GCC 4.2.1 released

The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.2.1

This release is a major release, containing new features (as well as many other improvements) relative to GCC 4.1.x.

GCC 4.2
GCC 4.2 changes

GCC 4.2.1 will be the last release of GCC covered by version 2 of the
GNU General Public License. All future releases will be released
under GPL version 3. See:

http://gplv3.fsf.org

for more information about GPLv3.

Enabling Solaris 64-bit C++ warnings

To enable Sun Studio to print out full C++ 64-bit porting warnings you need to use +w & -xport64. I found that -xport64 on its own didn't do anything.

+w        Print warnings about additional questionable constructs
-xport64  Enable extra checking for code ported from 32-bit to 64-bit platforms

The warnings are extremely useful in cleaning up C++ code with regards to 64-bit portability.

Another useful option is :

+w2        Emit warnings for code with additional portability problems

See "CC -flags" for full options and usage.

AMD to introduce 45nm process AM3 CPU family in 2H08

AMD to introduce 45nm process Socket AM3 CPU family in 2H08

It also looks like they might drop the "64" from the name of some future CPUs, but they will still of course all be fully 64-bit.

Source: Digitimes

Intel Itanium to skip 45nm

Intel's high end 64-bit chip, the Itanium, to skip over 45nm and go straight to 32nm.
It's going to get more powerful & have more features such as quad-core.

Source: vnunet

Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/2007

A new release of this excellent Solaris edition.

Solaris Express Developer Edition

Lots of new features :

Solaris Express Developer Edition : Features

including:
New Sun Studio 12 C, C++ and Fortran compilers
Solaris (Solaris Express Community Edition build 64a)
and lots more.

Apple shows off new Leopard developer features

Xcode 3.0 has full 64-bit support, Xray looks exciting.
Leopard has DTrace
Leopard Developer

Leopard is fully ground-up 64-bit:
Leopard 64-bit

Engadget link Leopard 64-bit

Sun Studio 12 released

"Sun Studio software delivers high-performance, optimizing C, C++, and Fortran compilers for the Solaris OS on SPARC, and both Solaris and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, including the latest multi-core systems"

Lots of new features including :

• Supports Linux
• Better x86-64 support
• New Sun Studio IDE
• Better multicore support
• Faster compiler and better code generation

Sun Studio 12
What's new

Fedora 7 released

New Fedora 7 release

New features include :

• Linux 2.6.21
• GNOME 2.18 and KDE 3.5.6
• Xorg Server 1.3
• Better KVM support
• New Wireless stack

Fedora Project
Fedora 7 Release Notes

Torrent links
including x86_64 DVD and x86_64 Live

AMD Performance Library 1.1 Preview

The Inquirer: AMD comes up with K10 performance library

AMD Developer Central

AMD Performance Library 1.1 Preview helps performance especially for 64-bit CPUs.

The next Windows Server will be 64-bit only

OSNews Link : The next Windows Server will be 64-bit only

It looks like the next version of Windows Server will be 64-bit only. That's a pretty good step.

Betanews: Windows Server 2008 to be the last 32-bit server Windows OS

GCC 4.2 released

The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.2.0.

This release is a major release, containing new features (as well as many other improvements) relative to GCC 4.1.x.

GCC 4.2
GCC 4.2 changes

IBM's Power 6 promises 5GHz boost

The Inquirer: IBM's Power 6 promises 5GHz boost

CentOS 5.0 released

Release for CentOS-5 i386 and x86_64

New features highlights :

• These updated software versions: Apache-2.2, php-5.1.6, kernel-2.6.18, Gnome-2.16, KDE-3.5, OpenOffice.org-2.0, Evolution-2.8, Firefox-1.5, Thunderbird-1.5, MySQL-5.0, PostgreSQL-8.1.
• Better desktop support with compiz and AIGLX.
• Virtualization provided by the Xen hypervisor with Virtual Machine Manager and libvirt.

CentOS website
CentOS 5.0 Release announcement
Distrowatch: CentOS

Microsoft 64-bit website refresh

It looks like Microsoft has updated it's 64-bit section.

Microsoft 64-bit Computing Overview

Debian 4.0 released for AMD64

The new Debian 4.0 release of today officially supports AMD64 :

A total of eleven architectures are supported including: Sun SPARC (sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel IA-32 (i386) and IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), ARM (arm), IBM S/390 (s390) and – newly introduced with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 – AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64).

New features include :

• Linux kernel version 2.6.18
• GNOME 2.14
• Xfce 4.4
• OpenOffice.org 2.0.4a
• Evolution 2.6.3
• the GNU C library, version 2.3.6
• the GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 as default compiler
• language interpreters: Python 2.4, PHP 5.2
• web servers: Apache 2.2, fnord 1.10
• database servers: MySQL 5.0.32, PostgreSQL 8.1

Release Notes
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released
Distrowatch entry : Debian
OSNews : Debian 4.0 released
Debian 4.0 (etch) review

New 64-bit Linux releases

SabayonLinux 3.3 64-bit miniEdition
The single-CD "miniEdition" of SabayonLinux 3.3 has been released

64-Studio
Audio focused 64-bit Linux distribution.

Beta Ubuntu 7.04 "Fiesty Fawn" released

HP tool update

New Release! HP Code Advisor C.01.15 is now available for free download.

The following are the notable features of this release:

* Generate code complexity metrics to gauge the complexity of the code being developed or migrated
* Detect multi-thread programming issues
* Create easily manageable snapshots of the PDB
* New options for finer control of the diagnostics at individual module and macro levels
* Improved cross-file analysis time
* Enhancements to the -crossfile option for selective enablement
* -target option to help reduce build to only modified elements
* Enhancements to reporting, including generation of HTML report

HP C Advise

Like "lint", this tool seems great at running some more thorough code analysis. I recommend running this if you have HP Itanium systems.

Solaris Express Developer Edition 2/07

Sun has a great new edition of Solaris aimed at developers.

"Solaris Express Developer Edition is an OpenSolaris-based distribution for x86 that includes the latest tools, technologies, and platforms to create applications for Solaris OS"

It includes Sun Studio 11 pre-installed, as well as NetBeans & Web 2.0 tools, StarOffice 8.0, Solaris + AMP and much more. The OS is Solaris Express Community Edition build 55. This edition is x86 only.

There is also a VMware packaged edition on the link below. I tested that 64-bit download in VMware Server and it worked really well.

Sun Developer Site : Solaris Express Developer Edition
Sun Developer Site : Download Page

AMD/ATI losing the geeks ?

When AMD introduced the Athlon, everyone seemed to notice, but especially the geek crowd. It was a great new processor. When they introduced the Athlon64 and Intel stated that 64-bit was not in their desktop future, the geeks and techies went crazy for AMD. It's been hugely successful and AMD64 is a great architecture. It almost feels like amazing good Alpha CPU didn't die, in some ways it's lived on in the AMD64.

The pendulum swung in favour of AMD and stayed there.

Intel backtracked and then copied the AMD64 and called in EM64T. But Intel were in a mess, developers, geeks and techies wanted fast 32/64-bit capable Athlon64 chips and didn't want the high power usage Pentium4. Company trouble at Intel also made things worse for them, layoffs occurred to try to sort things out.

But....

Geeks have respect for Intel again after it ditched the Pentium4 and released the Core CPU. The Core is a great CPU, lower power usage & very fast performance. Core Duo in a latop out performs the fastest AMD laptop CPU (Turion64). But it didn't stop there, they released desktop and laptop Core Duo CPUs and then enabled 64-bit CPUs for all via the Core 2 Duo. Core 2 Duo is even faster and even more energy efficient. I can understand why Apple switched to it (although it has taken me a long time to accept it & then try to understand why, I liked PowerPC).

Intel have raised the stakes yet again by releasing a Xeon 64-bit Quad CPU that uses 50W
Intel Xeon
The Register : New Xeon


I think that AMD made improvements, some of the dual core Athlon X2 CPUs use less or the same power as the old single core CPUs. But at the same time, Intel introduced a new CPU architecture and then improved upon it with the Core 2 Duo. AMD should have had the K8L out and ready, it does look interesting.

Drivers
Linux people that want to try out the great looking features of Beryl/Compiz etc. they are finding that ATI does not support this in their binary driver. Linux devs and users are being forced to switch to Intel (open source driver) or NVidia (binary driver supports AIGLX) instead.

VMWare Fusion Beta 2

arstechnia reports VMWare Fusion Beta 2 comes with "Experimental 3D Acceleration"

I'm not personally interested in 3D support, but it looks like it's going to be a great product. It does support 32-bit and 64-bit guests, which Parallels does not. The 64-bit support in VMware Server is excellent, I would expect that support in Fusion to be good also.