Items tagged with reading
Who could've seen this coming? The online e-tailer that made waves by selling nearly every book in the universe is keeping the art of reading at the forefront of its sales... but in a very different way. As digital bookworms have emerged and Amazon's Kindle line of tablets and e-readers have exploded, Amazon has issued "Kindle First." The exclusive program is one that promises Kindle users the ability to snag new books well before their official release date. Here's how it works: Each month, Amazon Publishing editors select several titles from Kindle’s most popular categories a month ahead of their official publication date, adding a note of recommendation and a behind-the-scenes look at...
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Yesterday, news broke regarding Microsoft and Intel launching parallel research centers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to investigate way to accelerate developments in mainstream parallel computing. And today, we've posted some details and commentary on the subject over at HotHardware. Here's a snip from the piece... "Even today, writing software able to take advantage of multi-threading is notoriously difficult. In order to help drive the development of the tools and threading-aware applications, Microsoft and Intel are together awarding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley $10 million dollars...
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It's no secret that the days of procuring performance exclusively through faster clock speeds are over. The current crop of multi-core server, desktop, and mobile CPU designs are a dead giveaway that processor vendors like Intel are instead looking to increased parallelism as the facilitator of more computing horsepower. The problem, according to David Patterson, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, becomes one of scheduling and balancing workloads across multiple sets of processing resources, so that you can truly get more performance out of those threaded designs. If an application is only running in one thread, upgrading to a dual- or quad-core chip won't help speed it up. It's a...
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These days, just developing a chip with a multi-core architecture doesn't necessarily equate to higher performance, since many mainstream applications are not multithreaded. As a result, big chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD are continually developing programming kits, compilers and various tools to equip software developers with the capability to tap mult-core processor resources for their roadmap product efforts. However the task at hand, though seemingly straight-forward isn't as easy, even for the likes of Microsoft. Though target applications that could benefit, like rich-media, image and speech recognition, 3D rendering and finance, are obvious, what's...
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The amount of information available to the consumer has exploded with the advent of the internet. Think of your attention span as capital. The coming battle is going to be to among content providers to always place exactly the appropriate content right in front of you. Read/WriteWeb explores this fantastic world we're moving into, where the pixel producers endlessly smooch the bums of the consumer. Otherwise, you're gone. It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell. Literally, the longer a user stays on a...
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Dual-core CPUs have made their way into computers across the world and with quad-core processors poised to make the same invasion, it looks like the core race is on. Interestingly, Intel notes on its roadmap that in it's 45nm Wolfdale dual-core and Yorkfield quad-core CPUs, hyper threading may make a return. Perhaps the most interesting thing about these two processors is the return of Hyper-Threading. This, however, does not mean that Yorkfield will appear as eight logical cores, nor does it mean Wolfdale will appear as four logical cores. Intel's internal guidance on the subject specifically claims the processor will ship with Hyper-Threading, but will only utilize 4 threads. On every Intel...
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ZDNet has an article running on how Intel's Hyperthreading hurts server performance with certain applications. There have been instances reported with SQL Server and Citrix Terminal Server where under heavy load, performance degrades with HT enabled. A Microsoft SQL Developer reported performance degrading and documents the details. Apparently, the problem lies with the on-die cache being unable to keep up with a flurry of multi-threaded requests. "With both SQL Server and Citrix Terminal Server installations, HT-enabled motherboards show markedly degraded performance under heavy load. Disabling HT restores expected levels, according to reports from within the IT industry." ...
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Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz Processor Intel breaks 3GHz barrier and introduces Hyperthreading to the mainstream By, Dave Altavilla and Chris Angelini November 14, 2002 It was only two short months ago that we gave you our hands on experiences with Intel's last flagship processor for the PC, the 2.8GHz Pentium 4. As we neared what seemed to be an almost mythical clock speed of 3GHz, we paused to wonder for a moment, whether or not the average user could take advantage of the power of a Pentium 4 at this clock speed or the future Athlon XP3000+, for that matter. Again, that pause we had was only for a moment and we snapped back to reality with a hearty Neanderthal...
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