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BERKELEY, Calif.; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; and MANNHEIM, Germany (Nov. 14, 2011)—Japan’s “K Computer” maintained its position atop the newest edition of the TOP500 List of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, thanks to a full build-out that makes it four times as powerful as its nearest competitor. Installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, the K Computer it achieved an impressive 10.51 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.

In the world of high performance computing, there are three distinct metrics in play: number crunching speed; data crunching speed; and energy efficiency. Can a computer excel at all three, or is our best recourse to try for something less than a hat trick?

The China TOP100 List of High Performance Computer was released by the Specialty Association of Mathematical & Scientific Software (SAMSS), CSIA.

Intel plays the musical chairs game, the IT industry celebrates lots of record quarters, only AMD disappoints. Things are uncertain around Globalfoundries and numerous Bryants draw attention.

IBM has the highest profit, the most patents – and now a woman in charge. Intel is upset about sold processor prototypes and AMD about the lawsuit from a notebook manufacturer.

It's jinxed: A lot of things related to the Bulldozer go wrong, including the joined endeavor of Microsoft and AMD to improve the processor's performance under Windows 7.

Maybe Microsoft boss, Steve Ballmer, will also address various tops and flops of the company in his Keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show CES 2012 – the last of its kind, as, to the surprise of the industry, Microsoft is saying farewell to this show. The list of flops got a little longer in mid-December, with the “update to optimize the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs” (KB2592546 ). In the description, Microsoft explains that, until now, the performance of the AMD Bulldozer CPU has been worse than expected.

Once a year, at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), the experts of the craft meet to report on the advancements in transistor, memory and manufacturing technology. Intel is struggling with the C1-step of its newest processors and AMD miscounts.

A new and updated version of the TOP500 iphone application is now available for download from the Apple App Store. This new version adds the latest 2 lists

It's the “worst-kept secret of the industry” – so it was said at Supercomputing 2011 (SC11) – that Intel's Haswell processor will feature transactional memory. Other leaked bits of news concern Intel's Ivy Bridge and AMD's Trinity.

About two years ago, in August 2009, Intel, IBM and Sun founded a “Drafting Group” in order to devise a common specification for transactional memory (TM). All three of them were planning to incorporate this feature into their next processor generations.

To your typical IT organization, the Top500 Supercomputing list released twice a year -- while interesting -- has little bearing on today's operations. Grand proclamations and goals, such as reaching Exaflop performance by 2018, also have little impact on the day-to-day goings-on in most data centers. (As quick background info: A FLOP is the number of FLoating Point Operations performed Per Second; an Exaflop is 10¹⁸ or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPs.)