UltraSPARC T2

Sun UltraSPARC T2

spec.org Q4 2007 Benchmarks


* Up to 8 cores, up to 64 threads per processor
* Dual 10Gbit Ethernet and PCI-E integrated onto chip
* Logical Domains (LDoms) for hardware virtualization with up to 64 OS instances
* Cryptographic processing at wire speeds


Single-chip SPEC CPU scores, based on tests that delivered 78.3 est. SPECint_rate2006 and 62.3 est. SPECfp_rate2006.

The UltraSPARC T2 is the first major processor whose blueprints are available under a free software license, namely the GPL.

darklyrics.com

Dark Lyrics is one of the largest metal lyrics archive on the Web.

...
Scan my horizon as blue turns to black
The sky is gone again
And all beneath are born to die
Insignificant, am I?
...


Insignificant;
Nevermore

UNIVAC

UNIVAC 1108

UNIVAC Memories

UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) serves as the catch-all name for the American manufacturers of the lines of mainframe computers by that name, which through mergers and acquisitions underwent numerous name changes. The company UNIVAC began as the business computer division of Remington Rand formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.


UNIVAC 1108 Prices in 1968 (in 1968 dollars)
Model / Description / Price / Installation Fee

3011-95 1108 CPU $566,460 $2,200
7005-72 131 K word Core Memory $823,500 $2,250
5009-00 FASTRAND™ Controller $41,680 $600
6010-00 FASTRAND II Storage Unit $134,400 $1,080
5012-00 FH-432/FH-1782 Drum Controller $67,360 $600
6016-00 FH-432 Drum (capacity 262,144 words) $34,640 $480
6015-00 FH-1782 Drum (capacity 2,097,152 words) $95,680 $540
4009-99 Console (TTY-35) $29,365 $200


The depreciation of the U.S. dollar since 1968 makes a benchmark of the value of the dollar in those days useful. In 1968, a sporty domestic automobile, the Chevrolet Malibu Sport Coupe with a 307-cid V-8 engine cost US$2663, 696 times less than a megabyte of UNIVAC core memory.

Extensible Firmware Interface

UEFI Official

EFI Intel

The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. EFI is intended as a significantly improved replacement of the old legacy BIOS firmware interface historically used by all IBM PC compatible personal computers. The EFI specification was originally developed by Intel, and is now managed by the Unified EFI Forum and is officially known as Unified EFI (UEFI).

History

The original motivation for EFI came during early development of the first Intel-HP Itanium systems in the mid-1990s. PC BIOS limitations (16-bit processor mode, 1 MB addressable space, PC AT hardware dependencies, etc.) were seen as clearly unacceptable for the larger server platforms Itanium was targeting. The initial effort to address these concerns was initially called Intel Boot Initiative and was later renamed to EFI.

EFI specification 1.02 was released by Intel on December 12, 2000. (Version 1.01 was the original issue; it had incorrect legal and trademark information and was quickly withdrawn.)

EFI specification 1.10 was released by Intel on December 1, 2002. It included the EFI driver model as well as several minor enhancements to 1.02.

In 2005, Intel contributed this specification to the UEFI Forum, who is now responsible for its development[4] and promotion. EFI was renamed to Unified EFI (UEFI) to reflect this; most documentation uses both terms interchangeably.

The UEFI Forum released version 2.1 of the UEFI specification on January 7, 2007; as of March 2007, it is the latest publicly available specification. It added and improved cryptography, network authentication, and the User Interface Architecture (Human Interface Infrastructure in UEFI).

Yttrium barium copper oxide

Yttrium barium copper oxide

Yttrium barium copper oxide, often abbreviated YBCO, is a chemical compound with the formula YBa2Cu3O7. This material, a famous "high-temperature superconductor", achieved prominence because it was the first material to achieve superconductivity above the boiling point of nitrogen.

Seventy-five years after the discovery of superconductivity, Georg Bednorz and Alexander Müller, working at IBM in Zurich Switzerland, discovered that certain semiconducting oxides became superconducting at the then relatively high temperature of 35 K. In particular, the lanthanum barium copper oxides, an oxygen deficient perovskite-related material proved particularly promising.

Building on the motif discovered by Bednorz and Müller, Maw-Kuen Wu and his graduate students, Ashburn and Torng at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1987 and Paul Chu and his students at the University of Houston in 1987, discovered YBCO. Their work led to a rapid succession of new high temperature superconducting materials, ushering in a new era in material science and chemistry.

YBCO was the first material to become superconducting above 77 K, the boiling point of nitrogen. All materials developed before YBCO became superconducting only at temperatures near the boiling points of liquid helium or liquid hydrogen (Tb = 20.1 K). The significance of the discovery of YBCO is the breakthrough in the refrigerant used to cool the material to below the critical temperature.

Uzak (2002)

Uzak (Distant) The Guardian

Uzak NBC Film

Uzak IMDb (7,6 out of 10)

If ever a film was composed in a minor key, it is this beautiful and sad movie from the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which simply floats like a helium balloon above the middling mainstreamers that have rolled up this week. It attains a clarity and simplicity that lesser film-makers could strain every sinew trying to achieve without ever getting anywhere. To Ceylan, these things are as easy as breathing. Uzak is about loneliness and depression, and particularly the kind of depression suffered by men of a certain age who would cut their tongues out rather than admit they are depressed.



Yet the film itself is, gloriously, the opposite of depressing. It is gentle and deeply humane, and even ventures into an arena of delicate visual comedy with a shy adroitness that Woody Allen might admire. Watching it is like taking a deep draught of cold, clear water. The fact that one of its actors, Mehmet Emin Toprak, died shortly after filming only increases its piquant quality.



Uzak means "distant": an idea whose metaphorical significance matches, though without outstripping, the more obvious sense of physical distance and estrangement. The movie actually forms the third of what could be thought of as a trilogy of autobiographical movies from Ceylan, the first two being The Small Town (1998) and Clouds of May (1999), works which use the director's own friends and family and hometown locations. (The Guardian; Peter Bradshaw)



Awards (International)

2003 - Cannes Film Festival · Grand Prix du Jury · Best Actor (Muzaffer Özdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak) 2003 - Cinemaya Film Festival, India · Best Film 2003 - FIPRESCI Grand Prix for Best Film of the year 2003 - Cinemanila Film Festival, Philippines · Grand Prize for Best Film (Lino Brocka Award) 2003 - Film Camera Festival “MANAKI BROTHERS”, Macedonia · Special Jury Prize (as DoP) 2003 - Mid East Film Festival, Beirut · Best Film · Best Screenplay 2003 - Chicago Film Festival, USA · Silver Hugo

2003 - Montpellier Film Festival, France · Golden Antigone (for Best Film) · Critics' Prize 2003 - Black Nights Film Festival, Estonia · Estonian Critics' Prize 2004 - Trieste Film Festival, Italy · Premio Trieste (for Best Film) 2004 - Film Festival of Mexico City · Best Director · Best Cinematography 2004 - Singapore International Film Festival · Best Film · Best Director · Best Actor (Mehmet Emin Toprak) 2004 - Awards of Radio 'France Culture' · Best Director of the year 2004 - Durban Int. Film Festival, South Africa · Special Jury Prize

Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory

Magnetoresistive RAM Wikipedia

Freescale MRAM

Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) is a non-volatile computer memory (NVRAM) technology, which has been under development since the 1990s. Continued increases in density of existing memory technologies, notably Flash RAM and DRAM kept MRAM in a niche role in the market, but its proponents believe that the advantages are so overwhelming that MRAM will eventually become dominant.

Unlike conventional RAM chip technologies, in MRAM data is not stored as electric charge or current flows, but by magnetic storage elements. The elements are formed from two ferromagnetic plates, each of which can hold a magnetic field, separated by a thin insulating layer. One of the two plates is a permanent magnet set to a particular polarity, the other's field will change to match that of an external field. A memory device is built from a grid of such "cells".

MRAM has similar speeds to SRAM, similar density of DRAM but much lower power consumption than DRAM, and is much faster and suffers no degradation over time in comparison to Flash memory. It is this combination of features that some suggest make it the "universal memory", able to replace SRAM, DRAM and EEPROM and Flash. This also explains the huge amount of research being carried out into developing it.


Early History

* 1955 - Magnetic core memory had the same reading writing principle as MRAM
* 1988 - IBM scientists made a string of key discoveries about the "giant magnetoresistive effect" in thin-film structures.
* 2000 - IBM and Infineon established a joint MRAM development program.
* 2002 - NVE Announces Technology Exchange with Cypress Semiconductor.
* 2003 - A 128 kbit MRAM chip was introduced, manufactured with a 180 nm lithographic process