You can participate in Intel’s full-day workshop about “how to get your code to run faster” and get an overview about how to analyse and log application performance. Many software developers are unaware that code can be written and manipulated to take best advantage of the underlying architectural features of the CPU. The workshop plans [...]

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by Anand Lal Shimpi, AnandTech
This is the Bulldozer building block, what AMD is calling a Bulldozer Module:

AMD refers to the module as being two tightly coupled cores, which starts the path of confusing terminology. A few of you wondered how AMD was going to be counting cores in the Bulldozer era. There are two [...]

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The Sun HPC Consortium Portland was held in conjunction with SC09 in Portland, Oregon. The Sun High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC) is an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis on high-performance, technical computing, and visualization.
SHPCC’s mission is to provide the high performance computing community with [...]

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By Eric Lai
During a revealing and often humorous panel discussion on the future of programming at last week’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s superstar developers espoused their loyalty to old-school methods of coding software.
Herb Sutter, lead designer of Microsoft’s C++/CLI programming language, predict that writing code to run on bare metal [...]

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by Lionel, HardMac
“The Polish website PCLab released (by accident?), before quickly removing it, a test of the Intel Xeon Gulftown, a future CPU sporting 6 cores and engraved at 32 nm. First figures indicate that this CPU is very promising. At equivalent clock speed, it is 50% faster than the corresponding quad core Xeon for [...]

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by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
Will the GPU ever become the metric that we use to measure PCs with, replacing the GHz-centric and core-centric CPU? Why might this happen? Well, because increasingly software developers are looking to the GPU to take the load off the CPU. And with good reason, as the GPU absolutely excels at certain tasks, [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM likes to go on and on about the transaction processing power and I/O bandwidth of its System z mainframes, but now there is a new and much bigger kid on the block. Its name is the Power Systems IH supercomputing node, based on the company’s forthcoming Power7 processors and a new [...]

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IBM has confirmed the end of the road for its Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor, the hybrid multicore processor used in Sony’s PlayStation 3 console — and little else. David Turek, IBM’s vice president of deep computing, said in an interview with the German site Heise Online that the current PowerXCell-8i processor will be the [...]

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By Dawn M. Foster
As we move into the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, people start thinking about wrapping up the current year and looking forward to what next year might have in store for us. A few of the open source industry analysts and other industry experts have started to post their predictions [...]

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In then the past few years we have seen multiprocessing systems become more mainstream, in fact most modern personal computer CPU’s now feature symmetric multiprocessing systems (SMP), where multiple instantiations of the same processor share the processing burden of the applications running on the PC.
While SMP’s are quite common today, we typically have not seen [...]

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Imagination Technologies Group plc has announced a forthcoming series of embedded processors under the name “Meta Connected Processor” intended to support Internet-connectivity in low-cost consumer products.
The family of cores will combine versions of Imagination’s 32-bit Meta multithreaded processor and Ensigma programmable communications technologies. The combination is already used in consumer broadcast applications, thereby combining the [...]

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IBM officials are saying that they plan to continue manufacturing and selling its Cell processor, refuting rumors circulating on the Internet that the technology was being killed.
The future of the Cell processor been the topic of speculation on the Web since a Nov. 19 report from the online German Web site Heise Online quoted an [...]

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Intel’s six-core Gulftown processors got delayed to second quarter of 2010 and was tested by Polish site PC Lab. This six-core Intel Gulftown processor is from the 32nm Westmere family flagship with 12MB shared L3 cache and compatible with Intel Socket LGA1366 based motherboards. As per the tests, this multi-core Gulftown chip showed 50 percent [...]

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By Dan Woods
“The widespread adoption of multicore hardware is in many cases actually slowing down computing. A typical scenario: A company has a data-intensive software application and wants to make this software run as fast as possible. When its single-core machine reaches end of life, the company purchases multicore hardware. To everyone’s surprise, the application [...]

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The latest processor from “i” family, has been tested and seems to have a huge processing power. In a comparison with Intel i7, Intel i9 has 6 cores instead of 4. This provides almost a linear increase of power, and i9 is 50% faster than i7 at the same internal CPU frequency. Despite all [...]

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Graphics core licensor Imagination Technologies Group PLC (Kings Langley, England) is preparing compilers that will be able to assign tasks across both graphics and general-purpose processing units. Imagination has had its own 32-bit Meta processor core on its books for most of this decade but it best known as a licensor of application-specific digital audio [...]

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IBM has announced that it has cancelled its plans to release an update to the Cell processor chip, which was meant to pack two PowerPC processors and 32 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs).
The PS3’s innovative ‘Cell’ processor presumably won’t be used in the PS4 if reports this morning, claiming the chip is “dead in the water”, [...]

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By Aharon Etengoff
Nvidia has patented a method of optimizing the GPU pixel processing pipeline. According to company spokesperson Hector Marinez, patent no. 7609272 “helps” the shader process textures in a way that makes “full” use of any extra circuits.
“Previously, when a large texture needed to be read, one instruction would be issued, and [...]

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By Lilian K.K.
Parallel processing is the new standard, and your software needs to be multi-threaded to take advantage of it. Threading your applications to utilize multi-core technology enables everything from better multitasking solutions to improved performance. What’s more, if you optimize before the end of the year, you’ll get a chance to succeed in a [...]

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Despite all the all the recent hoopla about GPGPUs and eight-core CPUs, proponents of reconfigurable computing continue to sing the praises of FPGA-based HPC. The main advantage of reconfigurable computing, or RC for short, is that programmers are able to change the circuitry of the chip on the fly. Thus, in theory, the hardware can [...]

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