Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Aug 2010 23:24 UTC
At the Hot Chips 2010 conference, IBM announced their upcoming z196 CPU, which is really, really fast. How fast? Fastest chip in the world fast. Intended for Z-series mainframe computers, the Z196 has a clock speed of 5.2GHz. Measuring just 512 square millimeters, the Z196 is fabricated on 45nm PD SOI technology, and on its surface contains almost one and a half billion transistors. My... Processor is bigger than yours.
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RE[2]: Are they still stuck in GHz race?
by cb88 on Sat 28th Aug 2010 03:50
in reply to "RE: Are they still stuck in GHz race?"
Member since:2009-04-23
Mainframes tend to have Terabytes of ram just for that reason even my schools compute servers that students use have 64Gb ram and 8x cores. Also wasn't it just the other week that that group demonstrated sorting and archiving 1Tb of data in a minute? http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/27/2231219/Data-Sorting-Wor...
I believe there was a graph I once saw that showed a strong correlation between the speed of AI computations and the size of CPU cache. Such computations don't benefit much from faster access to data on an HD but do benefit greatly from data that can be accessed quickly from cache. What I'm trying to say is 1ms vs 100ms is still slow compared to 5-10ns or less.
RE[2]: Are they still stuck in GHz race?
by tylerdurden on Sat 28th Aug 2010 18:15
in reply to "RE: Are they still stuck in GHz race?"
Member since:2009-03-17
No, you are all missing the point.
It is not that a computer is as fast as it slowest component. The whole point of computer architecture is to make the common case fast. Veeeeery different.
So yeah, the booting speeds may have not progressed that much since they are constrained to the speed of the disk subsystem, which indeed is quite slow. But booting up is not the common case, is it? Running code is. And for the most part, most modern computers tend to utilize their processors rather well, try running a modern game on an old P3. This like databases etc are obviously more sensitive to I/O, but the machines used to run them are not necessarily comparable to a modern single user PC.
Features
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:38 UTC
At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 11:29 UTC
The day has finally come! Jolla has finally announced the launch device for its Sailfish operating system - and by god this is a looker. It's decidedly different from other phones out there, but it has good specifications and carries a relatively reasonably price tag - EUR 399, and it's up for pre-order today, shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:33 UTC
Why does Google get so much credit in the technology industry? Why, despite the company's many obvious failings, do many geeks and enthusiasts still hold a somewhat positive view on the all-knowing technology giant? A specific talk at Google I/O this week provides the answer.
Linked by David Adams on 05/16/13 4:23 UTC
OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/11/13 21:41 UTC
"Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening." That's one way to start an insider explanation of why Windows' performance isn't up to snuff. Written by someone who actually contributes code to the Windows NT kernel, the comment on Hacker News, later deleted but reposted with permission on Marc Bevand's blog, paints a very dreary picture of the state of Windows development. The root issue? Think of how Linux is developed, and you'll know the answer.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/08/13 14:22 UTC
This is one of those news items that's fun to write, fun to read, fun to comment on, and where no one will be able to say anything unkind. It's all just one big ball of awesome fluffiness. TuneTracker, the BeOS radio automation software, has just released something very special: TuneTracker System 5, the first version designed entirely and specifically for Haiku. In fact, it actually includes Haiku in the software package. Better yet, TuneTracker also unveiled several system-in-a-box products - which have Haiku and TuneTracker pre-installed.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/02/13 15:28 UTC
Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/29/13 21:06 UTC
Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/24/13 22:24 UTC
They're here! Whether that excites you or not remains to be seen, but the Galaxy S4, which will most likely become the best selling Android smartphone of the year by a huge margin, has been reviewed by all the major sites, and there's lots of interesting conclusions in there - although I think most of you will get the gist.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/18/13 11:21 UTC
Nokia has posted its quarterly results for the first quarter of 2013, and just like the quarters that came before, there's not a whole lot of good news in there. The rise in Lumia sales still can't even dream of making up for the sales drop in Symbian phones, and when broken down in versions, the sales figures for Windows Phone 8 Lumias in particular are very disappointing. In North America, Nokia is getting slaughtered.More Features »
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2006-01-10
Wow, while everyone else went on scientific reasoning of why RAM is fast or not fast..
The slowest path of computing at this point in time isn't RAM, which is probably the second slowest, the slowest is through the hard drive!
RAM keeps getting faster and faster. Hard drive technology really hasn't changed all that much since the beginning.
It's sad that it has been the bottleneck in real speed for so long. If only SSD technology was FAR cheaper than it is. Then maybe we can finally start pushing the limits of the PCI(e/x) and Memory bus.