Distribution World

The UK won a record 1,431 investment projects from overseas companies in 2006/7, according to figures published by UK Trade & Investment. This represented a 17 per cent increase and created over 36,000 new jobs. "From Siemens to Amgen, Sega to Airbus, the UK has won projects from world-class overseas companies - proving we can compete on the international stage, despite increasing competition and the challenges of globalisation,” says John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (that’s the old DTI).

Students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have used a PS3 to study the parallel processing capabilities of the Cell microprocessor.

Freescale Semiconductor, post private equity buyout, seems to have made an important committment to its Scottish wafer fab at East Kilbride where over 1,200 people are employed.

With all this talk of Intel and AMD dual and quad cores, the sleeping giant of the multi-core processor battle could be PowerPC. Freescale is demoing its MPC8641D dual-core device based on Power Architecture technology at the second annual Multicore Expo Conference and Exhibition on March 27-29.

Multi-core processors may be the new rock n roll for the likes of Intel, AMD and Texas Instruments, but what they are saying about the potential of parallel processing architectures is not really new. All they are doing is taking the concept to the wider embedded systems market.

Enea has upped the parallel processing support of its Polyhedra relational database management system (RDBMS) for network infrastructure systems. Polyhedra v7.0 is tuned for multi-processor systems by supporting parallel execution of queries and transactions. The in-memory, transactional RDBMS is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and it will execute out of local RAM so should run smooth. Polyhedra 7.0 is ...

AMD’s first teraflop performance server may come just week’s after Intel’s 80-core processor announcement, but AMD gains from its use of product silicon, the Opteron dual core CPU and the R600 Stream Processor. Indeed, Intel said it had no plans to bring the 80-core chip to market, but it expected chips with 20 to 40 cores could hit the market ...

Multi-processor system developers have been crying out for more than a year for a benchmarking scheme which is independent. And they have it, well almost. Embedded benchmarking organisation EEMBC has been working on test suites for multi-core processors since last summer, but EEMBC president Markus Levy told EW, that the first multi-core processor code should be available to members within ...

In 1996 Intel built its first supercomputer capable of teraflops performance. It was called ASCI Red and was built for the Sandia National Laboratory. It took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500kW of power. Just over 10 years on and Intel says it has achieved the equivalent performance ...