Nvidia challenges Intel with PC central processors

A PC and WINTEL were synonymous until now. Not any more. The recent CES at Las Vegas in first week of January brought news that changes that relationship for  ever, I guess. PC meant Intel processors that kept building on the original 8086 architecture. Other than AMD no one else challenged that. NVIDIA was happy to build chips and boards for supporting graphics and video on the huge numbers of PC  being sold. That changes now and NVIDIA has announced a processor that can go inside the PC.

The company is going to build a central processor using ARM architecture. The processors will be integrated on the same chip as NVIDIA's graphic processor and will be aimed at everything from workstations to supercomputers. "We are designing a high-performing ARM CPU core in combination with our massively parallel GPU cores to create a new class of processor," said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA CEO. This they expect would free the PCs, workstations and servers from the hegemony and inefficiency of the x86 (Intel) architecture.

What makes this really feasible is the announcement from Microsoft that they will be releasing a Windows version (Windows 8!) for the ARM processor.

CES-UPDATE 3-Nvidia challenges Intel with PC central processors | Reuters

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google

The MS- Yahoo! deal finally came off! That makes Microsoft Bing the no 2 search engine. Apparently it has something like 15% of the market. between Yahoo! and Bing this share is expectyed to go up to 30% or better and start challenging Google who's sitting on more than 65% share.

With this one move Microsoft moves to number 2 position. Yahoo! gives up search business and saves on the R&D expenses. Yahoo woyuld server up ads on the Bing search results and have a sharing arrangement with MS. Look like it is quite win-win for both of them.

Is Google worried! Te gap is so large, if they maintain theinnovation periodically, they should be oki. But, for consumers it is good to have a number 2 challenging number one. The number one is likely to get complacent over time.

Desktop Supercomputer CX1 From Cray

Supercomputers are coming to the desktop. I guess, it was bound to happen someday. This one from the makers of supercomputer CRAY uses Wintel technology for the first time. The horse power comes from 8 nodes of 2 Xeons each and each these could be dual or quad core. That's 32 to 64 processor cores to slice up your workload and work parallely on them. What else is there in the hardware configuration! 4 TB of secondary storage. I ma tempted to make a comment- are you ever going to need more? But the history of computing is full of stories how applications always catch up with whatever capacities are made available for them. Each of the processing nodes have 64 GB memory. Looks like that's a loosely coupled parallelism. 

The whole thing is going to be managed by MS Windows HPC Server 2008. That's a lot of firepower!