- Intel decides to get back into the graphics chip business. I have the back story.
- Apple updating the new iPhone already? Looks like the run rate for the thing is 800,000 a week. Meanwhile AT&T keeps the exclusive.
- Microsoft getting grief over Vista. Company proves that everyone is indeed within 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon.
- Google may lose suit over AdSense.
- Thailand bans GTA IV.
- New initiative to make $12 computer as an SOC.
- Motorola has a new co-CEO.
- SanDisk is 20 years old.
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Beyond making game makers happy some OS markers are starting to take advantage of multiprocessor chip sets. OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will have ‘Grand Central’ which is an API to take advantage of mc, and Sun has been working hard in the labs to scale Solaris (Niagara and Intel). For example, they’ve been able to scale MySql across 80 cores.
Microsoft kind of supports it through .NET and is really only explicit in their game API’s. Hopefully they’ll fix this in their next OS – or not, it’s Microsoft after all.
Why the big deal of multicore? Think of CGI for web servers (e.g. PHP or the Google Python based app engine) – a new process is spawned for each request. Clean easy programming model and quite efficient once it’s loaded. However it’s slow to load and sucks up chip resources like mad.
Threads that service requests (like in a Java or .NET server) are kind of kludge of this. Threads live inside a process and share programming resources. A more difficult programming model but loads faster.
Multicore gives you the best of both worlds. Expect these chips next year. Meanwhile the chip developers are making a killing this year from mobile chips.
Back in late 1989, we started developing a product using the new (at the time) Intel 82716 graphic controller chip. It was so new that Intel gave us prototype parts to work with. We finished the design and started production in early 1990. We were in production for about a month when Intel announced that they were discontinuing the 82716 and effectively getting out of the embedded video controller market. They did allow a french company to second source the chip but it was not rated for as high a clock speed as the Intel produced part. We had to hand select the french made parts and overclocked the ones that worked.
Damned Intel bean counters!
Intel getting “back” into graphics is a logical progression to the computing industry trend – visual computing !!!
The internet is going visual – think Second Life. The OS interface is going 3D. Gaming is now mainstream. It is only logical that processing loads will be increasingly sent to graphical engines.
Also, getting “back” to graphics? Intel TODAY is the LARGEST graphics vendor in the world!!
Ars Technica has a nice overview of the GPU for Larrabee.