Posted 11/24/2009 at 10:14:19am

I'm not surprised that IBM's killing the next one, and I wouldn't be surprised if they let the Cell quietly die.  The vast majority of supercomputers they sell are Blue Gene and Power based, not Cell.  Also, game developers tend to just use wrappers that others have written to port games to the PS3 after they write the games for the XBox 360.  Programming for the Cell just isn't worth the effort; you have to micro-manage everything.  The only way the Cell is ever going to take off is if they do a major re-design of the processor to make it easier to program for or they put a ton of effort into designing a compiler that does all the micro-management for the programmers.

Posted 11/11/2009 at 02:56:44pm

It looks to me like it was designed for servers.  In that sense, leaving out Windows support makes sense for now.

Personally, I hope libraries for HPC programming get built-in soon.  My little bit of HPC programming experience has been painful so far.

Posted 10/26/2009 at 10:04:22pm

There's directions here: http://icrontic.com/articles/upgrade-the-windows-7-rc-to-retail

I wouldn't be surprised if you run into more oddities going this way though.  I successfully did it going from the RC to Enterprise and haven't had any problems in the few hours I've used it, but for all practical purposes Enterprise is also Ultimate.

Posted 10/26/2009 at 09:07:55pm

FYI, you can change ext3 to ext4 without a reformat. I've done it without any trouble.  But, be warned, I don't think they have a way to go back.  Anyway, see here for the simple instructions. 
You can still mount an ext3 file system with the ext4 file system driver and see performance improvements just from using the new core. 

Posted 08/29/2009 at 02:57:59am

I think there's a couple zeros missing.  According to the top 500 list, that thing tops out at 156 Tflops, not 1 as stated in the article.

Actually, it's about the most power efficient you can get if you don't want to spend a whole bunch of time re-writing your software for the GPU or Cell.  It's a BlueGene/P system, and they crank out 372 Mflops/Watt.  The cell offers 536 Mflops/Watt, but I'm sorry to say that those supercomputers are going the way of 8 track tapes.  They're simply too hard to program for, and people simply don't want to invest the time requred to port the codes over when they could be running simulations instead.  So, the next generation, BlueGene/Q, will simply be multi-core CPUs.

Posted 05/13/2009 at 03:40:21pm

AMD did screw up, and they are laregely to blame for being in the position the find themselves in, but Intel's anti-competitive practices are simply making the situation worse. Only Intel will benefit if AMD goes out of business.  You won't see the cost of computing decreasing anywhere near as quickly if that happens.

Intel has billions in cash reserves.  They can just eat the fine, and they probably won't pass it on to consumers.  The dynamics of supply and demand tell us that raising chip prices to recoup the cost of the fine is not a good idea.  That would decrease the number of chips they sell, and could actually decrease the profit they make overall.

As for the justification of the EU protecting AMD because it's a European company, that doesn't take into account the fact that Japan, South Korea, and the US are going after Intel.

Posted 04/25/2009 at 09:27:01pm

I'm glad you guys posted this.  I just bought a copy for a friend.  I'm not much of an FPS person, and when I tried playing the HL2 demo I got motion sickness, but my friend's the sort of guy who will love this.

Posted 04/22/2009 at 10:25:38am

Warranty replacement is fine until you have 3 or more of them go out, then it gets annoying.  That happened to me with Antec PSUs.  They sent newer and fancier units each time, but it's still annoying and time-consuming.  It's even more annoying when the replacement goes out.  Now I avoid Antec PSUs like the plague.  I've also had a couple of the cheaper (I think they were made by Allied) PSUs go out.  I've just stopped bothering with warranty replacements on PSUs and I never settle on cheap ones anymore.  When one goes out, I replace it with a PC Power & Cooling one.  It's worth the extra money.  I've been buying from them for a few years now and I haven't had any problems.  I don't care that they outsource the manufacturing; their PSUs are still great.

Posted 04/09/2009 at 11:27:05pm

I think it'd be funny if this worm never does anything but keep spreading and changing.

Posted 03/16/2009 at 04:35:36pm

I doubt it'll ever become mainstream on traditional desktops and laptops, but we keep seeing new types of computers emerging, like smartphones.  Who knows what'll be invented in the next decade.  Whenever new things like that come out, Linux has a good chance of becoming the OS of choice on those devices, because people don't already have expectations about how the OS should behave.