Big Blue says that the shiny new System z10 you just installed in your basement yesterday is officially obsolete and should be relegated to household media streaming/torrent duty in the wake of its replacement. Behold the zEnterprise System, and its central compute server the zEnterprise 196, capable of processing more instructions than your puny humanoid mind could ever dream of issuing. Don't look now, but your girly-man netbook just peed itself.
NOT SATISFIED WITH showing off a Llano wafer, AMD showed off the next generation part, Orochi, at the GloFo GTC summit today. While there was no silicon to pass around, pictures are much better than test.
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about Bulldozer, the upcoming new desktop and server core. It is the largest architectural jump in standard x86 cores in a long long time.
THERE HAVE LONG been rumors of a major player moving their data centers from x86 based PCs to the ARM architecture. It looks like the first big player to jump in to the market is going to be none other than Facebook.
INTEL'S PURCHASE OF McAfee is quite synergistic and makes a lot of sense to anyone following the company. Contrary to most opinions out there however, it has nothing to do with security.
Still wants you to pick up the bill at dinner though
HP is an interesting company. They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it's all seems very boring to the casual observer. They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses. They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable. Well the blob has done it again. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
BT junkies finding it hard to contain their excitement
The Association of People who Stockpile Digital Recordings of the Tasteful Expression of the Human Form, or APSDRTEHF (they are rumored to be voting on a new name in the near future), received word of an amazing feat of storage engineering today. Toshiba is presenting a paper at the 2010 Magnetic Recording Conference in San Diego today outlining their research and successful implementation of a new technology that can cram a staggering 2.5 terabits of information into a single square inch of platter real estate. For the layman, that's about 300GB of information stored on a surface the size of a postage stamp.
After over 3 years of running around the legal jungle gym, the United Stated Department of Justice has finally caught up with Hewlett-Packard, the world's current leading provider of technological stuff, and reached a settlement after rubbing HP's face in the sand a couple of times [ DOJ -1 | HP -0 ]. The settlement lays to rest 2007 allegations of kickbacks and fraud related to government contracts negotiated by technology contractor Accenture over the past decade.
INTEL AND GE have are doing something with healthcare today, and there is a webcast going on as this is written. Thoughtfully, Intel and GE have saved us from the excitement of that webcast through advanced technical features.
INTEL IS TALKING about Silicon Photonics again, the real advances are masked behind a breathless press release about lasers replacing electronics. The advances announced today are nothing nearly as spectacular nor as breathless, it is simply a speed bump and a connector.
Grab a fifth or your favorite 70 proof or higher beverage and read on
Recently hard drives and the storage industry in general has been a tough thing to write about, because frankly, nobody really cares! It’s much more fun and exciting to get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest multi-core CPUs running at orgasmic clock speeds, or exotic video cards that need their own power reactors but have enough FLOPs under the hood to calculate the single precision meaning of life. In fact the only time we give our trusty storage things a second thought (and exhaust our dictionaries of naughty words) is when they die and take our data along with them. Well, to help remedy this journalistic conundrum, we've developed a drinking game to aid in your consumption of this article. Every time you see a storage related suffix (MB, GB, TB, etc.) you take a shot. Ready? Good, because you’re up to three already.
DDR3 IS SLOWLY but surely starting to take over from DDR2 as the mainstream memory type and this means that the memory manufacturers are shifting more and more of their production to DDR3. Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of its new 32nm DDR3 memory in capacities of up to 2Gbit, or 256MB per chip.
ALTHOUGH IT'S ABOUT a month since we reported Intel's price drop and new processor launch, it has finally happened. We've got a few new processors in the market and Intel has dropped the price on some of its models by as much as 47.6 percent. So if you're looking for a bargain deal on a new CPU, then there might be something that'll fit your needs.
Another day, another quarterly earnings conference call. AMD came in with their latest and greatest batch of numbers, tidbits of product information, and future guidance for the company. While your man was unable to squeeze any questions in this time around, (and apparently vuvuzelas are frowned upon during these conference calls for some reason) there were still plenty of interesting nuggets of information dropped along the way, so let’s begin.
While listening in on hour-long industry financial conference calls should be the most fulfilling part of any geek's day, for some reason people expect outfits like us to break it all down into nice bite-size chunks that they can assimilate over morning coffee. Whatever, who are we to judge? Bottom line, Intel is on a tear this year and has just announced record quarterly; revenue ($10.8B), gross margin (67%), operating income ($4.0B), and earnings per share ($0.51).
Beef patties, pickles, lettuce and seasame seed buns optional
The year was 2000. Will Smith's horrid "Will 2K" jam was finally fading from the radio waves and the scarred minds of millions across the globe. In March, CPU underdog AMD dropped the gigahertz bomb on us, sending shockwaves throughout the tech community, and lighting a fire under Intel's ass so intense, the heat wasn't fully dissipated until the last Prescott chip rolled off the assembly lines. AMD had (inadvertently or not) ignited what we all came to know as the GHz war, with Intel fighting for consumer mindshare by turning the GHz dial up to 11 (well, 3.8 anyway), while AMD desperately tried to keep up by ratcheting up their own clock speeds, and slapping on performance rating numbers to show the average Joe that they could still play with the big boys.
The Taiwan Cloud Computing Consortium has its first meeting
TAIWANESE COMPANIES ARE always on the lookout for the next big thing and it seems like this time around they're taking a stab at cloud computing. The Taiwan Cloud Computing Consortium was established back in April, but only had its first meeting as of yesterday. The TCCC as it's known as is a co-operation between the government funded Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and over 60 local Taiwanese technology companies.
TIS THE WEEK for cloud products, and AMD is not one to miss the opportunity to attach lots of new Opteron 4100s to the cloud. The chip itself is half of a Magny-Cours/Opteron 6100, but the cloud is where AMD thinks they will sell the most units.
THE SD ASSOCIATION has announced new high-speed symbols for SDHC and SDXC cards which are once again meant to make our lives easier. The old Class 2, 4, 6 and 10 ratings will be kept for older memory cards that don't meet the new UHS or Ultra High Speed SD card standard. The new UHS speed classifications as plenty of room to grow, especially as we've only hit the first generation of SDXC cards.
SUPERTALENT JUST RELEASED something that the server world has been waiting for since the dawn of SSDs, a SAS SSD. The 2.5" ShuttleCraft SAS SSD is the first affordable drive that is going to change how servers use storage.
TILERA MAKES CPUS that have lots of cores and a fairly unique multi-mesh interconnect fabric that live happily in embedded devices from AV equipment to Deep Packet Inspection (boo hiss) devices. Today, the company is entering a market that I never expected to see them in, cloud compute servers.
THE HOT CHIPS 22 conference has released their lineup of talks this year, and it once again looks really good. If you haven't been to one yet, it is one of the best conferences about chip architecture out there, and well worth attending.
Unless you’ve been locked in your mother’s basement, blissfully tapping away at your Atari 2600 paddle for the past 32 years, you’ve probably heard about the upcoming OnLive game service that officially launches today. While we're reasonably sure that the majority of our readers have progressed beyond the latest game technology from the 70’s, we'll elaborate anyway.
SEAMICRO IS A STARTUP that is attacking data center power use through a novel idea, optimizing hardware for a specific workload. For web serving workloads, the idea is simple, cram 512 Atom servers into a box with a virtual 'shared nothing' configuration.
Big Blue says that the shiny new System z10 you just installed in your basement yesterday is officially obsolete and should be relegated to household media streaming/torrent duty in the wake of its replacement. Behold the zEnterprise System, and its central compute server the zEnterprise 196, capable of processing more instructions than your puny humanoid mind could ever dream of issuing. Don't look now, but your girly-man netbook just peed itself.
NOT SATISFIED WITH showing off a Llano wafer, AMD showed off the next generation part, Orochi, at the GloFo GTC summit today. While there was no silicon to pass around, pictures are much better than test.
THERE HAVE LONG been rumors of a major player moving their data centers from x86 based PCs to the ARM architecture. It looks like the first big player to jump in to the market is going to be none other than Facebook.
INTEL'S PURCHASE OF McAfee is quite synergistic and makes a lot of sense to anyone following the company. Contrary to most opinions out there however, it has nothing to do with security.
HP is an interesting company. They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it's all seems very boring to the casual observer. They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses. They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable. Well the blob has done it again. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
The Association of People who Stockpile Digital Recordings of the Tasteful Expression of the Human Form, or APSDRTEHF (they are rumored to be voting on a new name in the near future), received word of an amazing feat of storage engineering today. Toshiba is presenting a paper at the 2010 Magnetic Recording Conference in San Diego today outlining their research and successful implementation of a new technology that can cram a staggering 2.5 terabits of information into a single square inch of platter real estate. For the layman, that's about 300GB of information stored on a surface the size of a postage stamp.
INTEL AND GE have are doing something with healthcare today, and there is a webcast going on as this is written. Thoughtfully, Intel and GE have saved us from the excitement of that webcast through advanced technical features.
Recently hard drives and the storage industry in general has been a tough thing to write about, because frankly, nobody really cares! It’s much more fun and exciting to get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest multi-core CPUs running at orgasmic clock speeds, or exotic video cards that need their own power reactors but have enough FLOPs under the hood to calculate the single precision meaning of life. In fact the only time we give our trusty storage things a second thought (and exhaust our dictionaries of naughty words) is when they die and take our data along with them. Well, to help remedy this journalistic conundrum, we've developed a drinking game to aid in your consumption of this article. Every time you see a storage related suffix (MB, GB, TB, etc.) you take a shot. Ready? Good, because you’re up to three already.
DDR3 IS SLOWLY but surely starting to take over from DDR2 as the mainstream memory type and this means that the memory manufacturers are shifting more and more of their production to DDR3. Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of its new 32nm DDR3 memory in capacities of up to 2Gbit, or 256MB per chip.
The year was 2000. Will Smith's horrid "Will 2K" jam was finally fading from the radio waves and the scarred minds of millions across the globe. In March, CPU underdog AMD dropped the gigahertz bomb on us, sending shockwaves throughout the tech community, and lighting a fire under Intel's ass so intense, the heat wasn't fully dissipated until the last Prescott chip rolled off the assembly lines. AMD had (inadvertently or not) ignited what we all came to know as the GHz war, with Intel fighting for consumer mindshare by turning the GHz dial up to 11 (well, 3.8 anyway), while AMD desperately tried to keep up by ratcheting up their own clock speeds, and slapping on performance rating numbers to show the average Joe that they could still play with the big boys.
TAIWANESE COMPANIES ARE always on the lookout for the next big thing and it seems like this time around they're taking a stab at cloud computing. The Taiwan Cloud Computing Consortium was established back in April, but only had its first meeting as of yesterday. The TCCC as it's known as is a co-operation between the government funded Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and over 60 local Taiwanese technology companies.
TIS THE WEEK for cloud products, and AMD is not one to miss the opportunity to attach lots of new Opteron 4100s to the cloud. The chip itself is half of a Magny-Cours/Opteron 6100, but the cloud is where AMD thinks they will sell the most units.
THE SD ASSOCIATION has announced new high-speed symbols for SDHC and SDXC cards which are once again meant to make our lives easier. The old Class 2, 4, 6 and 10 ratings will be kept for older memory cards that don't meet the new UHS or Ultra High Speed SD card standard. The new UHS speed classifications as plenty of room to grow, especially as we've only hit the first generation of SDXC cards.
TILERA MAKES CPUS that have lots of cores and a fairly unique multi-mesh interconnect fabric that live happily in embedded devices from AV equipment to Deep Packet Inspection (boo hiss) devices. Today, the company is entering a market that I never expected to see them in, cloud compute servers.
HOW DO YOU follow an 8-core Nehalem-EX server chip? If you are Intel, you do it with more cores, and that is exactly what Westmere-EX does.
THE HOT CHIPS 22 conference has released their lineup of talks this year, and it once again looks really good. If you haven't been to one yet, it is one of the best conferences about chip architecture out there, and well worth attending.
Unless you’ve been locked in your mother’s basement, blissfully tapping away at your Atari 2600 paddle for the past 32 years, you’ve probably heard about the upcoming OnLive game service that officially launches today. While we're reasonably sure that the majority of our readers have progressed beyond the latest game technology from the 70’s, we'll elaborate anyway.
SEAMICRO IS A STARTUP that is attacking data center power use through a novel idea, optimizing hardware for a specific workload. For web serving workloads, the idea is simple, cram 512 Atom servers into a box with a virtual 'shared nothing' configuration.