architecture

hardware

CPU vs. GPU

Intel’s latest quad-core CPU, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, consists of 582 million transistors. That’s a lot. But it pales in comparison to the 680 million transistors of nVidia’s latest video card, the 8800 GTX. Here’s a small chart of transistor counts for recent CPUs and

By Jeff Atwood ·
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apple

x86 Uber Alles

I guess John Gruber isn’t as savvy as he thought he was: “Apple Announces Switch to Intel Chips” After seeing NT slowly shed its MIPS, Alpha, and PPC versions, you have to wonder: will our children be using architectures that emulate some form of x86? Even with a flash

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Multiple Core CPU Futures

cpu

Multiple Core CPU Futures

Both AMD and Intel now have dual core CPUs on the market, in the form of the Athlon 64 X2 and the Pentium 4 D series. They may be expensive now, but I fully expect dual core architectures to trickle down to the rest of the lineup within the next

By Jeff Atwood ·
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It Came From Planet Architecture

.net

It Came From Planet Architecture

Coming from humble Visual Basic 3.0 beginnings, by way of AmigaBasic, AppleSoft Basic, and Coleco Adam SmartBasic, I didn’t get a lot of exposure to formal programming practice. One of the primary benefits of .NET is that it brings VB programmers into the fold – we’re now real

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

My Database is a Web Service

In The Fallacy of the Data Layer, Rocky Lhotka makes a case for something I’ve come to believe as absolute truth: It is commonly held as a truth that applications have a UI layer, a business layer and a data layer. In most of my presentations and writing I

By Jeff Atwood ·
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