AMD announced Friday that it will begin shipping its quad-core Opteron processor, dubbed "Barcelona," in August. Enterprise-level server manufacturers including Sun Microsystems have committed to using the standard and low-watt special edition versions of the chip, giving the chipmaker a much needed boost against archrival Intel and its Xeon 5300 Clovertown quad-core chip. "Barcelona represents a very important product for AMD," Shane Rau, an IDC analyst, told TechNewsWorld.
University of Maryland researcher Uzi Vishkin announced this week that he has created a prototype device using a parallel processor that could very well be the "next generation of personal computers." The test model, using technology based on parallel processing on a single chip, is capable of computing at speeds up to 100 times faster than current desktops, said Uzi Vishkin, a professor in the Clark School's electrical and computer engineering department and the university's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.
Genome researchers have successfully transformed one bacterial species into another by replacing all of its DNA, according to a report published Thursday. Biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute transplanted the entire genome, or set of DNA, from one species of Mycoplasma bacteria into another. About three days later, the DNA from the first bacterium had taken over the second so that it became indistinguishable from the donating bacterium, the scientists reported.