“It seems like only weeks ago that dual-core processors were considered overkill for mobile devices, not to mention eating their batteries. But in 2011 they will be mainstream, driving even better graphics, gaming and video experience, according to the vendors. This will see a swarm of tablets and superphones with multicore processors, many of them [...]

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The newly released version of the Mathematica scientific number-crunching software allows users to enter calculations in plain English, the company announced Monday.
With Wolfram Research’s Mathematica 8, now available, the user can simply type in the desired calculation and the software will interpret the input and, presumably, return the correct answer. The company calls this feature [...]

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Micrium, a leader in real time operating systems (RTOS) dedicated to microcontrollers, in collaboration with PolyCore Software, Inc., specialists in multicore development software today announced a partnership whereby they will collaborate to provide customers with ARM Cortex-based technology that adheres to industry standards while greatly improving efficiency and time-to-market.
PolyCore Software’s Poly-Platform(TM) simplifies multicore [...]

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By Peter Clarke
Fabless chip company Amlogic Inc. has announced that its AML8726-M chip combines 1080p high-definition video decoding together with an ARM Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 graphics.
The high-definition video decoding is performed using proprietary circuits, Amlogic said. The chip is intended for use in gaming and other multimedia consumer devices such as digital photo frames.
Full [...]

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by Agam Shah
Intel has demonstrated its first six-core processor for desktops, the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, which will go into workstations and enthusiast PCs targeted at gamers.
The company said that the new chip will be faster and more power-efficient compared to its past gaming processors. Based on a new architecture, the processor includes more cores [...]

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LSI Corp. has added a new Power PC processor and fast embedded DRAM cores to its library, claiming demand for custom silicon is on the rise in its core networking and storage markets. The company also is leveraging a 10 Gbit Ethernet core licensed from startup Teranetics and 40 and 28nm process technology from foundry [...]

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By Agam Shah
Intel plans to release next-generation Xeon server processors based on the Westmere microarchitecture in the next three months, the company said on Thursday.
Intel plans to refresh its line of Xeon server chips as it ramps up chip production to the 32-nanometer process, said Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO, during a financial earnings call. [...]

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Marvell Technology said today that it’s figured out a way to deliver the first-ever quad-core ARM-based application processor for cell phones and other mobile devices. More cores equals more performance, of course, and Marvell says its quad-core ARM chips will deliver “gigahertz-plus” performance.
Currently Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset is the leader in ARM-based processors for phones, with [...]

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Although we have a few years before the next-generation of gaming consoles make their way into the market, Sony is stepping up its research for PlayStation 4 to better entice developers. According to Kotaku, Sony is looking to leave the Cell architecture for a more open and workable architecture. Supposedly developers are having issues tapping [...]

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Intel announced the Atom processor in 2008. That same year we were introduced to the first two members of the family: Diamondville and Silverthorne. The chips were both called Atom, but they differed in their application. Diamondville was used in desktops, nettops and netbooks, while Silverthorne was almost exclusively for MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices).
Atom continues [...]

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by Jon Worrel
For the past few months, Intel has been reluctant to supply its enthusiast and enterprise markets with a naming scheme for the upcoming Westmere-based 32nm six-core chips (codenamed “Gulftown”) that it has planned for its high-end processor segment in 2010.
Many journalists, analysts and consumers have been speculating the possibility that the company [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IT shops buy current products, but they always have their eyes out one or two generations to assure themselves they aren’t buying into a dead-end product. Which is why makers of chips and other components that go into systems as well as system makers themselves are forced to talk about the future [...]

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ARM Ltd’s competitors included a host of IP processor companies such as MIPS, ARC and Tensilica but the field of serious processor competition has dramatically narrowed to, ARM vs. Intel Corp. ARM has also substantially expanded its processor core design sockets—both to high-end and low-end markets. On one hand, the company has bravely marched into [...]

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Freescale Semiconductor is offering the QorIQ P1012/P1021 family, with the QUICC Engine multiprotocol technology, delivering high-performance, low-power migration path to all-IP environments for customers using legacy multiprotocol interfaces.
Most embedded multicore processors integrate general-purpose CPUs not optimized for data-plane tasks, thus requiring more or faster CPUs to deliver the same level of performance for multiprotocol processing. [...]

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Eco-friendly 3D microchips, being developed by a clutch of cutting-edge research labs, are likely to boost computing power 10-fold, consuming negligible energy. They are being developed jointly by IBM Research Lab, EPFL and ETH Zurich, the twin Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology.
The project, under the leadership of EPFL’s John R. Thome’s (Lausanne), aims to develop [...]

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By Junko Yoshida
“As recently as five years ago, ARM’s competitors included a host of IP processor companies such as MIPS, ARC and Tensilica. Now, like it or not, the field of serious processor competition has dramatically narrowed to, well, ARM vs. Intel Corp. ARM has also substantially expanded its processor core design sockets — both [...]

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by Michael J. Miller
Intel will continue to work on many of the concepts within Larrabee, because the overall directions of both the CPU and the GPU markets require it. As I see it, the two big trends in general processor designs are a push for much greater parallelism, particularly for high-end computing; and much more [...]

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By Russell Davoli
“Intel SOA Expressway XSLT 2.0 Processor is now available for download from whatif.intel.com, the Intel experimental software site. It’s in the newest project in the “Designing New Capabilities” category.
A beta version of this processor is released as a standalone executable program so that anyone in the XML and XSLT community can try it [...]

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Synopsys, Inc., a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing, today announced that Loongson Technology Co., Ltd. (Loongson) (funded by the Institute of Computing Technologies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) achieved first-pass silicon success on its 65-nanometer, multicore, high-performance Loongson-3 CPU design using Synopsys’ CustomSim(TM) circuit simulator. The CustomSim [...]

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Stunning growth in the performance of graphics processors along with stiffer competition is prompting developers of the technology to look beyond the traditional drive for photo realism in search of broader applications in parallel computing.
Designers say they want to apply massively parallel graphics operations to new computing architectures. The result, according to at least one [...]

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