If you write for a living, expressing your opinion and making forecasts, you can be expected to make a few mistakes. When that happens, it can be embarrassing. In the extreme it can be damaging to whomever you’ve inadvertently, and ignorantly (but hopefully never maliciously), misrepresented. Everybody makes comments and statements they wished they hadn’t—ask the president of the U.S., … Read more

By now you have all heard of Ageia, the new company on the scene with a co-processor designed to run physics algorithms. It’s a clever and novel idea, and one that has people excited. It also has its fair share of naysayers. No doubt it’s not going to be an easy road for the company, but it follows interesting and … Read more

It’s all about numbers—who’s got the biggest, the fastest, the mostest. The problem is keeping it up. When you’re talking about a lot of zeros, then it gets even harder and little blue pills don’t help. Take the number of zeros in a trillion. The word trillion denotes different numbers in American and British usage. In the American system, one … Read more

When I think about what it was like to use a computer in the sixties compared to using a computer today it makes all those little problems we deal with every day seem kind of small. For instance, in ’64 we had stroke writer displays, and computers that were built with magnetic core memory and integrated circuits that had only … Read more

It’s spring and a new crop of graphics processors are being readied for market and I’m very excited about what’s coming. I was going to say graphics processors are so cool—but then I would have had to add seventeenleven sentences explaining that I was using the vernacular convention of the word and not the thermal usage of the word, for … Read more

PCI Express will revolutionize workstations; CAD is the big winner Workstation users, especially high-end workstation users, have an insatiable appetite for high performance in their workstations, and historically they have never gotten all the power they have needed. The situation is about to improve as computer architecture is due to undergo a major overhaul. Performance is measured in terms of … Read more