An old-school Atari zine’s history of the PPC architecture.

When thinking about the scale of computing problems, consider the rendering times of Ratatouille:

During Ratatouille, the renderfarm consisted of about 850 machines with nearly 3200 processors between them. When rendering the final Ratatouille film frames on a 2.66 GHz processor, each frame took an average of six hours. It took about 1532 CPU-years to render Ratatouille, including the lower-resolution renders done at various points in the pipeline and working iterations. That means that if we only had one CPU in the renderfarm, Ratatouille wouldn’t have been released until the year 3539. To store the images generated while making the movie, we used 12 terabytes of disk space.

Taking Advantage of Concurrent Programming for Windows (part 1 and part 2). The shift to multiple core CPUs changes what’s possible for application scalability.

An example of animated directed graphs in Javascript. A bit CPU-hungry, but an example of what can be done.

The Xbox 360 CPU architecture.

‘Nightmare’ drove desperate user to open source, a story about a company switch to BSD for infrastructure. A few interesting quotes:

Then PWC was hit with a virus affecting network traffic and the Checkpoint firewall was running at 100 percent CPU capacity which was effectively a denial of service. “So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint (a commercial Windows firewall),” he said.

And the kicker:

Despite this Uemura is adamant the move wasn’t made because he wanted to. “As much as I love OpenBSD, we had no choice,” he said.

It isn’t about features, it’s about what works (and what doesn’t).

On Threads
So, while Sun will probably be the first player slapping big money down on the multithreading horse in the high-stakes CPU race, you still need to pay attention even if you’re not a Sun customer. Because a few years from now, you’re going to need a lot more CPU cycles than you do now, and unless you’re willing to bet on that 5GHz fusion reactor, multithreading is how you’re probably going to get them. (Via Tim Bray)

Longhorn specs: The Truth?
Microsoft is expected to recommend that the “average” Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.