An EE Times article from the recent Power Architecture Developer’s Conference in Austin, TX discusses the lack of parallel languages for embedded multicore programming:  Embedded software stuck at C

Tilera has announced their new CEO is the former head of Xilinx’s DSP division, Omid Tahernia:  Xilinx vet tapped for Tilera CEO seat

IBM sponsors a multicore supercomputer center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County:  UMBC and IBM celebrate MC²

The IBM Cell University Challenge announced its winners at the recent Power Architecture Developer’s Conference in Austin, TX.  CNN Money published the following article:  IBM’s ‘Cell University Challenge’ Winners Uncover Breakthrough Applications for Brain Monitoring, Data Mapping, Medical Imaging and Object Detection

Cray J. Henry, director of the Defense Department’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program comments on multicore adopting in the Government Computer News article:  The multicore challenge.

EE Times reports on an AMD three core device:  Odd move: AMD plans three-core CPU.  It is likely that these devices will be standard four core devices with one defective core ignored.  A similar approach was taken very many years ago when floating point coprocessors first went on-chip.  Devices with faulty FPUs were sold (at a discount) as basic FPU-less fixed-point devices.

This first step toward defect tolerance may point to one of the real advantages to multicore:  the ability to continue to increase performance via larger die size, without substantially decreasing yield.  If done correctly, very large devices can be produced at very low cost using these techniques.  This may be a key piece of technology that keeps Moore’s Law alive.

There seems to be changes afoot in the Sony / Toshiba / IBM (STI) consortium that brought us the Cell:  Report: Sony Selling Advanced Chip Stake

“TOKYO (AP) — Sony Corp. will sell its Cell microprocessor and advanced chip operations to Toshiba Corp. for nearly 100 billion yen ($870 million) next year, a news report said Saturday.”

The Manycore Corporation is working on its Carnap programming language for multicore programming.  The work is being led by Steven Ericsson-Zenith who was involved in the Occam programming language for the Inmos Transputer.