinguished Engineer, Denis Sheahan, called server virtualization “a key [...]

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Good design is one of the main challenges that firms must face up to if they want to stay ahead in the low latency race, according to Stephen Goldman, director of enterprise architecture, CME Group.
“The most important thing you can do is design a good system, it’s about how engines are designed, and how technologies [...]

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The next-generation iPhone is starting to generate a significant wave of hype - and it hasn’t even been announced yet. Such is the game that Apple and its fan-base love to play.
Rumors are swirling around the intertubes that hint at all sorts of high-tech features being crammed into the next hardware iteration of the iPhone. [...]

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Connective Logic, a UK company, demonstrated their multicore software development platform named Blueprint at TechCrunch50 conference last year.
John Gross and Jeremy Orme of Connective Logic started writing a six-part article introducing Blueprint, that provides an alternative approach to multi-core development. While Blueprint is interoperable with technologies such as Microsoft’s Task Parallel Library (TPL) and [...]

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By Rik Myslewski from Multicore Expo for The Register
As Markus Levy, president of the Multicore Association, put it: “Hardware’s easy.” Brian Carlson, Texas Instrument’s Open Multimedia Application Platform (OMAP) marketing Manager agrees, saying, “The hardware’s in place already to enable some really exciting applications that just aren’t there yet.
“The challenge is closing that gap between [...]

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Steve Leibson illustrates some important points of Chapter 3 of the Reuse Methodology Manual (the RMM), which suggests the rules and tools for system design. The RMM was originally written in 1996, during the dawn of the SOC. Steve says, since the technology since then marched on, some issues with the book’s more outdated ideas [...]

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outh Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said Thursday (March 19) it shipped the first high-density memory modules based on 2-gigabit (Gb), 50-nanometer-class DDR3 memory.
Samsung (Seoul) said it is shipping 18 configurations of its high-density DDR3-based modules, designed for servers. The modules include a 16-gigabyte (GB) registered inline memory module and an 8-GB registered dual inline [...]

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