By Joab Jackson, IDG News
A study suggests the emergence of multicore processors will support an overhaul of computing architecture and much faster operations.
To use multicore processors effectively the technology industry needs to radically rethink the basic computer architecture it has used over the past 50 years, a University of Maryland researcher argues in the [...]

[Read more →]

British chip design giant ARM has announced its latest chips for the smartphone market, the Cortex-R5 MPCore and Cortex-R7 MPCore, adding in support for LTE and LTE-Advanced platforms.
Further shoring up its defences against Intel’s assault on the smartphone market with its promised low-power Atom variants, ARM’s newest Cortex-R chips offer binary compatibility with the company’s [...]

[Read more →]

By Peter Kogge, IEEE Spectrum
Supercomputers are the crowning achievement of the digital age. Yes, it’s true that yesterday’s supercomputer is today’s game console, as far as performance goes. But there is no doubt that during the past half-century these machines have driven some fascinating if esoteric pursuits: breaking codes, predicting the weather, modeling automobile crashes, [...]

[Read more →]

By Suzanne Deffree, Managing editor, EDN
Intel Corp has announced plans to invest $100 million directly into US university research over the next five years, starting with Stanford University.
Through the investments the company will open Intel Science and Technology Centers across multiple universities throughout the year. Such a move is a shift in strategy for Intel. [...]

[Read more →]

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov, XbitLabs
If you’ve been following the recent history of 3D graphics hardware, you should be aware that the GeForce GTX 480 card was not born easily. Nvidia’s first GPU with the Fermi architecture was released in a cut-down configuration. It is only at the end of 2010 that [...]

[Read more →]

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced availability of the updated AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Software Development Kit (SDK) v2.3 with full support for the first AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), OpenCL™ 1.1 and AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 Series graphics. AMD APP technology enables AMD GPUs and CPUs to work together to run many demanding [...]

[Read more →]

by Peter Clarke
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) has announced its next-generation portable entertainment system (codenamed NGP) will be run on a four-core Cortex-A9 processor from ARM and a PowerVR SGX543MP4+ graphics core from Imagination Technologies. NGP will make its debut at the end of the year 2011, Sony said.

[Read more →]

by Rick Merritt
A Microsoft executive called for a new class of multicore system-on-chips to drive the lower power servers needed for tomorrow’s data centers. But he poured cold water on ARM-based chip vendors, hoping to get design wins in such systems.

[Read more →]

# Intel Labs announced $100 million cash investment in U.S. university research over the next 5 years, marking a new model of collaboration for the organization.
# Funding will support a number of Intel Science and Technology Centers; the first such center will be led by Stanford University and focus on next-generation visual computing.
# This new [...]

[Read more →]

Today at the AMD Asia Pacific Fusion Tech Day, AMD launched a new class of accelerated processors in Asia Pacific that combines more compute capabilities than any processor in the history of computing. The AMD Fusion Family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) incorporate – in a single die design – multi-core CPU (x86) technology, a [...]

[Read more →]

Prof. Wen-mei Hwu from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign gave a tutorial at ICCS Tutorial on Manycore and Accelerator-based High-performance Scientific Computing. The tutorial was designed for participants with basic CUDA programming knowledge. The tutorial covered topics on Computational thinking, Parallelism transformations for performance, Avoidance of resource oversubscription, and Dealing with data efficiently. The slides are [...]

[Read more →]

A free online tutorial, Introduction to Performance Tools, has been released in CI-Tutor. This tutorial provides an introduction to a number of commonly-used performance tools on the TeraGrid’s high-performance computing resources.

[Read more →]

by Ben Hardwidge
IBM has revealed that graphene can’t yet fully replace silicon inside CPUs, as a graphene transistor can’t actually be completely switched off.
In an interview for a forthcoming Custom PC feature about chip-building materials, Yu-Ming Lin from IBM Research - Nanometer Scale Science and Technology told us that ‘graphene as it is will not [...]

[Read more →]

Wireless and audio chip vendor CSR plc has signed a deal with ARM Holdings plc under which it has licensed both the Cortex-A5 and the high-end Cortex-A9 cores in multiprocessing form. CSR says it wants to use the cores in automotive navigation and location-aware consumer equipment, especially in Brazil, Russia, India and China.
CSR (Cambridge, England) [...]

[Read more →]

Semiconductor maker NetLogic Microsystems and commercial packet-processing software provider 6WIND have announced an expansion of their collaboration to deliver high-performance support for NetLogic’s XLP832 multicore communications processor. The XLP832 processor handles networking apps including security appliances, Layer 4 through Layer 7 switching, storage networking, 3G/4G wireless, and small business networks.
Full Story

[Read more →]

by Scott Bicheno
In an exclusive interview with HEXUS, NVIDIA’s Tegra GM - Mike Rayfield - gave a nice lot of details about the present and future of NVIDIA’s chips based on the ARM instruction set.
The last time Hexus spoke to Rayfield was nearly a year ago at MWC 2010. At the time he was talking [...]

[Read more →]

by Satish Sathe, AppliedMicro
Today’s SOC (system-on-chip) processors integrate a diversity of cores, accelerators, and other processing elements. These heterogeneous multicore architectures provide increased computational capacity, but the resulting complexity also poses new challenges for embedded-system developers across a variety of applications, including control-plane processors, video servers, wireless base stations, and broadband gateways. Discrete cores each [...]

[Read more →]

by Gilles Pokam, Cristiano Pereira, Klaus Danne (Intel Corporation), Lynda Yang, Samuel T. King (UIUC)
Abstract
As multi-processors become mainstream, software developers must harness the parallelism available in programs to keep up with multi-core performance. Writing parallel programs, however, is notoriously difficult, even for the most advanced programmers. The main reason for this lies in the nondeterministic [...]

[Read more →]

by David Martinez, Vasco Santos, Martin Mc Donnell, Ken Reynolds, and Peter Carlston, Intel Corporation
Abstract
The suitability of Intel® multi-core processors for embedded digital signal processing (DSP) applications is now being reevaluated. Major advances in power-efficient transistor technology, optimized multi-core processor microarchitectures and the evolution of Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel® SSE) for vector processing have [...]

[Read more →]

by Steve Lohr, (published on Dec 21st, 2010)
When China unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer in October, surpassing the quickest American machine, there was no shortage of hand-wringing. The Chinese dash to the top was seen as an unnerving loss of high-tech preeminence by the United States.
Anyone worried about America’s place in global computing in the [...]

[Read more →]