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Perhaps you may remember Knights Ferry, any geek’s wet dream. That project ended up canceling and led to Knights Corner, the current development that inherits a similar idea but adopts modern times.

Knights Corner, still in development, will have 50 general purpose x86 cores and aims to be able to handle peaks of 1 Tflop. The format, predictably, is PCI Express and is used extensively in large data centers, render farms and the like.

Knights Corner Technology is a great competitor NVidia Tegra and its use in large supercomputers, such as the BSC will be renewed soon. The principal difference between Tegra and Knights Corner is the architecture: the NVidia committed to achieve high efficiency energy, Intel Knights Corner will be composed of general-purpose x86 cores, more specifically based on Pentium processors a few years ago. These processors have been some design changes, such as the use of Tri-Gate transistors to 22 nanometers that come with Ivy Bridge.

We repeat once again that despite not yet been released Knights Corner is the future of supercomputing, or at least has to be one of the technologies to consider. Efficiency, effectiveness and efficiency will be key to future servers.

We all know that large datacenters not use the same hardware as that of our homes. Maybe sometimes, be similar, but usually not integrated in the same way. One of the main priorities for these institutions (which, incidentally, are much more common than we think) is to optimize the ratio performance / watt and achieved great potential but at affordable prices for any company, Including Microsoft. The guys from Redmond are one of the leading companies in the sector, and of course make use of multiple data centers physically located throughout the world. These centers used for storing and executing information based on cloud computing services (also called the cloud).

We also know that Microsoft and Intel are two companies that have historically been well supported with each other. The last thing we know is that Microsoft is pushing Intel to evolve its Intel Atom so that they are good processors for use in large data centers and servers. It seems that they want to achieve is the number of Atom chips with 16 cores, each of which would be very basic but would work very efficiently in parallel, performing complex calculations in relatively low and getting better results than the current Xeon or Opteron processors very powerful but also with large energy consumption. Read more… »

Thin (3.6 cm), smaller and more consistent with the other computers and technology company, and that goes from white polycarbonate to aluminum. In terms of specifications, the base processor is a Core 2 Duo 2.44 GHz with an option to 2.66, the base RAM is 2 GB but we put option up to 8 GB, although the best comes from the hand of Graphics: Nvidia 320M, which although only 256MB, MacBook Pro equals the smallest of all.

Although perhaps the most interesting development (apart from design) is less than it has inside but outside as it is connected: the Mac mini becomes the first Mac with HDMI port. I think Apple is clear where you want to see the new little guy, right? In the lounge. The other port is usually Ethernet card, 4 USB, 1 FireWire 800, a mini Display Port, and the novelty SD card slot. Read more… »