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.
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IN THE LATEST chunk of the GDC chat with Tim Sweeney of Epic and Andrew Richards of Codeplay, the topics are Cell and the cost of threading. If you want to know what the coders and engine guys think of many cores, here you are.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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WITH THE INTRODUCTION of SATA 6Gbp, SSD drives got a much needed, faster interface, but it appears that we’ve hit another “wall” when it comes to performance of SSD drives, at least higher density drives. SSDs with more than 16 NAND Flash memory chips on them will have power issues in the near future which prevent them from reaching optimal write speeds. The good news is that Toshiba is already working to solve this problem with the help of a Japanese research group headed by Ken Takeuchi.
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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.
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A LOT OF people are talking about Nvidia’s new GPUs, the GF104, GF106, and GF108, but very few people understand why the parts are going to underwhelm. The reason is simple, the architecture is broken, and hasn’t been changed much.
Updated
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THE NEXT BIG thing appears to be hybrid drives, although Seagate’s new Momentus XT failed to impress most reviewers, despite offering some clear advantages over a traditional hard drive. The downside here of course is that we’re talking about a 2.5-inch notebook drive, but what if you want a hybrid drive for your desktop PC? Well, Marvell might very well have the solution to this problem with its upcoming “free” HyperHDD solution.
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MOST SMARTPHONES ARE still only shipping with a measly 512MB of storage memory at best, there are exceptions, of course like Apple’s iPhone and a couple of devices from Samsung to mention a few. However, Toshiba seems set on getting more storage memory into our mobile devices, as the company has launched 128GB e-MMC compliant NAND Flash memory chips today.
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PART THREE OF the ‘Epic’ debate follows our intrepid heroes, Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards, through the wilds of a GDC conference room, in the heart of the Moscone Center forest. The topic: Graphics hardware and it’s future, programmable or more fixed hardware?
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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.
Updated: Fixed wrong CPU speeds
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SUPERMICRO WAS SHOWING off a bunch of high end servers and boards during Computex, most based around Magny-Cours, and a few Becton machines as well. Not to be outdone, they finally revealed a new line of modular racks.
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ALTHOUGH WE EXPECTED to see a lot more SATA 6Gbps SSD drives at Computex, it seems like some manufacturers are holding off, waiting for new SSD controllers, before they launch their new products with SATA 6Gbps support. Nonetheless, AData was showing off a model based on the Marvell controller and it didn’t disappoint.
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WE MET UP with JMicron at Computex and although the company had a tiny booth at the show it was packed with people during our entire visit. JMicron is the first company to have a range of solutions for SDXC card readers, including support for USB 3.0. We ended up chatting with a very nice representative for the company who also spilled the beans on some upcoming products from JMicron.
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