A wonderful weekend

I've been working a lot these past several weeks, so it was a nice change to take the weekend to spend with my lovely wife. Over the weekend we finally managed to catch up on a lot of movies we'd been wanting to watch.

First there's Napoleon Dynamite. I know a lot of people really liked this movie, but man I thought it was horrible. I went in with pretty low expectations based on the previews and the friends that I knew who really enjoyed the movie (we generally have incompatible movie-humor), but even my low expectations were trumped by how bad I thought the movie was. I know I'm probably in the minority, but wow...

Then there's Bourne Supremacy. I had heard that the shaky camera effect was overdone in the movie so I went in with a pretty high annoyance-level expectation, but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't too bad - except for in the fight scenes. I liked the movie itself, although I can't figure out if I liked it more or less than the original. The plot was a bit too conclusive for me but overall, enjoyable.

Finally we watched Garden State - which I also liked. Everyone seemed to think this movie was incredible, and while I wouldn't classify it as one of the greats, I thought it was pretty good - reminded me a lot of how I felt when I first came to meet Vinney :)

I managed to get some work done over the weekend and I just had a meeting with Intel's Justin Rattner to talk about Cell a bit and get some of his input into the architecture. At this point I don't think there's much more outside perspective I need for the article, although I am waiting to talk to a few more people (especially those in the movie biz) about their thoughts on Cell vs. general purpose architectures for their needs. There is another paper on Cell's architecture being presented tomorrow, hopefully we'll get some more insight into the architecture - more specifically, everyone is very curious about the programming model for Cell - myself included.

I am gearing up for IDF, which should definitely prove to be interesting this year - as I'd say it's the year of multicore for Intel from servers to notebooks. I'm fully expecting to get some details on Yonah/Jonah among other things.

That's all for now, this week I'm just going to be working on Cell pretty much exclusively. On the Mac side of things the Mac HTPC article is done and next up is my Mac memory roundup. It looks like we'll have to push the NUMA article back a bit because of all of the NDAs coming up these next couple of weeks, but I'll get you a better idea of when that's happening soon. And Wesley is working on a SLI roundup as well, so keep your eyes peeled for that.