Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Dual Core? Quad Core? Try 80 Core!

Intel researchers recently announced they've produced an 80-core chip that uses less energy than a quad-core processor and has teraflop performance capabilities.

According to Manny Vara, a technology strategist with Intel's R&D labs the chip is just for research purposes and lacks some necessary functionality at this point, but Vara says Intel will be able to produce a chip with 80 cores in five to eight years.

The chip, called the Tera-Scale Teraflop Prototype, is the subject of a research project that Intel will present at the 2007 International Solid State Circuits Conference in early February.

Vara says the 80-core chip uses less than 100 watts of energy, compared to a dual-core chip using 60 to 70 watts or a quad-core using 105 to 130 watts.

Apparently, the approach is to use a larger number of simpler cores of varying types. So one core might be optimized for one kind of processing while another core is optimized for a different type of processing.

Read some early details here.

Labels:

Submit to:   book mark Dual Core? Quad Core? Try 80 Core! in del.icio.usDel.icio.us  |   submit Dual Core? Quad Core? Try 80 Core! to digg.comDigg  |   submit Dual Core? Quad Core? Try 80 Core! to slashdot.comSlashdot  |  diigo itDiigo

posted by Al @ 5:50 PM   0 comments links to this post

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Xilinx Education

If you use the Xilinx FPGA tools (or you'd like to) you may have noticed that Xilinx has an "education" link on their home page. Of course, the main purpose of this link is to sell you fairly pricey instructor-led training (actually, it is pretty reasonable for this kind of class, but more than most of us will pony up out of our own pockets).

However, there are several of the shorter classes available online for free. You do have to register, but the price is free. Some pretty good classes on the Xilinx-specific tools. Don't expect the Verilog, VHDL, or even the "designing with FPGA" classes for free, but there are titles regarding usage of constraints, basic FPGA architecture, and several other interesting topics.

Check out this page. It isn't really clear that some of the classes are free until you "drill down a bit," so be sure to explore.

Labels: , ,

Submit to:   book mark Xilinx Education in del.icio.usDel.icio.us  |   submit Xilinx Education to digg.comDigg  |   submit Xilinx Education to slashdot.comSlashdot  |  diigo itDiigo

posted by Al @ 9:43 PM   0 comments links to this post