Lumsk

www.lumsk.com

Lumsk is a folk metal band from Trondheim, Norway. It combines traditional Norwegian folk music and folklore with rock, progressive rock and metal. The group has both male and female vocals with violin, guitar and drums.

After having released a self-produced demo, the band released an EP called Åsmund Frægdegjevar in 2001 under contract with the record company Spikefarm Records. The next year, the band moved to Tabu Recordings and released their debut album, which had the same title as the previously released EP. The album was characterized by its blend of classical instruments and heavy metal. The songs make up a narrative about the saga of Åsmund, who in Lumsk's interpretation sails from Ireland to rescue a king's daughter from a group of trolls.

Several years later, and with a new vocalist, the band released its second album, called Troll. The album was a departure in many ways from its predecessor - the band had gotten a new vocalist and guitarist, and as a whole the music was not as heavy or dark as on the debut album. There were also fewer songs, and together they didn't compose one narrative, but were rather stories in and of themselves; stories which were based on Nordic mythology and were written by the saga author Birger Sivertsen and his wife Kristin.

The same year the band released the single Nidvisa, which, in addition to the song Allvis from Troll, contained a song written for the action group Give Us Back Christmas (Gi oss jula tilbake in Norwegian) in protest against department stores' early Christmas decorating. The profits from the sale of the single also went to the group.

On February 26, 2007, Lumsk released their third full-length album, entitled Det Vilde Kor. On this album, Lumsk have added music to Det Vilde Kor, which is a collection of poems written by the famous Norwegian poet Knut Hamsun. With this album the music departed from its folk metal sound and incorporated a calmer and slightly more progressive nature.

In July 2007 Espen announced on Lumsk's website that Ketil and Siv Lena would be leaving the band due to a baby being born. They were replaced by Swedish musicians Håkan Lundqvist and Jenny Gustafsson. As of 2008 they are still looking for a replacement for vocalist Stine Mari Langstrand, who also left the band in 2007.

Current members

* Vidar Berg - drums (2005-)
* Espen Warankov Godø - Synthesizer and Male vocals (2000-)
* Eystein Garberg - Guitar (2001-)
* Håkan Lundqvist - Guitar (2007-)
* Jenny Gustafsson - Violin (2007-)
* Espen Hammer - Bass guitar (2002-)

Albums

* Åsmund Frægdegjevar (2003)
* Troll (2005)
* Det Vilde Kor (2007)

Intel Itanium

Itanium is the brand name for 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Intel has released two processor families using the brand: the original Itanium and the Itanium 2. Starting November 1, 2007, new members of the second family are again called Itanium. The processors are marketed for use in enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and was later developed by HP and Intel together.



Itanium's architecture differs dramatically from the x86 architectures (and the x86-64 extensions) used in other Intel processors. The architecture is based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, with the compiler making the decisions about which instructions to execute in parallel. This approach allows the processor to execute up to six instructions per clock cycle. By contrast with other superscalar architectures, Itanium does not have elaborate hardware to keep track of instruction dependencies during parallel execution - the compiler must keep track of these at build time instead.

After a protracted development process, the first Itanium was released in 2001, and more powerful Itanium processors have been released periodically. HP produces most Itanium-based systems, but several other manufacturers have also developed systems based on Itanium. As of 2007, Itanium is the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, IBM POWER, and SPARC. Intel released its newest Itanium, codenamed Montvale, in November 2007.

Intel has extensively documented the Itanium instruction set and microarchitecture, and the technical press has provided overviews. The architecture has been renamed several times during its history. HP called it PA-WideWord. Intel later called it IA-64, then Itanium Processor Architecture (IPA), before settling on Intel Itanium Architecture, but it is still widely referred to as IA-64. It is a 64-bit register-rich explicitly-parallel architecture. The base data word is 64 bits, byte-addressable. The logical address space is 2^64 bytes. The architecture implements predication, speculation, and branch prediction. It uses a hardware register renaming mechanism rather than simple register windowing for parameter passing. The same mechanism is also used to permit parallel execution of loops. Speculation, prediction, predication, and renaming are under control of the compiler: each instruction word includes extra bits for this. This approach is the distinguishing characteristic of the architecture.

The architecture implements 128 integer registers, 128 floating point registers, 64 one-bit predicates, and eight branch registers. The floating point registers are 82 bits long to preserve precision for intermediate results.