In the HPC world, we tend to pay attention to the hottest server chips as they hit the market. But as I’m learning from the Exascale Report, much lower chip power requirements are needed for the industry to reach the next computing milestone of sustained Exaflops. This week AMD’s John...

Recently when benchmarking the Btrfs and EXT4 file-systems we were left surprised that the performance of the next-generation Btrfs file-system had regressed against EXT4 to the point where the evolutionary file-system is measurably faster in a greater number of disk benchmarks. In fact, even with solid-state drives and Btrfs offering...

Peter Varhol has a nice piece on GPU vs. CPU computing in Desktop Engineering this week. Not surprisingly, he concludes that you need both when time is on the line: An ideal configuration is one with one or more CPUs and a set of GPUs that use CUDA or similar parallel computation architecture. All...

A chip in IBM's new zEnterprise System clocks in at 5.2GHz. The fastest IBM microprocessor to date is targeted at mainframes. It packs in four cores, plus a respectable helping of DRAM.