A good article from Satnam Singh Of Microsoft Research in the new ACM Queue: Heterogeneous systems allow us to target our programming to the appropriate environment.

From The Register: IBM to snuff last Cell blade server

From the Reuters: Nvidia is buying communications IC firm Icera: Nvidia to buy phone chipmaker Icera for $367 million.

From GigaOm: Low power embedded multicore startup Adapteva announces its Epiphany architecture. Its a heterogeneous array of floating point DSP cores aimed at low power applications.

From the Communications of the ACM. Jack Dennis and Peter Denning, two of the pioneers in computing describe how parallelism has been with us for a while:

The Resurgence of Parallelism

Parallel computation is making a comeback after a quarter century of neglect. Past research can be put to quick use today.

Tilera, perhaps the last of the first crop of massively multicore startups, gets funding from Broadcom. From the EE Times: Broadcom takes stake in multicore pioneer Tilera

From the Inquirer: March is the month of multi-core CPUs.

A good article on ARM from EE Times Asia: ARM invasion moves past mobile market. Interesting that ARM ships 90 cores per second. But when it comes to multicore:

Many SoC designers—and ARM licensees—are struggling on one issue in today’s environment of multiple GPUs and MPUs: Is there a compiler that can automatically spread load energy efficiently across those multiple cores in a SoC?

ARM’s answer is, no, not yet.

Acknowledging that “huge software challenges are coming,” Inglis said, “Many SoC vendors are, just about now, running into an ‘oops’ phase.” He warned that the industry is still in a very early stage of using multiple cores for their SoCs. “Real SoCs based on multiple cores to run real applications are just about to come out now. They are being debugged. Many engineers are suddenly asking, ‘how do you run all these tasks in so many cores?’”

From PC World: Intel 48-Core “Single-Chip Cloud Computer” Improves Power Efficiency This just as the Larabee CPU +GPU is being canceled.

From Cnet: Intel: Initial Larrabee graphics chip canceled This was the INtel CPU + GPU device.