by Greg Pfister
Intel and Nvidia reached a legal agreement recently in which they cross-license patents, stop suing each other over chipset interfaces, and oh, yeah, Nvidia gets $1.5B from Intel in five easy payments of $300M each.
This has been covered in many places, like here, here, and here, but in particular Ars Technica originally lead with [...]

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By Abi Sundaram, published on Intel Software Network
Every student (including me!) upon graduation hopes their University has prepared them with all the skills to beat out the applicant sitting next to them for a job. Before joining as an intern with the Intel Academic Community, my conception of parallelism was to the say the least [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Intel and Nvidia are burying the hatchet, and it looks like it will be stuck in AMD’s skull. And, perhaps equally importantly, Nvidia will be $1.5bn richer.
With “eye candy” – snazzy media processing – being the most important aspect of personal computing these days, Intel can ill afford to be at war [...]

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By Michael Voss
Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) Version 3 Update 5 introduced the class graph as a Community Preview (CP) feature. There is an introductory post that provides an overview of the class and the nodes that can be used with it. You can download the open-source version of this release at www.threadingbuildingblocks.org and [...]

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By Grant Gross, IDG News
Intel and Nvidia have signed a patent cross-licensing agreement and ended a long-standing legal dispute between the two companies, Intel said Monday.
Under the agreement, Intel will pay Nvidia US$1.5 billion, Intel said in a press release.
“This agreement … preserves patent peace and provides protections that allow for continued freedom in product [...]

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by Rob Farber
General purpose graphics processor unit (GPGPU) technology has arrived during a perfect storm of opportunities. Multi-threaded software is now a necessity as x86 and other conventional processor designs have been forced to adopt a multi-core approach. From dual core cell phones to IBM Power 7 systems that will support well over a [...]

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by Steve Conway
To recap the problem: Most high performance computing applications, like PC applications, were originally written to run on one single-threaded processor. Thirty years of hardware-software innovations have enabled most codes to exploit only a modest number of parallel processing elements — IDC research found that 56 percent of HPC codes are no [...]

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The European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI) is formed with the goal of building a European vision and roadmap to address the challenge of the new generation of massively parallel systems composed of millions of heterogeneous cores which will provide Petaflop performances in 2010 and Exaflop performances in 2020.

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The 2nd UK GPU Computing Conference was held on December 13-14 2010. Here is the Conference description from the conference web site:
Many software developers in the UK are harnessing the step change in compute capability offered by Graphics Processing Units. A wide range of applications are being accelerated: simulations of physical systems; numerical finance; image [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
The ARM race for the data center just got a whole lot more interesting. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia announced that it is indeed working on a CPU and that the chip is based on the ARM RISC architecture that’s wickedly popular in smartphones and tablets. In other [...]

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by Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts, Intel Corporation
Abstract
Error diffusion in image and graphics processing programs represents an excellent example of a problem which at first may seem resistant to a multi-threaded approach, but upon further review will actually lend itself well to speed up possibilities. Using the Floyd-Steinberg algorithm for error diffusion, the trick lies [...]

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by Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts, Intel Corporation
Abstract
The major CPU vendors are shifting gears, choosing to add parallelism support on-chip with multi-core processors in order to avoid many of the technological hurdles in boosting speeds, while still offering a better performing processor. However, if your software does not take advantage of these multiple cores, it [...]

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By Hokiealumnus, Overclockers
New architectures are a blast. Not only do we get new hardware to toy with, but we see greater efficiency and new features. The gag order has been lifted on Intel’s latest offering: ‘Sandy Bridge’. We’re only too happy to bring you all the juicy details on the i7 2600K CPU and P67-based [...]

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Advantech, a global manufacturer of telecom computing blades and multicore network processor platforms, today announced two new products based on the latest Intel® Core™ i7 processors. The MIC-5603 AdvancedMC™ and the MIC-3395 6U CompactPCI single board computer are designed to give OEMs the competitive advantage through the performance enhancements and scalability of the 2nd generation [...]

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by Steve Bush
Nvidia has announced it is to build ARM-based CPUs, as Microsoft confirms the next Windows will work on both ARM and x86.
Codenamed Project Denver, the single-chip Nvidia products include a CPU running the ARM instruction set plus an Nvidia graphics processor (GPU).

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A new site devoted to lock-free, wait-free and just scalable synchronization algorithms, concurrency, scalability-oriented architecture, multicore-friendly patterns and anti-patterns, parallel computations, threading technologies and libraries, tooling support and related topics:
1024cores

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by Richard Wilson
Mentor Graphics has added to its support of Linux-based embedded system design in the networking market.
The design tool firm has selected 6WIND, a supplier of packet processing software for networking and telecoms products, to integrate its 6WINDGate software with its Linux platform.
Full Story

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by Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts, Intel Corporation
Abstract
This article describes the theory and practice of the principal parallel programming constructs that focus on threading and begins with the fundamental concepts of synchronization, critical section, and deadlock. It will discuss common issues associated with these concepts, as well as classical problems in the area of threading.

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Freescale Semiconductor is finding innovative ways to stop “vampire” energy loss, the loss of power that occurs when an AC adapter is plugged into an electrical outlet but isn’t charging a device. Freescale’s new Watt Saver technology automatically eliminates no-load power consumption for AC adaptors, potentially providing substantial energy savings over existing manual versions. In [...]

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by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug, AnandTech
Twelve months ago NVIDIA stood on stage at CES and introduced its Tegra 2 SoC. It promised dozens of design wins and smartphones shipping before Spring 2010. That obviously did not happen.
What instead happened was NVIDIA lost a number of design wins, many of which we centered around [...]

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