ARM has disclosed technical details about its new v8 architecture - the first to include a 64-bit instruction set - at ARM TechCon 2011 in Santa Clara, California.The next-gen architecture will expand the reach of ARM processors in the consumer and enterprise markets where extended virtual addressing and 64-bit data processing are required.According to ARM CTO Mike Muller, ARMv8 architecture consists of two main execution states: AArch64 and AArch32. 

The AArch64 execution state introduces a new instruction set, A64 for 64-bit processing, while the AArch32 state supports the exist...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation of RAM clusters that were faster than disk clusters. [M]emory is several orders of magnitude faster than d...

Flash is a necessary waystation as we travel to a single in-memory storage architecture. That's the view from a Fujitsu chief technology officer's office.Dr Joseph Reger, CTO at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, is that office-holder, and – according to him – flash is beset with problems that will become unsolvable. He says we are seeing increases in flash density at the expense of our ability to read and write data. Each shrink in process geometry, from 3X to 2X and onto 1X, shortens flash's endurance, and each increase in cell bit level, from 2-bit to 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC), ...