You’ve built a cool new web application with Ruby on Rails (or similar framework) and released it to the world. Everything works as expected, but users are starting to complain about the app being too slow. And you’re starting to regret following that mantra about “premature optimization.”
Improving your web application’s performance can be a daunting [...]

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Today’s memory technology gives designers so many choices, and so many tradeoffs. That’s the good news and the bad news, and it’s only going to get more difficult, as new technologies move to market.
That was the message of a keynote address at the Embedded Systems Conference delivered by Jeff Bader, Director of Marketing for the [...]

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This story was published last week. We missed it, but posting it a little late. Although it is not related to multicore, this story and research related to alternative energy sources is cool.
“Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun’s visible light energy. [...]

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“The Next Big thing? The memristor, a microscopic component that can “remember” electrical states even when turned off. It’s expected to be far cheaper and faster than flash storage. A theoretical concept since 1971, it has now been built in labs and is already starting to revolutionize everything we know about computing, possibly making flash [...]

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Toshiba Corp. Monday (Oct. 27) launched a new line-up of 43-nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory products available in densities ranging from 512 Mbits to 64 Gbits.
The new lineup includes three products—16Gb, 32Gb and 64Gb—which integrate 43-nm monolithic 16Gb chips, the highest density SLC NAND chips available, according to Toshiba. The devices will come [...]

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Simon Davidmann, chief executive officer and founder of Imperas Ltd., will participate in a panel titled, “Virtual Platforms: Are they Worth the Investment?,” Monday, October 27, at the Embedded Systems Conference Boston.
The panel, to be held from 4:45-5:45 p.m. at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, will explore effects virtual platforms have on the software [...]

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Research and Markets announced the addition of the “The end of Moore’s Law and its impact on devices” report to their offering. Here’s the abstract:
“The end of an era is approaching. For over 30 years the technology industry has relied on exponential improvements in microprocessor technology, described by Moore’s Law, to deliver ever-increasing computing power [...]

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Ziptronix unveiled details of its patented Direct Bond Interconnect (DBI) technology, which employs a low-temperature process for 3-D chip stacking without thermal compression.
Ziptronix (Research Triangle Park, N.C.) said the technology can be used for either wafer-to-wafer or chip-to-wafer stacking, further claiming that its 3-D bonding process is low-cost and provides high yields.
Full Story

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The recent appearance of multicore system-on-chip (SoC) devices has rearranged the boundaries among silicon devices, boards and subsystems. This trend has led to significant changes in chip-to-chip and board-to-board interconnect requirements. Are existing standards-based interconnects ready for this transition?
With the introduction of the microprocessor in the 1970s, simple computing systems were constructed on a single [...]

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Think of any historical IT transformation and you’ll likely recall the pain associated with change. For large organizations, change isn’t easy and it certainly doesn’t occur overnight. It requires a finessed combination of planning, validating, selling and a fair amount of political cajoling to get people signed up for the change. It also requires an [...]

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picoChip announced that the first public demonstration of its PC8808 TD-SCDMA femtocell software reference design in China marks its general availability in the market. At the same time picoChip revealed Digimoc, a leading Chinese solution provider of femtocells, as its first publicly disclosed TD-SCDMA customer. Digimoc is using picoChip’s PC202 device and PHY software reference [...]

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EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert provides a reading list of articles on virtualization.

Virtualization Goes Mainstream
Hardware Virtualization Slower Than Software?
The Virtualization Reality (from ACM Queue)
An Overview of Virtualization
Virtualization Is Not All Roses
Virtualizing Cuts Web App Performance 43%
Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ
VM Enables ‘Write-Once, Run Anywhere’ Linux Apps
Desperately Seeking Xen
Cache and memory in the many-core [...]

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On Tuesday, Gartner analysts Carl Claunch and Dave Cearley gave a crowd of IT leaders at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 a list of the top 10 technologies that will provide important strategic advantages to IT over the next three years. They encouraged the leaders to keep these technologies in mind as they formulate budgets [...]

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At one time, MRAM technology was hot. But recently, MRAM has fallen out of favor in the market, because the technology has taken longer than expected to commercialize.
As a result, Cypress Semiconductor Inc. exited the market. IBM Corp. and Infineon Technologies AG sold their MRAM venture. And Freescale Semiconductor Inc. will spin off its MRAM [...]

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Timing, area, power and signal integrity have traditionally been the primary objectives of design technology. Increasingly manufacturability and yield have also become critical design objectives, especially for technology nodes at 90nm and below. To address manufacturability challenges, multiple yield optimization techniques have been added to the design flow. These techniques range from simple ones—such as [...]

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Parallel programmers are leveraging the power of multi-core platforms to create better performing applications. Implementing virtualized threaded applications is another step forward in balancing the need of optimized performance and infrastructure management.
An article on Intel Software Network provides the following links that introduce some key technical issues to consider when scaling your application on and [...]

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There are fundamental power constraints in both portable devices and wall-powered applications. Power consumption of portables has been doubled at the expense of higher demand for performance and functions, while the wall power consumed by data storage centers, servers, etc, already accounts for about 1.5% of the energy consumed in the US, according to Samuel [...]

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The Cell processor chip, which is a heterogeneous multicore architecture and originally developed for Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console, will power “Cell TV,” Toshiba Corp.’s next-generation, flat-panel TV scheduled for launch in the fall of 2009.
Full Story
Related Links
Leadtek demos Cell chip on a PCI-E card

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One of our readers (Thanks Greg!) reminded us that we missed this story. Here is an excerpt:
“IBM is now offering customers who buy its System x rack servers and BladeCenter blade servers the option of bundling Microsoft’s Windows Datacenter Edition. This may seem like hitting a gnat with a cinder block, but it makes sense: [...]

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Jack Ganssle writes for Embedded.com that experts tell us interesting facts about our work lives that we may know but deny: programmers have human limitations. This article may not be related to Multicore, but related to programmers, i.e. people!
“The Agile Manifesto reads, in part, that the signatories value “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”1 [...]

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