Posts by James

AMD lifts veil on six-core Constantinople Istanbul

Err, no use?

> Nobody has come up with a useful software model for USING all these cores. Even specialised stuff in the lab struggles to use more than a handful of cores effectively.

How very, very wrong. There are plenty of scientific uses for many core machines. Why do you think thousand-commodity-core clusters continue to be built? The more CPU you can fit in a rack, the better (cooling and power notwithstanding)...

Mapping the universe at 30 Terabytes a night

"Largest proprietory dataset"?

They're ignoring the computing and storage grid we've already put together for the LHC experiments then? 15PB a year from this year, errm sorry, next year.

Data centers embrace The Great Outdoors

'Dirty heat'

The problem with that is that the heat is actually really hard to reclaim. If, for example, you have water cooled racks you don't get a huge temperature rise in the water, and it is very hard to efficiently extract the heat back.