Weighing the value of today's processors - The Tech Report - Page 11

Weighing the value of today's processors - The Tech Report - Page 11: "Among quad-core processors, the picture is much clearer. The Q6600 is quite obviously the most sensible choice compared to both AMD's underperforming Quad FX chips and Intel's overpriced Core 2 Extreme offerings."

LINPACK benchmark

If there is an aspect of the Linpack computation that makes it "easier" than other parallel benchmarks, it is *regularity*. The Linpack computation is fine-grained and requires much communication, but the computation is extremely *regular*, and that regularity can be exploited to minimize synchronization delays and thus keep the processors performing useful work throughout the bulk of the computation, as long as the communication requirements do not create a delay.
Link http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/hpcwireWWW/04/1008/108518.html

Particletree » Web App Autopsy

Particletree » Web App Autopsy: " longer a company has been around the more code it has. Experience also shows that once you are past your base set of code, the percentage dedicated to server side code starts to increase"

iSuppli raises 2007 computer sales forecast

iSuppli raises 2007 computer sales forecast: "global PC shipments to rise to 264 million units this year, up 11.2% from 239 million in 2006. The previous forecast envisioned 10.7 % growth for the year"

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?: "ReadyBoost also serves as a read cache of the system pagefile, with the idea that swapping to disk is less painful if it's done to a USB flash drive. "

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?: "The one unique feature that Santa Rosa offered that no other competing mobile platform, Intel or not, could bring to the table was a technology called Turbo Memory. An on-motherboard flash card, Intel's Turbo Memory is designed to act as another layer in the memory hierarchy, "

Linchi Shea : How did Random I/Os Outperform Sequential I/Os?

Linchi Shea : How did Random I/Os Outperform Sequential I/Os?
Granted, the I/O path I was working with was not a traditional hard disk. It was a LUN presented from a SAN with a large amount of cache, and to simplify to some extent, the LUN was a RAID 0 stripe set across 12 virtualized drives with a rather large stripe unit size (960K). But how should I explain why 8K random I/Os could outperform 8K sequential I/Os?
After some discussions with a storage professional, we came up with a theory consisting of the following three key factors:
Random I/Os were able to effectively hash I/Os across multiple drives that make up the RAID 0 device.
Relatively large RAID 0 stripe unit size of 960K caused 8K sequential I/Os to cluster around the same drives. Note that it would take 120 sequential I/Os to fill a single 960K stripe.
A base amount of cache was assigned to each drive in RAID 0. And when random I/Os were hashed across 12 drives, the I/Os benefited from larger amount of cache.
Do I have solid proof that these three factors were the root cause of 8K random I/Os outperforming 8K sequential I/Os? No, I don't. But I do have some circumstantial evidence supporting the theory.

Nintendo surpasses Rival Sony in market value - The Money Times

Nintendo surpasses Rival Sony in market value - The Money Times: "Nintendo has emerged as the numero uno in May for the fifth consecutive month after selling 338,000 units of the popular Wii video game devices in the United States, repeatedly outshining both its rivals Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 in the US video game consoles market.
The more-powerful systems, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, in May, again lagged behind in the fierce battle for dominance in the booming gaming consoles market by moving 81,600 and 154,900 units,"

My Way Finance

My Way Finance: "IBM's services organization — packed with 200,000 of IBM's 355,000 employees"

BM Seer

BM Seer: "'And the good news is that about 40-70% of the stuff we do in performance tuning actually ends up helping end users.'
This means that 30% to 60% of IBM's TPC-C tunings don't help users.
Really beyond the huge disk size of the large TPC-C results (which has a lot to do with the TPC-C being 14 years old), the quote below points to tuning that is legal but seems a bit too 'tricky' for my taste...
'We get down to the level of worrying about the physical column order in the table so the reference columns are near each other, minimizing cache misses during fetching. This is feasible in the TPC-C benchmark because there are only five tables and only ten to fifteen columns in each table. In a more realistic application, where there are many more queries to be considered, the tables are typically much, much wider, in the 80 to 100 column range; and there are dozens if not thousands of tables. Then this kind of analysis is no longer practical.' Bruce Linsay, IBM fellow' "

The YouTube effect: HTTP traffic now eclipses P2P

The YouTube effect: HTTP traffic now eclipses P2P: "Ellacoya Networks, makers of deep packet inspection gear for carriers, has pulled together some statistics on one million broadband users in North America, and its findings show that HTTP traffic accounts for 46 percent of all broadband traffic. P2P applications now account for only 37 percent. "

Technology@Intel · An update on Intel Itanium processors

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2007/06/i_get_asked_regularly_about.html: "I get asked about why not just focus on Xeon? Xeon is well addressing the needs of the $28B volume server market. This is the fastest growing portion of the server market. However, the mainframe and risc replacement market remains about the same size at $28B and is growing, albeit more slowly than the volume server marketing. Itanium plays a crucial role in the our pursuit of this market — with it’s best in class reliability and scalable performance. It competes head to head with Power and SPARC, creating an open system alternative to these other proprietary high end architectures. "

TG Daily

TG Daily: "Nvidia is well aware of this challenge and has begun assisting universities in establishing classes and developing course material focusing on massively parallel programming and CUDA in particular. Eventually, the company hopes, that GPGPU programming will become a standard part in computer science course work and help to educate a whole new generation of programmers. So far, Nvidia has taught courses at the University of Illinois, The University of California, the University of North Carolina and Purdue University. Nvidia said that several universities are developing their own courses, including the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, Oregon State University, the University of Wisconsin. Caltech, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford have been offering “legacy” GPGPU and GPU programming classes, according to Nvidia chief scientist David Kirk."

: "'The online gaming market segment is experiencing tremendous growth supported by multiple revenue models from subscription, free to play, advertising supported to micro-transaction and virtual currency,' said Alexander Marquez, director of strategic investments for Intel Capital. 'K2 Network's extensive gaming knowledge along with its unique Free2Play model is well positioned to capitalize on this exciting opportunity in interactive entertainment.' "

TG Daily - Analysis: Has Intel found the key to unlock supercomputing powers on the desktop?

TG Daily - Analysis: Has Intel found the key to unlock supercomputing powers on the desktop?
Hong Wang, senior principal engineer with Intel’s Microarchitecture Research Lab told us that the Exoskeleton employs technology which allows it to operate primarily outside of the OS. The Exoskeleton operates via opcodes inserted directly into the binary executable. In this way, coordinating between external accelerator resources and the main software program is handled directly by the CPU in its own native language - binary code.

Intel CPUs with this new ability will directly recognize those new opcodes. It will immediately instruct the accelerator to handle whatever is required. It does this via something called an Accelerator Exoskeleton software layer, which runs transparently to the OS, yet is visible to the application and communicates with the external resources.

Intel Introduces '3-Series' Chipsets at Computex

Intel Introduces '3-Series' Chipsets at Computex: "The Intel 3 Series Chipsets, formerly codenamed 'Bearlake' enable exceptional PC performance while helping to enable improved energy efficiency, system design and quietness. Computers with these chipsets can deliver CE-like video and sound quality and new data security and manageability features for business users and will be the foundation for Intel's next-generation Intel Viiv processor technology and Intel vPro processor technology, codenamed Salt Creek and Weybridge, respectively. "

Eugene Robinson - An Egghead for the Oval Office - washingtonpost.com

Eugene Robinson - An Egghead for the Oval Office - washingtonpost.com: "I want a president -- and it's amazing that I even have to put this on my wish list -- smart enough to know that Darwin was right."