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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As of December 4th (yesterday), the first Larrabee chip’s retail release has been canceled. This means that Intel will not be releasing a Larrabee video card or a Larrabee HPC/GPGPU compute part.
The Larrabee project itself has not been canceled however, and Intel is still hard at work developing their first entirely in-house discrete GPU. The [...]

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by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
At AMD’s Financial Analyst Day on November 11, the company laid out its 2010-2011 product roadmap across all its markets. This year the company focused a lot more on its client-side products, with quite a bit of emphasis devoted to its CPU-GPU “Fusion” chip strategy (which I’ll get to in a [...]

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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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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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