Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday introduced the latest member of its Phenom II X4 family of high-performance quad-core CPUs, which the No. 2 chip maker said it had run as fast as 7 GHz in extreme overclocking tests.
Out of the box, the new X4 955 Black Edition, which is aimed at gamers and hobbyists, runs [...]

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MIT Professional Education program offers a two-day workshop Concepts in Multicore Programming on June 8 and 9. (The workshop is a general introduction to the key concepts, and is NOT specific to our product Cilk++.)The workshop will be taught by our own Charles E. Leiserson and Pablo Halpern,authors of the popular Introduction to Algorithms and [...]

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A wounded AMD looks to release its first 12 core processor in Q1 2010.Many fondly recall the megahertz race the 90s phenomena in which Advanced Micro Devices and Intel raced to have the highest-clocked processor.Over time,designers realized such a blind race was foolish, and that it was conceding far too much in efficiency and heat. [...]

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By Gastón C. Hillar
Many developers are working with the features offered by C# 3.0 and .Net 3.5 to exploit multi-core CPUs. Parallel Extensions, which will be part of .Net 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010 are entering Beta 1. Luckily, they will offer backward compatibility.
Parallel Extension will offer a lot of interesting features related to [...]

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There is a paper and the proof of concept code posted on the ITL website describing how to exploit Intel® CPU cache mechanisms.
A quote from the paper:
“In this paper we have described practical exploitation of the CPU cache poisoning in order to read or write into (otherwise protected) SMRAM memory. We have implemented two [...]

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Microsoft CLR 3, and prior - Thread Pool Engine:
The Thread Pool consist of thread safe/concurrent enabled global FIFO queue of work items, so when you call ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem method, your work item (essentially delegates) get queued there. The worker threads pick them out in a First In First Out order (i.e., FIFO order), and execute them [...]

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Sebastian Kübeck on his website writes that: “Inspired by Erik Meijer’s answers in an interview at QCon SF 2008 I tried to imagine how concurrent programming could be done in a simple way.
First, I tried to set aside everything I have learned so far about concurrency such as processes, threads, actors and the like and [...]

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By Jack Ganssle for Embedded.com
Using your C-compiler to minimize code size
A C compiler is a basic tool for most embedded systems programmers. It is the tool by which the ideas and algorithms in your application (expressed as C source code) are transformed into machine code executable by your target processor.
To a large extent, the C [...]

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At the AMD Opteron™ processor Sixth Anniversary event at its Sunnyvale campus, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced game-changing new additions to its server platform roadmap and a significant acceleration in roadmap execution.
* Months ahead of schedule, AMD plans to deliver the six-core AMD Opteron processor code named “Istanbul” in June this year, with up to [...]

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At the RSA Security Conference, RMI Corporation, a leading provider of high-performance processors for communication and media rich applications, and Continuous Computing®, the only company deploying uniquely architected systems comprised of telecom platforms and Trillium® software, today announced that Continuous Computing has selected RMI’s multi-core multi-threaded XLS®616 Processor for its FlexPacket™ AMC-PP20. The PP20 provides [...]

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Fabless firm ChipWrights Inc., which develops DSP-based devices called visual signal processors (ViSPs), has released the multicore CW5631 SoC for netbook developers struggling to implement successful web video and Linux support without driving costs sky-high.
The multicore CW5631 an ARM processor-based SoC that offers video performance at cost-effective price and power points; it also combines a [...]

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Within the scope of this project, ARM, Infineon Technologies, Lauterbach, NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics and TIMA Laboratory jointly created the MCD API. It was designed to provide debug tools with a unified debug interface to both real hardware and software simulations. This allows engineers to start the application development early in the SoC platform design flow [...]

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By Jack Ganssle for Embedded.com
Despite decades of research, formal methods to prove software correctness are still impractical for real systems. We embedded engineers build, then test, with no real proof that our products will work. When we pick a CPU, clock speed, memory size, we’re betting that our off-the-cuff guesses will be adequate when, a [...]

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Advanced Micro Devices will roll out server microprocessors today that hit a new low in power consumption for the company as well as some at new and higher data rates. The chips come in the wake of the debut from archrival Intel Corp. of its highest performance server chips to date, the Xeon 5500 series.
AMD’s [...]

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ARM and Mindspeed Technologies, Inc. today announced that Mindspeed has licensed the ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ processor for use in their next generation, high-performance multiservice networking platforms, designed to support voice and data services across wireline and wireless networks.
The widely-adopted ARM MPCore (multicore) technology increases performance scalability and control over power consumption to exceed the performance [...]

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When it comes to writing computer software, there is a huge difference between “multi” and “many.” Mere humans can write good software for the current breed of multicore processors that have two to four processing units inside a single chip, although this still requires extra skill and patience. The next step is many-core processors with [...]

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Progress Software today announced the latest release of the Progress Apama Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform with a Parallel Correlator that leverages multi-core, multi-processor functionality. The Correlator takes care of thread management and load balancing, allowing the CEP software to automatically spread itself among multiple cores.
In a test of Apama CEP-based smart order routing, the [...]

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Oracle Corp.’s proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems marks a strange step back to the future of computer industry that raises questions about the outlook for Sun’s hardware, Java software and the database giant itself.
Whether or not Oracle can make that broader hardware/software sale, it gains with Sun control over the strategic Java programming [...]

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By Jack Ganssle for Embedded.com
Every flip-flop has two critical specifications we violate at our peril. “Set-up time” is the minimum number of nanoseconds that input data must be stable before clock comes. “Hold time” tells us how long to keep the data present after clock transitions.
These specs vary depending on the logic device. Some might [...]

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Andrew B. Kahng is Professor of CSE and ECE, UC San Diego abk@ucsd.edu where his research focuses on integrated-circuit physical design and design for manufacturability. Kahng is general chair of the Design Automation Conference 2009.
Kahng has provided the following guest blog as ‘food for thought’:
What is a “roadmap”? In the technology world, a roadmap [...]

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