Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Multicore vs Programmers
An old colleague just sent me an email bringing up a discussion we had last year, where he was a strong proponent for the homogeneous model of a multiprocessor. The root of that discussion was the...
View ArticleWhen Multicore makes Things Simpler, like IMA
Most of the time when talking about the impact of multicore processing on software, we complain that it makes the software more complicated because it has to cope with the additional complexities of...
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IBM z6: Multicore, Accelerators
The IBM mainframe family started with the S/360 back in the 1960s is still going strong. The naming has been a interesting in recent years, going from S/390 to z900 to z990 to z9. Seems like the next...
View ArticleHeterogeneous vs homogeneous systems, revisited
I got another email from my friend with the thesis that processors will become ever more homogeneous as time goes on, while I believe in a relative heterogenezation (is that a word?) of computer...
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David Ditzel Interview at The Register/Semicoherent Computing
The Register has a few podcasts in addition to their website, and the one called “Semicoherent Computing” has turned into a very nice series of interviews with interesting people from the computer...
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Kunle Olukotun Interview: Heterogeneity, Domain-Specific Programming
The Radio Register has a nice interview with Kunle Olukotun, the man most known for the Afara/Sun Niagara/UltraSparc T1-2-etc. design. It is a long interview, lasting well over an hour, but it is worth...
View ArticleSiCS Multicore Days: The Debate Points
It is a week ago now, and sometimes it is good to let impressions sink in and get processed a bit before writing about an event like the SiCS Multicore Days. Overall, the event was serious fun, and I...
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EETimes.com – Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms
The EETimes article Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms piqued my interest. There is an interesting chart in there about just how slow more-than-one-core processors will be in penetrating a vaguely...
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When does Hardware Acceleration make Sense in Networking?
Yes, when does hardware acceleration make sense in networking? Hardware acceleration in the common sense of “TCP offload”. This question was answered by a very nicely reasoned “no” in an article by...
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Cavium Octeon II: Short Notes
About two months ago, Cavium Networks launched their second generation of Octeon chips, the Octeon II. The most obvious difference to the previous generation (Octeon, Octeon Plus) is a new MIPS64 core...
View ArticleSiCS Multicore Day 2009
Last Friday, I attended this year’s edition of the SiCS Multicore Day. It was smaller in scale than last year, being only a single day rather than two days. The program was very high quality...
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Freescale P4080, in Physical Form
Past Tuesday, I attended the Freescale Design With Freescale (DWF) one-day technology event in Kista, Stockholm. This is a small-scale version of the big Freescale Technology Forum, and featured four...
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MCC 2009 Presentations Online
The presentations from the 2009 Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing (MCC 2009) are now online at the program page for the workshop. Let me add some comments on the workshop per se. This was the...
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Nvidia “Kal-El” Variable SMP
Nvidia recently announced that their already-known “Kal-El” quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC actually contains five processor cores, not just four as a “normal” quad-core would. They call the architecture...
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SiCS Multicore Day 2012
The 2012 edition of the SiCS Multicore Day was fun, like they have always been in the past. I missed it in 2010 and 2011, but could make it back this year. It was interesting to see that the points...
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David May on Multicore: Heterogeneity not Needed
Via the EETimes, I found a very interesting talk by Bristol professor David May, presented at the 4th Annual Bristol Multicore Challenge, in June of 2013. The talk can be found as a Youtube movie here,...
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Intel Blog Post: The More the Merrier – Integration and Virtual Platforrms
Integration is hard, that is well-known. For computer chip and system-on-chip design, integration has to be done pre-silicon in order to find integration issues early so that designs can be updated...
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SAMOS 2019 – Insights, Mechanisms, Heterogeneity, and more
Earlier in July 2019, I had the honor of presenting one of the keynote talks at the 19th SAMOS (International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, MOdeling, and Simulation)...
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CACM on DSAs
The July 2020 edition of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) had a front-page theme of “Domains-Specific Hardware Accelerators”, or DSAs. It contained two articles about the subject, one about an...
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Timesharing System Design Concepts (1970)
When I recently turned 50, a friend of mine gave me a book that was about as old as me – Timesharing System Design Concepts, by Richard W Watson. The copyright date is 1970, but the publishing date...
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