multicore

A big number doesn't always win over the market, but it can help. And the number AMD is pinning its hopes on today is 16.

That's the notable number of cores in each of its Opteron 6200 "Interlagos" processors using the new "Bulldozer" architecture. Using an approach that helped Intel reclaim the initiative that the original Opteron stole years ago, the Opteron 6200 actually packages two silicon chips in a single housing and fit into the same socket as the earlier-generation Opteron 6100 models that reached up to 12 cores.

The chips are available … Read more

Chipmaker Intel has been investigating the issue of scaling the number of cores in chips through its Terascale Computing Research Program, which has so far yielded two experimental chips of 80 and 48 cores.

In November, Intel engineer Timothy Mattson caused a stir at the Supercomputer 2010 Conference when he told the audience that one of the Terascale chips--the 48-core Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC)--could theoretically scale to 1,000 cores.

Mattson, who is a principal engineer at Intel's Microprocessor Technology Laboratory, talked to ZDNet UK about the reasoning behind his views and why--while a 1,000-core chip isn'… Read more

Security research firm Matousec has published details of a technique for bypassing some of the protections offered by widely used Windows security software, including programs from McAfee and Trend Micro.

However, the attack has serious limitations, including the requirement that the attacker must already have the ability to execute code on a system, Matousec acknowledged. That means the method would have to be used in combination with another attack vector, or employed by an attacker with local access to a system.

The method, called an argument-switch attack, can be used against Windows security programs that use a technique called System … Read more

Google's Chrome browser draws heavily on the WebKit browser engine project led chiefly by Apple, but now WebKit is adopting one Chrome idea: separation between some computing processes.

Apple programmer Anders Carlsson announced the move, an interface called WebKit2, in a WebKit mailing list posting Thursday. "WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Pushing several steps farther in the multicore direction, Intel on Wednesday demonstrated a fully programmable 48-core processor it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can.

The 1.3-billion transistor processor, called Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is successor generation to the 80-core "Polaris" processor that Intel's Tera-scale research project produced in 2007. Unlike that precursor, though, the second-generation model is able to run the standard software of Intel's x86 chips such as its Pentium and Core models.

The cores themselves aren't terribly powerful--more like lower-end Atom processors than Intel's flagship Nehalem models, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said at a press event here. But collectively they pack a lot of power, he said, and Intel has ambitious goals in mind for the overall project.

"The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do," Rattner said. "They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability." … Read more

Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.

And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project.

The computing industry is in constant tension between making a fresh start and evolving the current technology. The limits of today's hardware designs and programming technology led the Go team to take the former approach.

"We found some of those problems … Read more

Intel's James Reinders is an expert on parallelism; his most recent book covered the C++ extensions for parallelism provided by Intel Threaded Building Blocks. He's also the Director of Marketing and Business for the company's Software Development Products. In Part 1 of our discussion at the Intel Developers Forum in September we talked about how to think about performance in a parallel programming environment, why such environments give developers headaches, and what can be done about it.

Here, in Part 2, we move on to cloud computing, functional and dynamic languages, and what needs to happen with … Read more

It's a question we all face: with chips getting more processing cores instead of more gigahertz, is your next computer going to actually run your software faster?

Microsoft is one of the companies that feels the pressure to most acutely when it comes to putting those cores to work. Though it doesn't pretend to have the problem licked, Microsoft does believe Windows 7 provides a better foundation for using multicore systems than earlier versions of the operating system.

One key part of solving the PC's multicore problems draws from the world of big iron, and Windows 7 … Read more

Cambridge, England-based chip company ARM on Wednesday announced the development of dual-core, quad-core, and eight-core Cortex A9 processor designs, explicitly aimed at markets currently served by Intel's x86 chips and IBM's PowerPC.

"This is a huge departure from what we've done in the past", Eric Schorn, vice president of marketing for ARM's processor division, told ZDNet UK. "We really wanted to take off the handcuffs and see what could be done with performance, performance, performance."

The new designs, available in two variants optimized for low power consumption or high performance, are intended … Read more