Intel Xeon Phi Enters Parallel Quest for HPC Dominance
Ever seen three thoroughbreds heading for the same finishing line, but running on different tracks? Watch AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA going after the high-performance computing (HPC) market. This week, Intel entered an official name into the race, Intel Xeon Phi. The first product to feature Intel’s many integrated core (MIC) architecture, Phi is expected to ship with more than 50 cores. Continue reading
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AMD Fusion Developer Summit: GPU is Not Just for Ninja Programmers
Skilled programmers who can sneak into the GPU and execute their parallel jobs belong to an elite group. They are “Ninja programmers,” as AMD corporate fellow Phil Rogers call them.
Rogers, who delivered the keynote at this week’s AMD Fusion Developer Summit, believes GPU computing should be available to a broader audience, to the common programmers who make a living churning out codes in C, C++, JAVA, and Python. In fact, Rogers may even object to the term GPU computing. If it were up to AMD and Rogers, GPU and CPU computing could be one and the same, fused together into a Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). Continue reading
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DE Contest Winner Norwood: Life with a New Dell Precision Workstation with AMD FirePro Graphics
Mark Norwood from Norwood Designs, winner of DE‘s cubicle toy design contest, is no longer spending 18 hours rendering. Previously, he would hit “render” in his program, go to bed, then wake up to find that his machine was still chugging away at his pixels. But the new Dell Precision workstation with AMD FirePro graphics — the prize he collected for his water-spraying Sherman tank — reduced the rendering jobs to merely hours. Continue reading
DE Cubicle Toy Design Contest: We Have a Winner!
Earlier this week, we — the three judges — agonized over our upcoming decisions to pick one from the three worthy ideas we had before us:
- Jason Cox’s remote-controlled mouse, detailed in Google SketchUp;
- Ray Kelley’s bottle cap blaster, designed in SolidWorks; and
- Mark Norwood’s water-spraying tank, designed in SolidWorks.
All three exhibited inventiveness and playfulness. Perhaps more important, each incorporated a unique approach to “recycling.” Jason’s design would give new life to old, discarded PC mice. Ray’s design would encourage coworkers to collect and redeploy their otherwise useless bottle caps. Norwood’s design could easily be realized by modifying a generic toy tank, available at your nearest Radio Shack or ToysRUs. Continue reading
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Show and Tell: Your Playful Idea Could Win You a Dell Workstation with AMD Graphics
A prank stapler that shoots projectiles, a motion-triggered device that plays the theme from Psycho, a miniature catapult that can be adjusted with an iPad — these are just a few of the ideas we’ve received (so far) from people who’re in the running for a chance to win a professional Dell workstation with AMD graphics (retail value estimated at more than $5,000).
Kelly, who sent in the idea for a catapult called “Kaboom,” said her device is “a fun way to geek out and blast your neighbor! ” (We’re pretty sure she meant her colleague in a neighboring cubicle, but who knows? Perhaps she’s thinking of the neighbor whose tree branches have consistently reached over her fence.) Continue reading
