Niagara Day

You can’t possibly imagine the amount of work it’s taken to get here. Richard McDougall has put together a Niagara Blogging Carnival which is the right place to start if you’re the kind of person that the MSM (Main Stream Marketing, that stands for) isn’t aimed at; i.e., not a CEO, CIO, or journalist. My own personal favorite Niagara newsbites: Item: Nobody gets 100% yield on their chips. I gather that for the Niagaras that don’t turn out perfect, we’ll sell ’em cheaper as 7-core, 6-core, 4-core, or whatever. Some of these configs might turn out to be the deal of the century depending how we price them. Item: They’re open-sourcing the hardware, too. I’m not sure exactly what that means in the big picture, and the licensing is going to matter, but it’s cool. Item: Those eight cores, when one’s not busy, they stop it. No, they don’t idle-loop it, they stop it. Obvious when you think of it. Item: When not to use the new stuff. Item: How the I/O works. Item: What makes chips wear out and fail? Lots of things, but especially heat; so low-wattage chips are RAS winners. Item: Maximum geek-out! Last item: When you have Java threads that map real closely onto Solaris threads that map real closely on to hardware threads, and you also have a lot of well-implemented hardware threads, this is what happens.