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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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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.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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