Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 27th Nov 2009 22:10 UTC
"IBM likes to go on and on about the transaction processing power and I/O bandwidth of its System z mainframes, but now there is a new and much bigger kid on the block. Its name is the Power Systems IH supercomputing node, based on the company's forthcoming Power7 processors and a new homegrown switching system that blends optical and copper interconnects. The Power7 IH node was on display at the SC09 supercomputer trade show last week in Portland, Oregon, and El Reg was on hand to get the scoop from the techies who designed the iron. This server node is the heart of the 20 petaflop 'Blue Waters' supercomputer being installed at the University of Illinois."
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Member since:2006-01-02
Member since:2009-05-20
Member since:2008-07-15
Which is why the ppc G4, which was very low-power and efficient, kicked the arse of Intel or AMD in its performance to power consumption ratio? Yes, Core2 and Athlon-64 were faster in terms of raw computing power, but they sucked up a hell of a lot more energy too. I've yet to see an X86 chip that can match the power-to-performance ratio of the ppc, Atom is a joke by comparison.
An ARM desktop might be nice for some uses, especially when Cortex A9 comes around. Current ARM chips, however, seem a bit under-powered for what many people use their desktops to handle. Curent ARM chips would be ideal for netbooks or other small devices. They're powerful enough to handle mobile computing and yet use very little power making battery life amazing.
Features
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/09/10 16:18 UTC
Notebooks with dual GPUs have been shipping for a while now, but switching between the fancy discrete GPU and the low-power integrated one hasn't exactly been painless. Today, NVIDIA introduced a technology called Optimus, which makes the switching process automatic and transparent. In Windows, that is.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/08/10 23:55 UTC
The past few weeks or so, there's been a lot of interest in a supposed battery status report bug in Windows 7. After installing Windows 7, some users reported seeing "consider replacing your battery"-warnings in systems that appeared to be operating just fine on Windows XP or Vista. After extensive research, Steven Sinofsky has now explained on the Engineering 7 blog that the fault is not with Windows 7 - it really, really is your battery.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/08/10 21:38 UTC
Developed by industrial designer Barton Smith, the Stream Adaptive Computer System is an interesting take on making computing easier and more adaptable to suit the user's current needs. Today, he also unveiled the operating system and user interface that would run on Stream. It's... Amazing.
Linked by David Adams on 02/08/10 19:29 UTC
We've been working on an "OSNews version 5" upgrade for several months, and with several months to go, we decided to make some incremental changes to OSNews on the existing codebase. The major change, as you probably already noticed, is that we've removed the "Page1/Page2" tabs and instead have OSNews stories with original content and commentary in one column, and news, items on OS-related topics gleaned from other sources in the other. Read on for more details on the changes we've implemented.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/08/10 13:23 UTC, submitted by kragil
You may remember that back in November last year, I wrote about the lack of a decent Paint.NET-like application for Linux (or, more specifically, for Gtk+ distributions, since Qt has Krita). As it turns out, this compelled Novell employee Jonathan Pobst to code a Paint.NET clone in Gtk+ using Cairo. Version 0.1 is here, and it's remarkably advanced for something so young.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/07/10 19:11 UTC
Later this month, Microsoft will most likely unveil
Linked by Kroc Camen on 02/05/10 23:28 UTC
A quick round up of various web-related news items. First up, a new open source product entitled the "Highgate media suite" will bring OGG video decoding to Silverlight. Microsoft have just joined the SVG working group (arguably 10 years late, but it's better than nothing). Adobe promise significant improvements in Flash 10.1, including Core Animation rendering on OS X and lowered CPU usage. Finally, CoperLicht--a WebGL JavaScript 3D engine (Quake in JS will be here one day)
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/05/10 22:24 UTC
In a way, it's kind of sad. The old media squealing and squirming, trying pathetically to hold on to a time that has long been lost to the sands of... Well, time. Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, made such a pathetic attempt before a US Congress committee yesterday, claiming Boxee stole Hulu's content.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/04/10 23:41 UTC
Finally something we can work with. While both the iPad and the Joo Joo are technically still vapourware, people have at least had the opportunity to play with the former, while the latter remained somewhat illusive. Now that the device has been set to ship at the end of this month, Ars Technica finally had some time to play with the Joo Joo and talk to Fusion Garage's CEO, Chandra Rathakrishnan. There's good news, and there's (potentially) bad news.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/04/10 20:48 UTC
Now this is something you don't read every day. Dick Brass, vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, has written an article for The New York Times' Op-Ed section, detailing the flaws in Microsoft's corporate culture, and how they've severely affected the company in a negative way. Telling, and painful. And, in a way, very sad. Update: Microsoft responds. "For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact."
Member since:
2008-07-01
Hurrrr. I wish someone would do a new Power/PowerPC desktop machine.