Consortium of leading European companies and research institutes, announced plans to develop a new type of computer architecture based on ARM processors and capable of providing ekzaflopsnye calculate the consumption of 15 or even 30 times smaller than today’s supercomputer systems.

This new project, called Mont-Blanc, coordinated by the Barcelona supercomputer center (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, BSC) and a budget of over € 14 million, including more than € 8 million investment by the European Commission.

The main initial objective – to create a full-featured high-performance supercomputer based on chips that are used today in embedded systems, and overcome the limitations found in the prototype and build applications that can take advantage of this ekzaflopsnogo supercomputer.

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President of Epic Games Mike Capps in an interview with Develop reported that his company intends to participate actively in the preparation of specifications for new gaming platforms. “It’s just part of our plans. I can not tell anything more – he said. And then he added vaguely, “Well, let’s say that this is our plan was a year ago, and I can not tell you whether we realized it or not.”

Mr. Capps said then that the demonstration Samaritan (Samaritan), shown at last year’s GDC event was the first part of the company’s plan: “Our concept is designed for mass Samaritan PC hardware, two or four years and he shows what will be capable of following the console. Just at that time no one knew how the game will look like the next generation – our idea was to show people what we can achieve. ”

“I mean, that Samaritan – a demonstration in real time, which looks like an animated film 5 years ago – so advanced steel technology. Thus, our aim was to demonstrate some of the technologies that we would like to see in next-generation platforms, as well as provide a Samaritan as a test of the package.

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China stepped up its efforts in the field of semiconductor processors. The last country supercomputer based on chips produced domestically. Very interesting to see whether and how soon China to catch up with the American manufacturers of chips for supercomputers, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA.

Edition of The New York Times reports that the Sunway BlueLight MPP supercomputer was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in the Chinese city of Jinan. Recently it became known about the details passed through technical measures.

The most interesting thing is that it uses the 8704 chip ShenWei SW1600 and takes 2 ranked Chinese supercomputer with a theoretical computing capacity at the level of 1.07 petaflops (performance Linpack – 74,4%).

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The developer of ARM chips introduced recently the eighth generation of its instruction set architecture (ISA). ARMv8 ISA extends the current architecture ARMv7 64-bit memory addressing.

The company notes that this move will allow the company to find a place chips in the server market and other business sectors, bringing the benefits of energy efficiency in a market that is increasingly faced with the problem of power consumption and computational efficiency.

Previous instruction set architecture ARMv7 provides 32-bit virtual address space, expandable to 40-bit. This allowed the chips to ARMv7, such as the Cortex A8 and Cortex A9, the underlying mass smartphone applications to provide 4GB of memory, potentially addressing with up to 1TB of physical memory.

For the more traditional tasks, which use the core ARM, 4GB is enough, but the company wants to break away from the market of mobile devices and embedded systems in new areas.

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No exact launch date is declared a commercial program Kinect for Windows, but Microsoft has said that professional and business developers will be able to use a set of development tools Kinect for Windows early next year.

November 4 marks a year as an innovative controller Microsoft Kinect hit the market. This sensor has breathed new life into the Xbox 360 thanks to a natural and intuitive management tools, providing users with new gaming and entertainment experience.

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This year, Nintendo had to work hard that its new game console, portable, able to reach predestined her earlier success. But the activities undertaken to promote sales 3DS could not affect the financial result. The company has promised to provide new updates designed to improve the environment eShop.

In addition, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata (Satoru Iwata) personally apologized to investors for the mistakes of the leadership and promised that the specific steps involved will avoid the same failures when running the home console.

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Phil McKinney (Phil McKinney), technical director of PC units in the Hewlett-Packard, said Monday that he intends to leave the company after nearly 10 years of service in it. Reasons for the decision of the person responsible for strategic planning and development of HP in PCs is not known, but it joins a list of high-level management, which have recently considered the best to leave the company.

With this in his blog titled “Goodbye, HP», he wrote that his departure from the cases is not traditional. He does not plan to spend their days playing golf or sit around the house. Mr. McKinney said that he had too much enthusiasm, energy and ideas to go into the background, but he wants to retire to get the freedom to write, speak, lead, advise and teach, without looking at the limitations of the traditional corporate structure.

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