Software and hardware annotations 2009 April

This document contains only my personal opinions and calls of judgement, and where any comment is made as to the quality of anybody's work, the comment is an opinion, in my judgement.

[file this blog at: digg del.icio.us Technorati]

090426 Sun AMD chips with six or more CPUs soon to appear

AMD is planning to release soon some chips with six or eight CPUs:

Advance Micro Devices (AMD) said this week it is releasing its six-core Opteron chip in June, well ahead of schedule, and plans to follow it early next year with a chip code-named Magny-Cours that will ship in eight- and 12-core models. After that, it plans a 16-core chip in 2011.

These seem oriented to computation clusters as other than massively parallel computations it is hard to imagine which applications can make use of that many CPUs. It is not clear for example whether currently any applications other than graphics or video can make use of more then two CPUs, even if some games seem to benefit from 3.

090418 Sat Switching to Atom from RSS

After a long time of using RSS as the feed format for changes to this site, I have decided to switch to Atom for the feed of updates to this site and blog as it is a more descriptive language. However it has some defects too, and in particular:

• It does not have a DTD which does not allow validating using my favourite editing mode, psgml. I think I'll create a DTD eventually, as validation is far too useful.
• The Atom design is a classic of something I despise very much, which is the perverse use of an XML instance for non-markup purposes, here is an example entry:

    <entry>
      <title type="html">Quick loss of battery capacity</title>
  
      <category term="hardware"/>
      <category term="power"/>
  
      <published>2008-11-24T19:00:00Z</published>
      <updated>2008-11-24T19:00:00Z</updated>
  
      <link rel="alternate" type="html"
        xlink:href="http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/blog/0811Nov.html?081124#081124"/>
      <id>http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/blog/0811Nov.html?081124#081124</id>
  
      <summary type="html">After 9 months of use, my laptop
      battery now lasts 2 hours instead of 3.5 hours when new. It
      is in effect a consumable.</summary>
    </entry>

  Note that the most elements elements are pure markup with no contents. For example the category name is in the title attribute and not be the content of the category element is quite difficult to imagine.

The new Atom feed is the only one that I will continue to update.