Sunday, November 30, 2008

Today

I am very boring now. Who can talk with me. Today is Mark's birthday. We have a good time today.

AMD's 'Shanghai' CPU Enters Production

The last year has not been kind to AMD. Its 65nm Barcelona processors arrived several months late, and were already obsolete in many ways when compared to the Intel offerings at the time. To make matters worse, the Barcelona chips were also buggy, making the tardy offering even less desirable to consumers and PC manufacturers. All of this built up to AMD’s $1.2 Billion loss in Q2 of 2008, the same quarter Intel saw record-breaking gains.
Now, in an effort to right itself in the CPU market, AMD has begun manufacturing its next generation of processors. Shanghai, a 45nm quad core processor, will be available by the end of 2008, beating original expectations. As per its usual strategy, Shanghai will be available in server processors first, followed shortly by desktop varieties.
In order to gain ground on Intel in performance, these new Shanghai based chips will have three times more cache (6MB total) than previous processors, as well as the third iteration of HyperTransport. AMD claims these additions will boost performance by as much as 20 percent while lowering power consumption. Following the release of the Shanghai processors, the 45nm Deneb desktops processors will hit store shelves in early 2009, followed by Istanbul server processors (six-cores) later in the year.
This could be the boost AMD needs to stay competitive with the house that Moore built, but how will these new offerings compare to the six-core Xeon processors already shipping from Intel as well as the Core i7 chips expected later this year? Only time will tell.

IBM Roadrunner Beats Cray's Jaguar


The Los Alamos system, nicknamed Roadrunner, has hung onto its title as the world’s fastest supercomputer, a position that it first claimed back in June 2008. Since June, the supercomputer had received only slight upgrades, yet it was still able to edge out its competition this November with a speed of 1.105 petaflops/s under the Linpack benchmark application. Second place in the Top500 list went to Jaguar, the Cray XT5 supercomputer located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which achieved a speed of 1.059 petaflop/s. Both systems are operated by the U.S. Department of Energy, with seven of the top ten fastest supercomputers being located at U.S. Department of Energy facilities.
Third place in the Top500 list went to a system called Pleiades, a SGI Altix ICE system installed at NASA Ames in California, which reached a speed of 487 teraflop/s. The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scored 478.2 teraflop/s for fourth place. Supercomputers today are roughly 1,000 times more powerful than they were ten years ago, with Roadrunner being the first system ever to break the petaflop/s barrier. To put petaflop speeds into perspective, a single petaflop/s is roughly the equivalent of combining together the computing power of 100,000 of the fastest notebooks on earth.
The Roadrunner was also the world’s first supercomputer to use a hybrid design, currently combining 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and 6,912 AMD Opteron dual-core processors. The operating systems used by Roadrunner are said to be Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, with the entire system draining about 2.35-megawatt of power. Roadrunner was primarily designed to ensure the safety and reliability of nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile by simulating how nuclear materials age. Other uses of Roadrunner include research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change

A-Rod


Alex Rodriguez is one of the best third basemans, and he is the batter who can let pitcher to be afraid. In 2007, he sign a 10 years contract with yankees, he can make less 27.5 milion dolars each year. He have the highest salary in MLB.
Rodriguez begun his career in Seattle Mariners in 1994, at first, he is a shortstop. When he first time play baseball in MLB, he only 18 years old. In 1996, he hit 36 homeruns , 215 hits, and 123RBI. 1996 is the third year that he paly ball in MLB, he is a very good player in MLB. 2000 is the last year in Seattle Mariners.In 2001 he sign a 10 years contact with Texas Rangers which all money he can make is 25.2 milion dollars. That is the biggest contract at that time. But he only play ball in Texas Rangers for 3 years. In 2004, Yankees use Alfonso Soriano and a 3A player to change him. On August forth 2007, he hit the 500th homerun. I believe that he will hit more than 800 homeruns in his player life. He is the best player in MLB

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Intel 32nm CPU


Representatives from Intel will present a paper to discuss how they produced a 291Mb SRAM memory array to test the process – a process which uses high-k and metal gate technologies. Using a 0.171-micron^2 cell size, the device has close to 2 billion transistors and array density of 4.2-Mbit^2 – it operated at 3.8GHz at 1.1 Volts.
Static RAM cells are what chip makers always build first when testing a new fabrication process – and according to Intel, the new process appears to be good. Intel has also claimed that its first 32nm processors, codenamed ‘Westmere’ are expected to debut in late 2009 – essentially be a die-shrink version of their new Nehalem architecture, due out late this quarter.
Intel is also not the only chip maker detailing its progress, however. AMD is claiming the smallest functional SRAM cell ever made at 22nm, high-k and metal gate with a density of 0.10micron^2.
From the sounds of things, we can expect to start seeing 32nm chips from Intel around the third or fourth quarter of 2009 and 22nm chips from AMD. Generally the smaller they get, the lower the voltage – thus lowering the heat. This are going to be pretty cool next year, no pun intended.

Monday, November 24, 2008

no topic

Basic Composition
Batista 羅文彥
B9729039
Computer Science and Information Engineering
2008-11-25
Advantages of Living in a Dormitory
Outline: The advantages of living in a dormitory.
Introduction: The advantages I think for living in a dormitory.
Body
1. Cheap
2. Convenient
3. Make more friends
4.
5.
Conclusion: These advantages are my idea for living in a dormitory.

Essay
After we study in the university, living is an important problem for us. There are two choices for us. One is renting an apartment; the other is living in a dormitory. There are some advantages I think for living in a dormitory.
First, living in a dormitory is cheaper than renting an apartment. Living in a dormitory casts about 7000 dollars each school term. If we rent an apartment, we should pay about 6000 dollars each month. In other words, we should pay 30000 dollars each term, if we rent an apartment.
Then, living in a dormitory is convenient. For the college students, love, club, and schoolwork are they will learn in their university life. If we live in the dormitory, we can play clubs more easily. For example, I join a Guitar Club, and I will practice guitar too late in club sometimes. If I live in dormitory, I can go back to my room easily. If I rent an apartment, I need to take a bus or ride motorcycle to go home. It is very troublesome.
The most important, I can make more friends, if I live in dormitory. Because we life most all day together, we can become friends easily and our friendship will become more hard. We can talk about homework together. We can play together.
These are my think for advantages of living in a dormitory. There are many advantages that we live in the dormitory.