Freescale Semiconductor, post private equity buyout, seems to have made an important committment to its Scottish wafer fab at East Kilbride where over 1,200 people are employed.
According to a report in the Sunday Herald, Denis Griot, senior vice-president and general manager for Freescale in Europe, indicated that the Scottish fab was integral to Freescale's business strategy and no job cuts were planned.
With all this talk of Intel and AMD dual and quad cores, the sleeping giant of the multi-core processor battle could be PowerPC. Freescale is demoing its MPC8641D dual-core device based on Power Architecture technology at the second annual Multicore Expo Conference and Exhibition on March 27-29.
This is the firm's first dual core Power processor and if EEMBC is to be belived the results are pretty impressive.
Anyone interested in parallel processing silicon circa 1995. I have just noticed that two IMST805 -G25S : Floating Point Transputers sold for £22 on eBay.
Multi-core processors may be the new rock n roll for the likes of Intel, AMD and Texas Instruments, but what they are saying about the potential of parallel processing architectures is not really new. All they are doing is taking the concept to the wider embedded systems market.
Last week Mike Hames, senior v-p, Texas Instruments, speaking the company's Developer Conference (TIDC) in Dallas, was predicting the likelihood that hundreds of processors will be integrated on a single, three-dimensional chip.
Enea has upped the parallel processing support of its Polyhedra relational database management system (RDBMS) for network infrastructure systems.
Polyhedra v7.0 is tuned for multi-processor systems by supporting parallel execution of queries and transactions.
The in-memory, transactional RDBMS is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and it will execute out of local RAM so should run smooth.
Polyhedra 7.0 is available immediately for a broad range of operating systems, including OSE, VxWorks, Integrity, Linux, Windows and Unix.
Not strictly parallel processing, but something which I feel will be of general interest.
If you are wondering whether the DVD market will persist with its different Regional formats with the introduction of Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. I suggest you read the following item on the HDTVorg website.
The latest release of the Java Parallel Processing Framework has fixed a number of bugs in the system administration console.
To download the JPPF 0.25.0 beta release.
Changes to Java Parallel Processing Framework 0.25.0 also include a new server connection pooling capability. When added to the client, the connection pooling improvement should result in increased throughput.
There is also new demonstration and documentation to support the connection pooling enhancement.
A more lightweight distribution of the source code has also been added to the latest JPPF release.
AMD's first teraflop performance server may come just week's after Intel's 80-core processor announcement, but AMD gains from its use of product silicon, the Opteron dual core CPU and the R600 Stream Processor.
Indeed, Intel said it had no plans to bring the 80-core chip to market, but it expected chips with 20 to 40 cores could hit the market within 10 years. But no one expects to wait that long for teraflop performance from a commercial CPU?
AMD has made no secret of its plans to use co-processors interoperating with x86 microprocessors to provide supercomputer performance for specific applications.
Does this approach make more sense than Intel's single CPU-centric approach to super server performance?
Intel may grab the headlines with a single processor made up from 80 cores, but perhaps AMD's more pragmatic approach gains from being closer to a real data processing application.
For AMD, accelerated computing begins with an x86-based processor to which is added a separate accelerator chip, the Stream Computing processor.
Clearly, further integration is likely, whioch will inevitably bring the approaches of Intel and AMD clsoer together. But right now AMD's accelerator approach is all about beating Intel to market with commercial products.
"Going forward, AMD will integrate at the device level with accelerated processors, and will integrate a CPU and GP called Fusion, focused on mobile applications," said AMD senior fellow and chief platform architect Steve Polzin.
The Torrenza Stream Computing processor is AMD's first effort in this area and is shipping now, he noted, which performs general-purpose computation on the graphics processing unit (GPU) and allows the floating point performance of the GPU to be an order of magnitude faster than the CPU. Changes to GPU architectures allowed this.
This has real commercial applications, one of which is running oil exploration software from PeakStream.
