IF YOU WANT to learn about Nvidia's Tesla and GTX480 cards at GDC, don't ask Nvidia, it has problems with the truth. The real story is found with the users, and they have interesting things to say about the upcoming card's upward bound TDP.
AMD WAS SHOWING OFF its 6-core Thuban CPU at CeBIT along with its 890 chipset. The good news is the showing, the bad news is that it wasn't saying anything about it.
IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.
IS THIS THE final blow for the good old hard drive? Western Digital has as of today launched two SSD models, the SiliconEdge Blue which is a consumer model and the SiliconDrive N1x which targets data centers and various vertical markets.
THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.
THANKS TO ONE of our forum members, we managed to dig out a lot more details on the upcoming Magny-Cours processors from AMD and it seems like yesterday’s source was somewhat off the target, in terms of both pricing and specifications.
ALTHOUGH WE’LL HAVE to wait a little while longer for AMD’s new Magny-Cours based Opteron 6100 series processors to turn up in servers and in retail, European pricing for these 8-core and 12 core processors has turned up ahead of the launch.
ISSCC 2010 Fine details abound but overviews lacking
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about its Fusion CPUs, specifically the first one called Llano. The bad news is that it is not saying very much, but there are some interesting bits that leaked out at ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco.
IF INTEL'S NEXT generation chip does indeed slip into 2011 as some rumors suggest, there is a very good reason for it. Intel works in strange and mysterious ways, and uses more Feng Shui than anyone would expect.
IN PART 2, we look at the overall findings of the scanner, and a close look at each one. Also included is a look back at the 2007 results in light of the new data.
THIS PAPER FOCUSES on the accuracy and time needed to run, review and supplement the results of the web application scanners (Accunetix, Appscan by IBM, BurpSuitePro, Hailstorm by Cenzic, WebInspect by HP, NTOSpider by NT OBJECTives) as well as the Qualys managed scanning service.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of discussion about EVGA’s dual CPU board that was displayed during CES earlier this month. The main topic of discussion was what CPUs it would work with and most people presumed it was limited to Xeon processors.
TAPE DRIVES HAVE sort of faded into the dark over the past few years as a backup medium, although many enterprise backup solutions still rely on them on a daily basis. The storage capacities of the various backup tape technologies haven’t really kept up with the development in the hard drive storage market and as such the largest backup tapes only hold about half as much data as today’s largest hard drives.
IF YOU'RE LOOKING for a tiny, power efficient server motherboard, then the new range of Pine View based mini-ITX server boards from Supermicro might just be what you’re looking for. The company has launched three boards going under the X7SPA moniker that offer slight variations in the feature set from each other.
EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.
IF YOU ARE sick and tired of slogging along with your wimpy 4-core Nehalem laptop, Ace Computer has a solution for you, the 8-core Xeon 5500 (Beckton) based Ace Raptor 5 Server Workstation AC-Raptor55V. Yes, some insane company just put an Intel 8-core Becton server chip in a laptop, let's hear it for wretched excess.
MARVELL’S PLUG COMPUTER has been given an overhaul just in time for CES and the new model looks set to be the greatest one yet. Marvell has moved away from its 1.2GHz Kirkwood SoC to the new 2GHz Armada 300 SoC. The Armada 300 is still based on Marvell’s Sheeva core, but Marvell hasn’t disclosed if the Armada 300 is based on the ARMv5 or ARMv7 architecture. Other new additions include WiFi, Bluetooth and an “internal hard drive”.
EVGA HAS MANAGED to gain a fair bit of fame for its unusual and often quite good motherboards, but its latest creation that was sneak previewed on Twitter a couple of days ago is a monster of a motherboard. Not only does it feature two LGA1366 CPU sockets, but it also has six memory slots and seven PCI Express x16 slots. However, there’s one slight problem with this board, it uses a proprietary form factor.
IT LOOKS LIKE we were right about Fermi being too big, too hot, and too late, Nvidia just castrated it to 448SPs. Even at that, it is a 225 Watt part, slipping into the future.
Industrial to continue on, consumers lose a great maker
IT IS OUR really sad duty to inform you about rumors that DFI will be leaving the consumer motherboard business in January. The company is not going away, and will be refocusing on the industrial PC business.
REMEMBER THE TRIUMPHANT WIN for Fermi at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that Nvidia heavily touted at its GDC conference keynote? The supercomputer project was just killed for power reasons. Fermi power reasons. Whoops.
ANOTHER SHOE HAS DROPPED on the heads of Intel's legal team. This time it is an FTC lawsuit saying that the company is anticompetitive. Time for the fun to begin again.
INTEL HAS FINALLY done what we had all expected it to do, and pulled the plug on the consumer version of Larrabee. In a statement today, Intel said that the chip will be a development platform and an HPC part, but there will be no retail version, at least not any time soon.
SISOFT SANDRA 2010 was just released, and the big news is that it now has OpenCL based GPGPU benchmarks. They look to be a fairly well rounded and test both compute capabilities and I/O.
OFFICIAL WORD FROM NVIDIA is that gaming is now a footnote for the formerly leading graphics company, its latest and greatest Fermi chip won't see the light of day until at least Q1 of 2010, and Fermi's clock speeds so far are massively off what the firm had hoped for. Yup, it is a mess, just like we told you.
HP ANNOUNCED that it will buy 3Com for $2.7 billion the other day, and with one swipe of pen on checkbook validated Cisco's strategy. HP also showed that it won't be able to compete in the converged network arena for years to come.
THREE VERY INTERESTING tidbits snuck out in the Q&A session at the AMD analyst day today. It seems that Fusion and the new cores have taped out and are at the fabs.
AT ANALYST DAY, Chekib Akrout of AMD spilled the beans on the chip company's two new CPU cores, and Fusion. AMD's Bulldozer and Bobcat processors plus its memory controller that is called Fusion were all outed.
Ugly details revealed, it just keeps getting worse
IT LOOKS LIKE the brown stuff has hit the rotating blades in the ongoing Intel vs AMD antitrust lawsuits. New York's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just filed suit against Intel for all sorts of nasty things.
WESTERN DIGITAL HAS finally thrown its hat into the SAS ring with the release of the S25 line. Most observers were not expecting this, thinking WD would go from SATA directly to SSDs.
TILERA IS CLAIMING to have the first commercial CPU to reach 100 cores, and while this is true, the real interesting technology is in the interconnects. The overall chip is quite a marvel, and it is unlike any mainstream CPU you have ever heard of.
SUPERMICRO WAS AT IDF showing off the usual server and workstation toys. Because it had a bunch of new products at Computex, and there haven't subsequently been any really new Intel chips, the boards on display were evolutionary, not revolutionary.
LSI AND REDHAT were showing off the next step in hardware virtualization, IOV or I/O Virtualization, during IDF. The idea is simple, make SAS or SATA cards aware of virtual spaces, speeding up I/O for VMs many times.
AMD OFFICIALLY BROKE SILENCE on the Fiorana and Kroner platforms, right on top of IDF. Most of the specifications are already known, but there are a few interesting things left to tell you about.
IDF 2009: Fabric strategy leaves HP and IBM behind
WHEN CISCO JUMPED into the blade server market with its first Project California blades, that was big news, but the hardware was a yawner. The new 'Ventura' blades we were shown at IDF are going to change the game, radically.
SEAN MALONEY GOT all the good toys to show off at IDF this year, with Larrabee, Jasper, Gulftown and much more. There is a lot of good silicon in the pipeline.
ONE OF THE MOST recognizable and influential Intel executives, Pat Gelsinger, is no longer with the company. His rather sudden departure means a massive reshuffling that reaches just about every corner of Intel.
WHEN I FIRST saw the product that Adaptec is calling MaxIQ at CeBIT in March, it looked interesting, but was overwhelmed by the 5Z ultracapacitor backed RAID card. Now that Adaptec has let out all the details, the MaxIQ SSD RAID accelerator is by far the more interesting product.
AS WE SAID a few days ago, Intel is launching the new Lynnfield CPUs and the P55 chipset that goes with them. The CPU comes in three desktop flavors and six server variants.
INTEL HAS TALKED about Becton, now called Nehalem EX, without going into many technical details. At Hot Chips 21, it is starting to talk about the guts of the chip, and it is very different from the EX-free Nehalems.
AMD FINALLY STARTED to publicly talk about Magny-Cours and socket G34 during the Hot Chips 21 conference. The socket has a lot of complexities, so for now, we will only take a look at the interconnects, both on chip and off.
INTEL PUT OUT four new Nehalem CPUs today for both server and workstation markets. They are mostly just speed and power variants of the current chips, both on the low and high end.
WESTERN DIGITAL IS on a roll, owning the next great 'mine is bigger than yours' plateau in hard drives. Today, they introduced 750GB and 1TB 2.5 inch laptop HDs.
WHEN YOU DO something wrong, the best thing you can do is come clean and not cover it up. Covering things up only makes things worse, especially if you do it in a panicked way.
ONE OF THE few things worse than being woken up by an alarm clock at 7am after getting to a hotel well past midnight is being woken up before 7am by a phone call from a very angry Wolfgang Gruener. That was the first time the dirty underside of plagiarism in the IT journalism world directly made my life interesting, but far from the last.
THIS WEEK WE celebrated the 40th anniversary of putting people on the moon. Next week we'll hear how San Francisco's parking meters are hackable, have we really moved forward technologically?
THE NEW INTEL M-Series SSDs are already on sale a day or three early. The new versions, code named 'Postville' may look the same on the outside, but are much faster than their predecessors.
IF YOU WANT to control devices that require precise, coordinated movements, protocols like TCP/IP have too much overhead and latency making life difficult or impossible. Luckily, a standard called EtherCat is aimed at fixing all the things that makes TCP/IP unsuitable while still running over low cost 802.3 Ethernet hardware.
SEAGATE IS NOT ready to throw in the towel on high performance magnetic drives yet, and to show they are serious, Seagate just launched a line of 600GB SAS-6 drives. Take that SSDs, your puny SATA interface is no match for SAS-6 or Fiber Channel.
AMD JUST DOUBLED the count on their 6-core "Istanbul" Opteron CPUs, going from 5 to 10 SKUs. The new parts are in the SE and HE line, on the top and bottom of the speed and power curves respectively.
IF YOU WANT to learn about Nvidia's Tesla and GTX480 cards at GDC, don't ask Nvidia, it has problems with the truth. The real story is found with the users, and they have interesting things to say about the upcoming card's upward bound TDP.
AMD WAS SHOWING OFF its 6-core Thuban CPU at CeBIT along with its 890 chipset. The good news is the showing, the bad news is that it wasn't saying anything about it.
IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.
IS THIS THE final blow for the good old hard drive? Western Digital has as of today launched two SSD models, the SiliconEdge Blue which is a consumer model and the SiliconDrive N1x which targets data centers and various vertical markets.
THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.
THANKS TO ONE of our forum members, we managed to dig out a lot more details on the upcoming Magny-Cours processors from AMD and it seems like yesterday’s source was somewhat off the target, in terms of both pricing and specifications.
IN PART 2, we look at the overall findings of the scanner, and a close look at each one. Also included is a look back at the 2007 results in light of the new data.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of discussion about EVGA’s dual CPU board that was displayed during CES earlier this month. The main topic of discussion was what CPUs it would work with and most people presumed it was limited to Xeon processors.
TAPE DRIVES HAVE sort of faded into the dark over the past few years as a backup medium, although many enterprise backup solutions still rely on them on a daily basis. The storage capacities of the various backup tape technologies haven’t really kept up with the development in the hard drive storage market and as such the largest backup tapes only hold about half as much data as today’s largest hard drives.
EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.
IF YOU ARE sick and tired of slogging along with your wimpy 4-core Nehalem laptop, Ace Computer has a solution for you, the 8-core Xeon 5500 (Beckton) based Ace Raptor 5 Server Workstation AC-Raptor55V. Yes, some insane company just put an Intel 8-core Becton server chip in a laptop, let's hear it for wretched excess.
MARVELL’S PLUG COMPUTER has been given an overhaul just in time for CES and the new model looks set to be the greatest one yet. Marvell has moved away from its 1.2GHz Kirkwood SoC to the new 2GHz Armada 300 SoC. The Armada 300 is still based on Marvell’s Sheeva core, but Marvell hasn’t disclosed if the Armada 300 is based on the ARMv5 or ARMv7 architecture. Other new additions include WiFi, Bluetooth and an “internal hard drive”.
IT IS OUR really sad duty to inform you about rumors that DFI will be leaving the consumer motherboard business in January. The company is not going away, and will be refocusing on the industrial PC business.
SISOFT SANDRA 2010 was just released, and the big news is that it now has OpenCL based GPGPU benchmarks. They look to be a fairly well rounded and test both compute capabilities and I/O.
HP ANNOUNCED that it will buy 3Com for $2.7 billion the other day, and with one swipe of pen on checkbook validated Cisco's strategy. HP also showed that it won't be able to compete in the converged network arena for years to come.
TILERA IS CLAIMING to have the first commercial CPU to reach 100 cores, and while this is true, the real interesting technology is in the interconnects. The overall chip is quite a marvel, and it is unlike any mainstream CPU you have ever heard of.
LSI AND REDHAT were showing off the next step in hardware virtualization, IOV or I/O Virtualization, during IDF. The idea is simple, make SAS or SATA cards aware of virtual spaces, speeding up I/O for VMs many times.
WHEN CISCO JUMPED into the blade server market with its first Project California blades, that was big news, but the hardware was a yawner. The new 'Ventura' blades we were shown at IDF are going to change the game, radically.
WHEN I FIRST saw the product that Adaptec is calling MaxIQ at CeBIT in March, it looked interesting, but was overwhelmed by the 5Z ultracapacitor backed RAID card. Now that Adaptec has let out all the details, the MaxIQ SSD RAID accelerator is by far the more interesting product.
AS WE SAID a few days ago, Intel is launching the new Lynnfield CPUs and the P55 chipset that goes with them. The CPU comes in three desktop flavors and six server variants.
INTEL HAS TALKED about Becton, now called Nehalem EX, without going into many technical details. At Hot Chips 21, it is starting to talk about the guts of the chip, and it is very different from the EX-free Nehalems.
WHEN YOU DO something wrong, the best thing you can do is come clean and not cover it up. Covering things up only makes things worse, especially if you do it in a panicked way.
THIS WEEK WE celebrated the 40th anniversary of putting people on the moon. Next week we'll hear how San Francisco's parking meters are hackable, have we really moved forward technologically?
THE NEW INTEL M-Series SSDs are already on sale a day or three early. The new versions, code named 'Postville' may look the same on the outside, but are much faster than their predecessors.
IF YOU WANT to control devices that require precise, coordinated movements, protocols like TCP/IP have too much overhead and latency making life difficult or impossible. Luckily, a standard called EtherCat is aimed at fixing all the things that makes TCP/IP unsuitable while still running over low cost 802.3 Ethernet hardware.
SEAGATE IS NOT ready to throw in the towel on high performance magnetic drives yet, and to show they are serious, Seagate just launched a line of 600GB SAS-6 drives. Take that SSDs, your puny SATA interface is no match for SAS-6 or Fiber Channel.