Expect to See Atom In Smartphones and Tablet PCs Soon!

Intel announced recently that one could expect to see smartphones based on its Moorstown platform by early 2011. You can expect to see some tablets appear with the same platform under the hood little earlier than that.The platform was announced in Dec 2009 and Intel says they have at least 50 design wins in these two device categories. Besides an Atom processor inside the Moorstown also has a graphics processor built in.That adds to the graphics capability and the smartphones developed on the same platform have the capability to process 1080p HD video. This platform, Intel claims, delivers 2 to 4 times the performance of other processors in the product category. This was highlighted by a prototype running the 1080p version of Avatar at the just concluded Computex show in Taipei. OS to be supported include Android and MeeGo but not Windows.If you want to view the exibits, you can go here to take a virtual look until end August this year. A variant on the Moorstoen, called OAK Trail positioned at Tablets is going to be released early next year.

Some Observations on Supercomputer 500 List

The latest version was published on 28 May 2010, the previous one was in Nov 2009. It is interesting to notice some changes in just this last six months.

1. The least powerful system had a performance of 20 teraflops/s. You need 24.7 TF/s to just get into the list.
2. The list was full of machines built from quad core processors.Some 425 of the 500 systems had these silicon wonders inside them. Six or more core processors were on 25 of the systems only.
3. Intel dominated with 402 systems using them, AMD Opteron at second spot was used in 47 systems and IBM Power chips were in 42 systems only.
4. IBM and HP are the top vendors in the supercomputer league.

Read up the complete report here.

What are Supercomputers made of!!

There is a list of top supercomputers maintained here. This is updated twice a year and the latest update happened recently on the 28th May 2010. What is interesting is not the top spot. That is still held by Cray Jaguar  supercomputer. It is able to perform at 1.75 petaflops/s on the Linpack benchmark and is capable of a theoretical maximum rate of  2.3 petaflops/s.

There's a new entry on this list and that goes directly to no.2 spot. A Chinese system named nebulae that performs at 1.271 petaflops/s on Linpack and a possible theoretical performance of 3 petaflops/s that surpasses the Jaguar too.

This is built of the silicon wonders, commercially available microprocessor chips that we admire here at this site. The Nebulae is built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. The use of graphic accelerator chips or GPUs are becoming increasingly common in high performance systems.  

Intel Dual Core Atoms

It has been about 2 years since the first products started coming out that used the Intel Atom chip. Atom was meant for low power, lighter duty netbook products. Intel now has announced a two core version of the chip. So far two versions of the 2 core chips are available. Both are 4 threads capable. The two versions are the D 510 and the 330 version.


The D510 features are 1.66 GHz clock speed, 1 MB L2 cache, 64 bit instruction set, it is made with 45 nm process, has maximum TDP of 13 watts. Maximum memory size is 4 GB with DDR2 memory with maximum memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s.

The 330 features are1.6 GHz clock speed, 1 MB L2 cache, 64 bit instruction set, it is made with 45 nm process, has maximum TDP of 8 watts.