Computer Hardware

Interesting reading for Geeks.

Virtualization – Intel Hexes AMD
While AMD stumbles around trying to get its first errata-free Barcelona quads out two years behind Intel, Intel is off planning the launch of its six-core Dunnington microprocessor, a hex, if you will, the last of the expected Core 2-based Xeon server chips before it switches over to the Nehalem microarchitecture capable of supporting eight or more cores.

Intel, Microsoft, Uncle Sam sink big money into multicore
“With multicore, it’s like we are throwing this Hail Mary pass down the field and now we have to run down there as fast as we can to see if we can catch it.”…That’s a pretty good summary of where the software folks are at with the rapidly increasing core and thread counts that are coming out of the hardware side of the computing industry, which is why two recently announced research institutes are hoping to cook up a steroid injection that will boost the metaphorical runner’s speed.

AMD Pushes Multi-Threaded Computing With Open Source Move
To maximize the performance of multi-core processors requires multi-threaded code. “Going multi-core won’t automatically raise application performance,” Forrester analyst James Staten told LinuxInsider. “Single-threaded applications that are not multi-core-ready will not benefit much from the new generation of processors.”