System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Sun has posted a video of a presentation called, “Rock’s Transactional Memory and How to Exploit It“. (51:49) Bob Cypher and Mark Moir. It provides interesting insights into what Sun is doing:

Chip Multi-threading
Multi-Core chips
Instruction Level Parallelism
Rock’s Hardware Scout
Locks
Transactional Memory (TM)
Rock’s Hardware for TM (HTM)
Best effort HTM
Simulation of Rock’s HTM
Performance improvements anticipated with hardware transactional memory

With the focus on performance, this release of JRuby has proven to be a contender. “There have been more and more reports of applications exceeding Ruby 1.8.6 performance; we are even beating Ruby 1.9 in some microbenchmarks,” reports Thomas Enebo.
Other major features in this release:

Compilation of Ruby to Java Bytecode (in AOT and JIT […]

The newly available Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) for Business is designed for customers looking for longer, more predictable support for the platform - up to 15 years per family.
Java SE for Business offers faster access to mission critical reliability and security fixes through Java SE for Business Revisions. Customers will be able to […]

Sun plans on building a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for Apple iPhone and the iTouch with intentions of releasing the JVM after June, enabling Java applications to run on Apple’s popular mobile devices.
Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun, said the JVM will be made available for free “as quickly as possible” after […]

This new release allows users to register JDK installations through Sun Connection so installed JDK instances can be tracked online along with other Sun software and hardware assets through the Sun Inventory Channel.
Learn more about Java SE 6 Update 5’s featured updates.
 
 Other updates released by Sun along with the Java SE 6:

JDK and JRE 6 […]

IDC is forecasting that the Open Source business, “reached $1.8 billion in 2006 and will grow to reach $5.8 Billion by 2011″. LinuxWorld has published an article,”2008’s Top Leaders in Open Source Business“, in which they list the open source business leaders who they think will matter the most in 2008:

Marten Mickos - CEO, MySQL […]

Sun has been developing a high-end SPARC processor with the codename Rock. One of Sun’s top engineers Marc Tremblay, delivered a paper at the ISSCC 2008 conference where he confirmed that Rock based systems would ship in the “second half of 2009“.
A brief technical summary of Marc Tremblay’s ISSCC presentation is available on ars technica […]

The Sun Java Real-Time System (RTS) will be helping Reuters, PLC address latency and unpredictable temporal performance of Java applications in the development and deployment of market-facing services.
“Reuters Group has a wide range of systems that use Java technology as part of the solution to deliver core services to our customers,” commented Andrew Cunningham, global […]

Developer.com’s 2008 Product of the Year awards have named the Java SE 6 JDK and NetBeans IDE as winners in the Framework and Development Tool categories, respectively. The NetBeans IDE also won for Java Tool or Add-in.
The Java SE 6 JDK not only was named as the favorite in the Framework category, but also received […]

Warner Bros. Entertainment has decided it will begin releasing its high-definition (HD) DVD titles exclusively in the Blu-ray disc format. Currently Warner Home Videos are available in both standard DVD format and Blu-ray, and will continue as such until the end of May, after which Blu-Ray will become its exclusive format.
“A two-format landscape has led […]