Microsoft math: dual core licensed as one chip
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Siding with chip makers, Microsoft said it won't charge double for its per-processor licenses when dual-core chips come to market next year.
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Blog: AMD announces its quad core server chips will ship in August
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Opinion: The company&#39;s decision to keep per-processor licensing for upcoming multicore technology is a win for customers, but of more immediate licensing concern are grid, partitioning and utility computing.
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A chip the size of a fingernail and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second is unveiled by Intel.
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Microsoft announced that it will continue its per-processor licensing model with the introduction of dual-core and multicore processors.
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After its recent delays and missteps, chip maker sets its sights on a dual-core future.
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Chipmaking giant Intel Corporation believes that its future lies in dual-core chips. Speaking at last weekâs Intel Developer Forum here, Intel President and COO Paul Otellini
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Microsoft will continue to charge its customers for a single processor license once a new crop of hardware servers with the equivalent of two microprocessors on each chip hit the market next year.
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(InfoWorld) - What if your desktop computer could run 100 times faster than a PC and were simple enough for a high school student to program? That's not an idle question. Researchers at the University of Maryland have built a prototype of a "desktop supercomputer" that can do just that. The new computer is at least three years from reaching commercial markets, but it could have a big effect in industries that process large loads of data. They include the pharmaceutical, aerospace, military and entertainment industries, for applications such as drug modeling, computer-aided design, and digital content creation. The Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer combines the decades-old philosophy of using parallel computing algorithms with the huge number of transistors in modern processors. The machine uses three field-programmable gate array chips from Xilinx to represent a network of 64 ARM processors that control dozens of threads of simultaneous computation, says Uzi Vishkin, a professor at theÂ A. James Clark School of EngineeringÂ who built the machine with his graduate students. The team is now trying to shrink the prototype, a license-plate-size board running at 75 MHz, down to a fingernail-size version running between 1GHz and 2GHz. Team members took the first step toward that goal this summer by commissioning IBM to manufacture a CMOS silicon application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with an on-chip data interconnect network. The venture is funded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Vishkin says. A kid could do it Even if they succeed in building a smaller version of the prototype, the researchers will face the challenge of teaching programmers how to write software for a multithreaded system. Many commercial software companies are already puzzling over a similar problem today as they try to adapt to the latest dual- and quad-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. However, Vishkin says his system will be easier to program than applications for commercial multicore chips because the XMT algorithms appear to the operating system to be a single thread. "If you build it in a way that people cannot program it, it remains in the ivory tower of theory," he says. To prove his point, before the end of this year, Vishkin is planning to teach a class of high school students how to program the XMT using a version of the C programming language. He will teach college students to program the prototype in the first quarter of 2008. User wish list A desktop supercomputer would be a godsend for students and artists who rely on computers to process huge amounts of data in the creation of high-resolution digital pictures and movies, says Jon Stiles, director of campus technology at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver. "That would absolutely revolutionize our animation department," Stiles says, adding that currently, students at the college often have to wait for nine or 10 hours while their PCs process the data in a new design. "We're constantly looking for ways to eliminate bottlenecks in production," he says. Stiles warns, however, that a parallel supercomputer would have to meet three conditions before the college could use it. It would have to offer vast data storage, be capable of running standard commercial software such as Adobe Systems' Creative Suite 3 and consume the same amount of energy as current computers. If those conditions were met, Stiles says, "my campus IT support manager would do back flips." Energy use shouldn't be a problem, says Vishkin. "Based on back-of-the-envelope calculations, we believe that each cluster we have will consume not much more power than a standard core," he says. "So we will be competitive on power draw with the same generation of multicore chips."
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Intel is on track to introduce work-sharing dual-core processors across all its product lines by the end of next year. The technology is part of a strategy shift at Intel away from processor speed and toward performance.
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Taking a stand on what has become a contentious issue, Microsoft on Tuesday said it will count new multicore processors as single units when they debut next year.
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It said it has demonstrated a working version of the technology based on its Opteron chip. By Darrell Dunn. The shift to dual-core microprocessors continues to accelerate.
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Start-up Simply RISC builds a single-core variant of Sun Microsystems' open-source UltraSparc T1 chip.
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NEW YORK - Communications chipmaker Broadcom today will announce a chip that combines four cores--the central brain of a chip--onto a single piece of silicon.
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(InfoWorld) - What will they put in notebook PCs next? At Intel's recent Developer Forum conference in Beijing, the company revealed it's working on quad-core processing to go. Set for release in 2008, the quad-core mobile processor is aimed at high-level gaming and mobile computers, where users will trade battery life for more performance. While the most demanding users (including gamers and those doing video editing) always want more processing power, this chip won't appear in standard business notebooks for some time. "You'll see it at the high end, but I don't see it running so fast into the mainstream because I don't believe there will be enough threaded applications that will justify the trade-offs," says Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobile platform group. (Multithreaded applications allow several parts of software code to be executed simultaneously, taking advantage of multiple processing cores.) The quad-core mobile chip will likely differ in some way from Intel's current desktop and server quad-core chips, which strap together two dual-core dies inside a single-chip package. Meanwhile, the next version of Intel's Centrino notebook platform, code-named Santa Rosa, hit the market last month. Compared with Centrino, Santa Rosa offers several improvements, including dynamic acceleration, which raises the clock speed of one processor core above the guaranteed frequency level when the other core has powered down. This raises the performance of the remaining core while keeping the processor operating within the thermal limits envisioned by Intel engineers. This differentiates Dynamic Acceleration from overclocking, where users raise the frequency of a processor beyond the intended level.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Company will manufacture a dual-core PowerPC processor.
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Quads, duals both targeted Intel has allegedly earmarked April not only for desktop four-core processor price cuts but also to reduce what it charges for quad- and dual-core chips designed for single-processor systems.â¦