Free Republic

High Scalability has a fascinating article up that summarizes a talk by Robert Graham of Errata Security, summarizing the development choices needed to support 10 million concurrent connections on a single server. From a small data center perspective, the numbers he is talking about seem astronomical, but not unbelievable. With a new era of Internet connected devices dawning the time may have come to question the core architecture of Unix, and therefore Linux and BSD as well. The core of the talk seems to be that the kernel is too inefficient in how it handles threads and packets to maintain...

Itanium and Opteron contrasted Letter What are the options for Intel? By The Letternan: Saturday 09 November 2002, 10:04 THE COMPARISON SPECS on Itanium 3 and Opteron here look pretty good. This appears to show both processors passing the current fastest server chip by a significant lead. However, for x86 code, Opteron looks like it will hit the market as fast as the fastest x86 processor while Itanium 3 is a joke on x86 code. It is too bad that there are not specs available on Yamhill because I have a very strong suspicion that it was killed, not because...

AMD Announces Technology to Enable Ten-Fold Performance Leap in Future Transistors World's smallest version of innovative design can foster better products and lower manufacturing costs Sunnyvale, CA -- September 10, 2002 --AMD today announced it has fabricated the smallest double-gate transistors reported to date using industry standard technology. These transistors, measuring ten nanometers, or ten billionths of a meter in length (gate), are six times smaller than the smallest transistors currently in production. AMD's research breakthrough could foster the placement of a billion transistors on the same size chip that currently holds 100 million transistors, enabling a vastly richer computing...

Speed limits on P4 could open window for AMD Can Barton scale to high speeds fast? By Mike Magee in San Jose: Sunday 08 September 2002, 23:47 THE MOST RECENT roadmap we saw from the Intel Corporation warns motherboard makers that with the introduction of 3.06GHz Pentium 4 in Q4, the designers are creating a somewhat new die layout for the Northwood process. This new layout might well be related to some significant errata in the processor, which we reported a few weeks ago. But with the introduction of 512K cache "Barton" AMD XP chips, we think that Intel may...