m i c r o d i s c o . a t a r j ’ s

r e t r o g a t h e r i n g

T O D A Y · I · V I S I T E D · an event called Retrogathering 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden, an annual gathering for fans of old video and computer games. Gaming consoles and computers like C64, Nintendo NES, Sinclair Spectrum and Ataris. Lectures was presented by the early days enterpreneurs, today veterans. There was early conections between the music business and video games industry in the early days. CBS for example was involeved in the develpment of the PacMan game.

A video game quiz with 22 tunes was presented. Composer and game title you where supposed to remember. Music from C64, Nintendo NES and some remixes it was. I think of myself as a kind of video game music fan, but I got completely lost and succeded realy badly. I speaked with a dude that came as 6 in this competition and 2 in an overall retrogame competition. He was pleased with the day, two placements in the video game circuit in only one day. Old video game machines and subjects around them, have became objects for fashination just like old cars used to be.

The image above shows the price cermony and winner of swedich championships in original Pong video game at Retrogathering 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Mr. Martin Lindell from the Swedish Game Industry Association hosted the event. More than 200 individuals attended the event.

www.retrogathering.se

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V I S I T · European Commision’s researchers night web
Local activities in Stockholm starts 12:00 at Kulturhuset. Visit the event program

w e b . 2.0 . e x p o . e u r o p e . b e r l i n

r e l e a s e . p a r t y . t o n i g h t

I N · S T O C K H O L M · at Pub Anchor Sveavägen 90 at 09.00 PM the Swedish gigants of death/viking metal will release their new album. Check out their new widget beneath.

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p a r a d i g m . s h i f t

T H E · C O N C L U S I O N · from the Multicore Day is a upcomming great paradigm shift. After a digital age with single microprocessor, linear applications, bus architechture and networking, we are climbing ower to a multicore or many core era. Chips with thousands of processing cores with own dedicated cache and I/O-bus and swich will be a reality in only six or eigh years. Today 4 cores are available in comercial processors, and 64 cores in the research like Tile64 from Tilera that host 64 cores in a regular mesh architecture.
Two cores in a processor will give a 50% faster prosessor, but upscaling with additions of cores will limit the speed, unless the methods threading is not optimated with multi threading.
New processors are suitable for running several OS and applications simultaneus extremely useful for demanding multimedia like HD video streaming management. A clear pro with multi/many core is lowered power consumtion and meeting environmental issues.
Ericsson R&D:s Mats Karlsson know that their future is in software development. Today 80% are working on software. Heteregenous processors will probably be adopted for applications.
Acumem founder Erik Hagersten lectured over parallelzing compiling and Mr. Hagersten is representing UPMARC a research programme with 60 MSEK for 10 years.
Stanford research manager Kunle Olukotun talked on Stanford Perversative Processing (SPP), parallel object language, and aim for development of Virtual World applications.

New Questions
• How to optimate threading of multiple/many cores
• Development of new tools and methods are needed.
• The limitation of internal bandwith is a great problem
• Regular mesh or heterogenity
• Hardware or software definition of applications
• New ways of thinking for new programmers

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I · A M · A T T E N D I N G · the Multicore Days at the new opened Kista Expo in Kista Science City. Keynote will be presented by Kunle Olukotun from Stanford University and after him will Anant Agarwal from MIT and Tilera give a lecture. The event is hosted by Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS)
Read the complete Program

c h r o m e

T H E · N E W · webbrowser from Google, Crome was released as a beta for Windows on tuesday 2 September. What is Chrome? Execution speed for javascript enhanced, adaption for webapplications, minimalistic design etc. But eyh, it's better to let the Google developers explain.

o n e . l a p t o p

T O · E V E R Y · C H I L D · is an educational project with Nicholas Negroponte from MIT involved.

“Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

Visit the OLPC:s web

s p o r e

S P O R E · V I D E O · G A M E · by EA released 4 September, here discussed by producer Will Wright.

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