AMD's SSE5 ends the old RISC vs. CISC debate
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Prompted by AMD's announcement of the SSE5 instruction-set extensions, Glaskowsky analyzes the ultimate outcome to this old controversy.
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Dual-core microprocessors won&#39;t mean doubled software license fees, according to an announcement by Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
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North and South bridges exposed Details of AMD's next-generation South Bridge chip, the SB700, have leaked out. With them, the chip maker's plans for its latest notebook reference platform, codenamed 'Trevally' - designed, it seems, to take Intel's 'Santa Rosa' Centrino head on.â¦
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AMD&#39;s dual-core AMD64 chips will provide instructions compatible with Intel&#39;s SSE 3 technology, the chip maker announced at the Microprocessor Forum yesterday.
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New dual-core processors will make conventional software licensing models obsolete. What's next?
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Gennady Feldman, in light of some of the recent talk about enhancing the performance of your PHP applications, has written up this new post comparing two of the more favored software packages - APC and Eaccelerator.   Some websites use other technologies like Java and face the exact same problems. There are different variables involved here and the most common one is database. So I thought i would post a couple of articles related to performance and tuning.   This this post of the series focuses on the first of the two - APC - and talks about places it's used and includes some general performance recommendations. These include "Don't try to throw everything at your poor database" and the importance of XDebug.
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Word on the official name of AMD's '4x4' double-dual-core platform, now 'Quad FX,' leaked out yesterday a day ahead of schedule. But even the first reviews of the new processor leave open some key questions.
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Four-core coming AMD has grown tired of hearing about Intel's four-core Xeon wonders and so countered today with some faster Opterons and some lower-voltage ones. If you can't beat them with cores, beat them with variety.â¦
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Budget Eee PC 701 grabs spotlight at Computex 2007 with its computing power and convenience.
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Intel racked up some serious karmic debt when it schemed to run AMD out of the PC processor business. Xeon now languishes in Opteronâs shadow, which strikes me as just desserts for some nasty business.
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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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Not everyone is ready to do a complete switch over to the new Intel LGA 775 platform quite yet and perhaps for good reason. Should you decided you would like to say take a peek at it without having to &quot;Sell
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Is parallel processing the step beyond? Here is a long-term question: is Intel starting the long walk away from the x86 architecture and towards what it sees as the "next big thing"?â¦
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Massively parallel, 64-bit POWER-based processor to debut at ISSCC
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There&#39;s been a fair amount of debate recently about whether AMD or Intel is winning the ever-present chip arms race. Based on the experience of this year&#39;s Intel Developer Forum (IDF), I&#39;m not sure that Intel can still claim to be in the lead.
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Via Technologies&#39; upcoming Isaiah processor likely outperforms&#160;Intel&#39;s Silverthorne chip&#160;designed for mobile computers based on limited information about the chip that&#39;s been made available so far, according to the Isaiah&#39;s chief designer.&quot;Silverthorne is liable to be a little faster than our current C7 [processor], but the new Isaiah will be substantially faster than that,&quot; said Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, the Via subsidiary that does processor design for the company.But don&#39;t look for Isaiah processors to match the performance of Intel&#39;s high-end processors, the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad.&quot;The Core 2 is going to be faster. Not massively so, but the Core 2 for performance is the fastest architecture in the world. It will be massively hotter too, and of course massively more expensive,&quot; Henry said.Announced Thursday, Isaiah is a 64-bit processor architecture that is significantly more powerful than the Esther cores used in Via&#39;s current line of C7 processors, while consuming the same amount of power. Single-core chips based on the Isaiah architecture will be available soon, with volume production using a 65-nanometer process expected by the end of June.Intel&#39;s Silverthorne processor is due for release&#160;around the same time. The chip is billed as an inexpensive, power-efficient processor that&#39;s ideal for ultraportable and handheld computers. Silverthorne is Intel&#39;s first chip designed for this product segment and will be the heart of Menlow, a chip package that pairs a processor with the company&#39;s Poulsbo chip set.The conclusion that Isaiah processors may outperform Silverthorne is based on the relatively small amount of information about Intel&#39;s chip that has been released. Most importantly, it assumes that Silverthorne and a related processor called Diamondville, designed for low-cost computers, use an in-order processor architecture instead of an out-of-order architecture.An in-order processor is similar to a factory with a single assembly line. The chip can only work on one operation at a time, and other operations must wait for the assembly line to clear before they can be processed. An out-of-order processor, like Isaiah and Intel&#39;s Core 2 chips, is equivalent to a factory with multiple assembly lines where different operations can be processed simultaneously.Other factors also come into play. Silverthorne likely has a substantially smaller cache than Isaiah processors -- which have 1MB of level 2 cache -- and could use a slower front-side bus, giving Via&#39;s chip an additional edge, Henry said.Silverthorne&#39;s performance will also be constrained by business considerations. &quot;They&#39;ve got to protect the high-end money makers in the Intel product line,&quot; Henry said.&quot;You don&#39;t want to make Silverthorne too good and you don&#39;t want to make it possible for someone to use a Silverthorne instead of a mobile Core 2,&quot; he said.Intel declined to answer detailed questions about Silverthorne&#39;s specifications and architecture, and it&#39;s possible the processor may confound Via&#39;s expectations when released. A true comparison of performance won&#39;t be possible until both chips are released and can be benchmarked by independent observers.&quot;It&#39;s very difficult to make an assessment given that Intel hasn&#39;t made a full disclosure on what Silverthorne is,&quot; said Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, a market research firm that tracks the microprocessor market.But there are signs the two chips could be closely matched.&quot;The description of the two components, both Silverthorne and [Isaiah], that we know to date would seem to put them in the same general class,&quot; he said, noting that some versions of Silverthorne and Diamondville are expected to ship with two processor cores, while others will have a single core, like Isaiah.&quot;From what has come out, Silverthorne is rumored to be an in-order machine,&quot; McCarron said. &quot;But we haven&#39;t actually seen parts yet, and it&#39;s certainly possible that particular rumor might not be correct.&quot;Intel clearly aims to partition its product line and there will be a &quot;gap&quot; between Silverthorne and the Core 2 product line, McCarron said, noting this gap could be a difference in processor performance or architectural restrictions that limit the features and capabilities offered with Silverthorne.&quot;It&#39;s very safe to say that the Silverthorne products will be positioned in such a way that they would not threaten products above them in the product stack that Intel has,&quot; he said.
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Killing two birds with one stone Hands on Iâve been fascinated by cross-platform programming for more years than I care to remember, and my interest has recently been sharpened by the acquisition of a number of Apple Macs â both Intel and PPC (PowerPC). This article focuses primarily on some technical aspects of Qt, Trolltechâs cross-platform C++ toolkit which, as you may know, is the architectural core behind the KDE desktop on Linux. At the end, I show how easy it is to create a simple application without writing a line of code.â¦