Creator of world’s first PC dies

Bill Gates leads tributes to Altair 8800 creator.




Ed Roberts, who built the first commercially available PC, has died of pneumonia aged 68.

In 1975 Roberts designed and built the MITS Altair 8800, which is widely considered the first personal computer. The computer lacked a keyboard or monitor and was sold as a self assembly kit but it kickstarted the modern computing age.

Two of the people inspired by the Altair were a young Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who wanted to get their software on the system. Microsoft was originally located in New Mexico right next door to Roberts’ facilities.

“Ed was truly a pioneer in the personal computer revolution, and didn’t always get the recognition he deserved,” said Gates and Allen in a statement.

“He was an intense man with a great sense of humour, and he always cared deeply about the people who worked for him, including us. Ed was willing to take a chance on us – two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace – and we have always been grateful to him.”

The Altair was a small commercial success and Roberts sold the company to hard drive manufacturer Pertec in 1976 for US$6m, of which he personally made US$2m.

He returned to his native Georgia to run a software company and also a farm. However in 1982 he decided on a change of career and went to medical school, graduating first in his class, and from 1986 became a small town doctor, something he continued with until his death.

“More than anything, what we will always remember about Ed was how deeply compassionate he was – and that was never more true than when he decided to spend the second half of his life going to medical school and working as a country doctor making house calls. He will be missed by many and we were lucky to have known him,” Gates and Allen continued

source : www.itnews.com.au

Intel Xeon Nehalem-EX lives large

Intel's new Nehalem-EX CPU for SMP servers brings eight cores, massive memory support, mainframe-like RAS features, and huge performance gains to large-scale workloads

While everyone has had a reasonably good time bashing the Itanium for the past several years, Itanium does have some significant upper-echelon features that x86/x64 systems could only dream about. Many of those features are in the RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) arena -- capabilities like failed DIMM isolation, hot-swappable RAM, inter-socket memory mirroring, corrupt data containment, and CPU hot-adds. Until the release of the Nehalem-EX, these features simply didn't exist in the Xeon world. They do now.

The Nehalem-EX chip is designed for high-capacity SMP servers, scaling from two to 256 sockets at up to 256GB of addressable RAM per socket. Each chip has eight physical cores and 24MB of L3 cache, and can present 16 logical cores through Hyper-Threading. These are big-time numbers. It's possible to drop 1TB of RAM into a four-socket Nehalem-EX server.

It's also important to understand the differences between the Nehalem-EX and the Westmere-EP. The Westmere-EP is built on a 32nm process, while the Nehalem-EX is built on a 45nm process. Where the Westmere-EP has six cores, like the X7400 Dunnington, the Nehalem-EX has eight. Where the Westmere-EP tops out at 12MB of L3 cache, the Nehalem-EX runs up to 24MB. Where the Westmere-EP runs up to 3.33GHz per core, the Nehalem-EX runs at 2.26GHz per core (at the moment). Where the Westmere-EP has two QuickPath interconnects, the Nehalem-EX has four, and can address twice the RAM of the Westmere-EP. Both offer Hyper-Threading, Intel VT virtualization hooks, and Turbo Mode.

The Nehalem-EX is suited for very large scaled workloads. Although the Westmere-EP has the bump in clock rate, it doesn't scale anywhere near the levels provided by the Nehalem-EX. That said, some workloads are better suited to the Westmere-EP, especially single-threaded tasks that benefit from the higher clock rate.

EX-treme performance
To test the Nehalem-EX, I opted for my suite of real-world concurrency tests. Lacking an Intel X7400-series server in the lab, I pitted a Dell R810 running two Intel X7560 Nehalem-EX CPUs against an older HP DL580 G3 running four Intel X7350 Tigerton CPUs. Note the differences between these systems before digging into the results: The HP DL580 had four quad-core X7350 CPUs running at 2.93GHz per core with a 4MB L3 cache. The Dell R810 had only two eight-core X7560s running at 2.26GHz per core with a 12MB cache. Whereas the X7560 Nehalem-EX CPUs support Hyper-Threading, the X7350s in the DL580 do not. It's not apples-to-apples, but it gives a good sense of what performance gains to expect if your servers are more than a year old and running on the X7300-series platform.

source : www.infoworld.com