by Richard Wilson
Green Hills Software has announced secure virtualisation support for the multicore OMAP 4 applications processor from Texas Instruments.
It is aimed at smartphones running Android or Windows.
The Integrity Secure Virtualization (ISV) for the OMAP 4 platform uses TI’s built-in M-Shield technology, which is based on ARM TrustZone technology.
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Texas Instruments has just unveiled its latest mobile chip, and the new OMAP4440 kind of makes NVIDIA’s blazing fast 1GHz dual core Tegra 2 chip seem like last year’s news.

The TI OMAP4440 has twin 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 cores… but it also has two ARM Cortex-M3 low power chips to handle less resource-intensive tasks, while reducing [...]

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by Neil Savage
Researchers at North Carolina State University have demonstrated new “soft” electronic components, built from liquid metals and hydrogels. The scientists hope that such components—quasi-liquid diodes and memristors—will work better than traditional electronics to interface with wet squishy things, such as the human brain.

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by James Niccolai
Oracle will halve the number of cores in its next Sparc processor and instead improve its single-thread performance, a weak area for the chip but one that’s important for running large databases and back-end applications.
The next Sparc chip on Oracle’s road map, the T4, will have eight cores on each chip, down from [...]

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By Lucas Mearian
Samsung announced a new 8GB dual inline memory module (DIMM) that stacks memory chips on top of each other, which increases the density of the memory by 50% compared to conventional DIMM technology.
Samsung’s new registered or buffered (RDIMM) product is based on its current Green DDR3 DRAM and 40 nanometer (nm)-sized circuitry. The [...]

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by Anton Shilov, XbitLabs
For years Intel Corp. has kept its so-called “tick-tock” microprocessor development strategy and implemented thinner manufacturing technology ahead of micro-architectural update. This allows the company to bring newer products to market every twelve months. However, the company will not keep this strategy with its many Intel core (MIC) micro-architecture chips for high-performance [...]

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eXludus Technologies, the leading developer of multicore system resource management solutions, today announced the availability of AppProfiler, an application profiling and reporting solution that provides detailed analytics on system resources consumed by applications.
AppProfiler analytics provide valuable and actionable insight into the processing, memory and I/O requirements of each application. This data frees users from having [...]

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by Bratin Saha et al., Intel® Technology Journal | Volume 13, Issue 4, 2009
Abstract
The client computing platform is moving towards a heterogeneous architecture that consists of a combination of cores focused on scalar performance, and of a set of throughput-oriented cores. The throughput-oriented cores (such as those in the Intel® microarchitecture codename Larrabee processor) may [...]

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by Kurt Keutzer and Tim Mattson
Abstract
The key to writing high-quality parallel software is to develop a robust software design. This applies not only to the overall architecture of the program, but also to the lower layers in the software system where the concurrency and how it is expressed in the final program is defined. Developing [...]

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by Dave Dunning, Randy Mooney, Pat Stolt, Bryan Casper and James E. Jaussi, Intel Labs, Intel Corporation
Abstract
Integrated circuit processing technology and computer architectures continue to mature. Single chip CPUs have been demonstrated to exceed one TeraFLOP [1]. This high level of computation, concentrated in a small area, creates many system design challenges. One of [...]

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By David Ott
Part 4: Operating System Power Management (OSPM)
A distinctive highlight of ACPI is the shift from BIOS-controlled power management in APM to operating system power management, or OSPM. Several reasons underlie this shift. First, the complexity requirements for power management have continued to grow and BIOS-based solutions increasingly pose integration difficulties with operating systems [...]

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by Greg Pfister
There appear to be many people for whom the term virtualization exclusively means the implementation of virtual machines à la VMware’s products, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and so on. That’s certainly a very important and common case, enough so that I covered various ways to do it in a separate series of posts; but [...]

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With keynotes of Paul McKenney (Linux CTO of IBM) and Vint Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist and VP of Google), the II Open Source Software, Multicore and Parallel Computing miniconference, will be in Brisbane, Australia on Tuesday 25 of January 2011.
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The EUREKA ITEA 2 software Cluster ParMA project has developed advanced technologies to exploit multicore architectures in semiconductor chips and so deliver substantial performance improvements for high-performance computing (HPC). ParMA technology has established new goals in modelling and simulation and enabled the development of innovative computer-intensive applications to accelerate research in many domains. It offers [...]

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Imperas™ today released its first models of the Cortex family of processor cores from ARM. Models of the M-series of cores are now available from Open Virtual Platforms™ (OVP™), including example virtual platforms incorporating the cores and support for the cores in Imperas’ advanced software development tools. Additionally, these and other models will be used [...]

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The current version of Adobe Flash at 10.1 offloads some of the internet video rendering to the GPU, but not all of it. Flash 10.1 offloaded H.264 decoding to hardware, and now in the next iteration at 10.2, now in beta, Adobe is moving the entire video rendering pipeline to the GPU.

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by Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) and Tom Mitchell (CMU)
A confluence of advances in the computer and mathematical sciences has unleashed unprecedented capabilities for enabling true evidence-based decision making. These capabilities are making possible the large-scale capture of data and the transformation of that data into insights and recommendations in support of decisions about challenging [...]

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By David Ott
Part 3: Hardware-Software Interface
ACPI describes itself as neither a software specification nor a hardware specification. Rather, it is an interface specification addressing both components and how they should interact with one another.[1]

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By David Ott
Part 2: Hardware Platform Power States
On a hardware platform level, ACPI defines a set of power states pertaining to various aspects of the system: global system states (Gx) like “off” and “working”, sleep states (Sx), device power states (Dx), processor power states (Cx), device and processor performance states (Px), and throttling states (Tx). [...]

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Freescale and CriticalBlue have expanded their relationship with an alliance focused on streamlining embedded multicore software development for Freescale platforms. CriticalBlue’s Prism development environment will support a broader range of Freescale’s QorIQ and Power Architecture-based multicore products. In addition, the companies will co-develop tools, extensions and methods to help customers more easily migrate software developed [...]

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