The Technology@Intel online magazine is featuring a cover story on Platform 2015 - A long vision for Microprocessor architecure in 2015 and the road map for Intel. Intel sees the future of computing platforms as a holistic satisfaction of computing, infrastructure and interface requirements.

Intel's long-range vision for the evolution of these three fundamental platform elements, and the architectural innovation and core competencies driving that evolution, is what we[Intel] call Platform 2015.

One of the notable key features of the processor architecture circa 2015 (or "Micro 2015", in short) is CMP or Chip-level Multi-Processing. With the von-Neumann bottle neck in sight, "parallelism for performance" is Intels vision for increased performance, rather than conventional techniques such as increasing the clock frequency. Intel's rationale for this -

[..]As chip geometries shrink and clock frequencies rise, the transistor leakage current increases, leading to excess power consumption and heat. Secondly, the advantages of higher clock speeds are in part negated by memory latency, since memory access times have not been able to keep pace with increasing clock frequencies. Third, for certain applications, traditional serial architectures are becoming less efficient as processors get faster (due to the so-called Von Neumann bottleneck), further undercutting any gains that frequency increases might otherwise buy.

The CMP architecture will perform operations at practical clock rates, but in parallel; divide and conquer the operations into multiple cores (tens or even hundreds). Apart from generic processing cores, the CMP will also include special prupose ones such as for graphics processing, network communication-protocol processing etc.

Some of the other key features of the computational aspect of Platform 2015 are - Special Purpose Hardware, Large Memory Subsystems, Microkernel, Virtualization, Compatibility and eco-system handling etc.

From Engineer 2005:

'ENGINEER', NITK's national level technical symposium, a forum for students and technical enthusiasts from all over the world, is scheduled to be held from the 17th to 20th of March 2005.

Competitions include an online programming contest debugging contest, an online treasure hunt, project presentation etc.

How to fry an egg on an XP, Laptop heat a threat to fertility; enough said. Time to chill the chip.

From The developerWorks: Cooling down hot processors:

Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. In this Power Architecture challenge, developers warm up to the idea of how to cool down the hotter processors. From the weird to the wonderful, readers uncover potential ways to chill the chips.

From A Sneak Peek at GNOME 2.10:

GNOME 2.10 is going to be the latest and greatest thing from the GNOME Desktop Project this March 9th. Here is a sneak peek of some of the things that are currently in the GNOME 2.9 development snapshot.

The Cell chip - what it is, and why you should care.
The Cell Chip - how will MS and Intel face the music?
The Next Wave: Apple's Connection to the CELL Processor

Found this in my text file collection. Are You a Hacker? by ReDragon Take a little quiz for me today. Tell me if you fit this description. You got your net account several months ago. You have been surfing the net, and you laugh at those media reports of the information superhighway. You have a red box, you don't have to pay for phone calls. You have crackerjack, and you have run it on the password file at a unix you got an account on. Everyone at your school is impressed by your computer knowledge, you are the one the teachers ask for help. Does this sound like you? You are not a hacker. There are thousands of you out there. You buy 2600 and you ask questions. You read phrack and you ask questions. You join #hack and you ask questions. You ask all of these questions, and you ask what is wrong with that? After all, to be a hacker is to question things, is it not? But, you do not want knowledge. You want answers. You do not want to learn how things work. You want answers. You do not want to explore. All you want to know is the answer to your damn questions. You are not a hacker. Hacking is not about answers. Hacking is about the path you take to find the answers. If you want help, don't ask for answers, ask for a pointer to the path you need to take to find out those answers for yourself. Because it is not the people with the answers that are the hackers, it is the people that are travelling along the path.

Just stumbled on the "Introducting Python" video.

This 24 minute video (200+ MB download) contains interviews with luminaries from the Python community interspersed with "A Python Love Story". It was created for use as an introductory activity in a computer science course using Python.

Created by a few high school students with help from the author of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist:Learning with Python, this video has enjoyed great reviews in the Python community.

A couple of years back, the STI Group (Sony, Toshiba and IBM) announced their plans to research and develop an advanced chip architecture for the broadband era. With a collective investement of $400 Million, the 5 year joint venture is focussed on designing a "supercomputer-on-a-chip". Code named "Cell", it is touted as the next wave of computing architecture thats going to obsolete PC as we know it. IBM describes the emerging techonogly as-

Just as the cells in a body unite to form complete physical systems, a "Cell" architecture will allow all kinds of electronic devices (from consumer products to supercomputers) to work together, signaling a new era in Internet entertainment, communications and collaboration.

Currently, the best resource available describing the architecture in detail is the patent application filed by STI in 2001, titled Resource dedication system and method for a computer architecture for broadband networks

A computer architecture and programming model for high speed processing over broadband networks are provided. The architecture employs a consistent modular structure, a common computing module and uniform software cells. The common computing module includes a control processor, a plurality of processing units, a plurality of local memories from which the processing units process programs, a direct memory access controller and a shared main memory. A synchronized system and method for the coordinated reading and writing of data to and from the shared main memory by the processing units also are provided.

Unfortunately, the patent is difficult to read, and could be a turn off for the casual tech-enthusiast. Fortunately for us, Nicholas Blachford took the trouble to "decipher" the patent application and wrote an article decribing the innards of the chip design, the use and implications of the technology.

Cell Architecture Explained

A century after Einstein's miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did. Here, we attempt to elucidate.

Miraculous visions, 100 years of Einstein (Economist.com)

The Ohio state university has some interesting research work going on - glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has expressed his worries over evidence that shows history repeating itself in the form of a drastic climatic change, that happened 5,200 years ago (3200 B.C.). Thompson and his research group believe that implications of the climatic change had been catastrophic for emerging cultures then, and that it could scale up to an even worse scenario if it happens again, considering the world's population of 6.4 billion. Not a very comforting prospect for man kind!

Evidence shows that around 5,200 years ago, solar output first dropped precipitously and then surged over a short period. It is this huge solar energy oscillation that Thompson believes may have triggered the climate change he sees in all those records.

Some of the notable markers in records suggesting that the climate was altered 5,200 years ago include, a perfectly preserved plant that recently emerged from the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes,

The plants were carbon-dated to determine their age and tests indicated they had been buried by the ice for perhaps 5,200 years. That suggests that somehow, the climate had shifted suddenly and severely to capture the plants and preserve them until now.

the preserved body of a man trapped in an Alpine glacier (reminds me of Encino Man!),

In 1991, hikers found the preserved body of a man trapped in an Alpine glacier and freed as it retreated. Later tests showed that the human – dubbed Oetzi – became trapped and died around 5,200 years ago.

and narrow tree rings.

Thompson points to a study of tree rings from Ireland and England that span a period of 7,000 years. The point in that record when the tree rings were narrowest – suggesting the driest period experienced by the trees – was approximately 5,200 years ago.

A reason to associate such a climatic change to fluctuations of solar energy, is the well known fact that a historic global cooling called the Little Ice Age, from 1450 to 1850 A.D., coincided with two periods of decreased solar activity.

Scientists have identified two causes of the Little Ice Age from outside the ocean/atmosphere/land systems: decreased solar activity and increased volcanic activity. Research is ongoing on more ambiguous influences such as internal variability of the climate system, and anthropogenic influence (Ruddiman). Some have also speculated that depopulation of Europe during the Black Death, and the resulting decrease in agricultural output, may have prolonged the Little Ice Age.

Source:OSU Research News