ARM processor becomes more and more popular during year 2012. Power and Integration—ARM Making More Inroads into More Designs. It’s about power—low power; almost no power. A huge and burgeoning market is opening for devices that are handheld and mobile, have rich graphics, deliver 32-bit multicore compute power, include Wi-Fi, web and often 4G connectivity, and that can last up to ten hours on a battery charge.The most obvious among these are smartphones and tablets, but there is also an increasing number of industrial and military devices that fall into this category.
The rivalry between ARM and Intel in this arena is predictably intense because try as it will, Intel has not been able to bring the power consumption of its Atom CPUs down to the level of ARM-based designs (Atom typically in 1-4 watt range and a single ARM Cortex-A9 core in the 250 mW range). ARM’s East unimpressed with Medfield, design wins article tells that Warren East, CEO of processor technology licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England), is unimpressed by the announcements made by chip giant Intel about the low-power Medfield system-chip and its design wins. On the other hand Android will run better on our chips, says Intel. Look out what happens in this competition.
Windows-on-ARM Spells End of Wintel article tells that Brokerage house Nomura Equity Research forecasts that the emerging partnership between Microsoft and ARM will likely end the Windows-Intel duopoly. The long-term consequences for the world’s largest chip maker will likely be an exit from the tablet market as ARM makes inroads in notebook computers. As ARM is surely going to keep pointing out to everyone, they don’t have to beat Intel’s raw performance to make a big splash in this market, because for these kinds of devices, speed isn’t everything, and their promised power consumption advantage will surely be a major selling point.
Windows 8 Release Expected in 2012 article says that Windows 8 will be with us in 2012, according to Microsoft roadmaps. Microsoft still hinting at October Windows 8 release date. It will be seen what are the ramifications of Windows 8, which is supposed to run on either the x86 or ARM architectures. Windows on ARM will not be terribly successful says analyst but it is left to be seen is he right. ARM-based chip vendors that Microsoft is working with (TI, Nvidia, Qualcomm) are now focused on mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) because this is where the biggest perceived advantages of ARM-based chips lie, and do not seem to be actively working on PC designs.
Engineering Windows 8 for mobile networks is going on. Windows 8 Mobile Broadband Enhancements Detailed article tells that using mobile broadband in Windows 8 will no longer require specific drivers and third-party software. This is thanks to the new Mobile Broadband Interface Model (MBIM) standard, which hardware makers are reportedly already beginning to adopt, and a generic driver in Windows 8 that can interface with any chip supporting that standard. Windows will automatically detect which carrier it’s associated with and download any available mobile broadband app from the Windows store. MBIM 1.0 is a USB-based protocol for host and device connectivity for desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. The specification supports multiple generations of GSM and CDMA-based 3G and 4G packet data services including the recent LTE technology.
Consumerization of IT is a hot trend that continues at year 2012. Uh-oh, PC: Half of computing device sales are mobile. Mobile App Usage Further Dominates Web, Spurred by Facebook article tells that the era of mobile computing, catalyzed by Apple and Google, is driving among the largest shifts in consumer behavior over the last forty years. Impressively, its rate of adoption is outpacing both the PC revolution of the 1980s and the Internet Boom of the 1990s. By the end of 2012, Flurry estimates that the cumulative number of iOS and Android devices activated will surge past 1 billion, making the rate of iOS and Android smart device adoption more than four times faster than that of personal computers (over 800 million PCs were sold between 1981 and 2000). Smartphones and tablets come with broadband connectivity out-of-the-box. Bring-your-own-device becoming accepted business practice.
Mobile UIs: It’s developers vs. users article tells that increased emphasis on distinctive smartphone UIs means even more headaches for cross-platform mobile developers. Whose UI will be a winner? Native apps trump the mobile Web.The increased emphasis on specialized mobile user interface guidelines casts new light on the debate over Web apps versus native development, too.
The Cloud is Not Just for Techies Anymore tells that cloud computing achieves mainstream status. So we demand more from it. That’s because our needs and expectations for a mainstream technology and an experimental technology differ. Once we depend on a technology to run our businesses, we demand minute-by-minute reliability and performance.
Cloud security is no oxymoron article is estimated that in 2013 over $148 billion will be spent on cloud computing. Companies large and small are using the cloud to conduct business and store critical information. The cloud is now mainstream. The paradigm of cloud computing requires cloud consumers to extend their trust boundaries outside their current network and infrastructure to encompass a cloud provider. There are three primary areas of cloud security that relate to almost any cloud implementation: authentication, encryption, and network access control. If you are dealing with those issues and software design, read Rugged Software Manifesto and Rugged Software Development presentation.
Enterprise IT’s power shift threatens server-huggers article tells that as more developers take on the task of building, deploying, and running applications on infrastructure outsourced to Amazon and others, traditional roles of system administration and IT operations will morph considerably or evaporate.
Explosion in “Big Data” Causing Data Center Crunch article tells that global business has been caught off-guard by the recent explosion in data volumes and is trying to cope with short-term fixes such as buying in data centre capacity. Oracle also found that the number of businesses looking to build new data centres within the next two years has risen. Data centre capacity and data volumes should be expected to go up – this drives data centre capacity building. Data centre capacity and data volumes should be expected to go up – this drives data centre capacity building. Most players active on “Big Data” field seems to plan to use Apache Hadoop framework for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. At least EMC, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Informatica, HP, Dell and Cloudera are using Hadoop.
Cloud storage has been very popular topic lately to handle large amount of data storage. The benefits have been told very much, but now we can also see risks of that to realize. Did the Feds Just Kill the Cloud Storage Model? article claims that Megaupload Type Shutdowns and Patriot Act are killing interest to Cloud Storage. Many innocent Megaupload users have had their data taken away from them. The MegaUpload seizure shows how personal files hosted on remote servers operated by a third party can easily be caught up in a government raid targeted at digital pirates. In the wake of Megaupload crackdown, fear forces similar sites to shutter sharing services?. If you use any of these cloud storage sites to store or distribute your own non-infringing files, you are wise to have backups elsewhere, because they may be next on the DOJ’s copyright hit list.
Did the Feds Just Kill the Cloud Storage Model? article tells that worries have been steadily growing among European IT leaders that the USA Patriot Act would give the U.S. government unfettered access to their data if stored on the cloud servers of American providers. Escaping the grasp of the Patriot Act may be more difficult than the marketing suggests. “You have to fence yourself off and make sure that neither you or your cloud service provider has any operations in the United States”, “otherwise you’re vulnerable to U.S. jurisdiction.” And the cloud computing model is built on the argument data can and should reside anywhere around the world, freely passing between borders.
Data centers to cut LAN cord? article mentions that 60GHz wireless links are tested in data centers to ease east-west traffic jams. According to a recent article in The New York Times, data center and networking techies are playing around with 60GHz wireless networking for short-haul links to give rack-to-rack communications some extra bandwidth for when the east-west traffic goes a bit wild. The University of Washington and Microsoft Research published a paper at the Association of Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM 2011 conference late last year about their tests of 60GHz wireless links in the data center. Their research used prototype links that bear some resemblance to the point-to-point, high bandwidth technology known as WiGig (Wireless Gigabit), which among other things is being proposed as a means to support wireless links between Blu-ray DVD players and TVs, replacing HDMI cables (Wilocity Demonstrates 60 GHz WiGig (Draft 802.11ad) Chipset at CES). 60 GHz band is suitable for indoor, high-bandwidth use in information technology.. There are still many places for physical wires. The wired connections used in a data center are highly reliable, so “why introduce variability in a mission-critical situation?”
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Goodbye Windows era – it’s over now, believes Salesforce.com ‘s CEO
Microsoft’s Windows 8′s appearance means that a market dominant operating system has run out of time, to predict the cloud giant Salesforce.com ‘s CEO Marc Benioff.
“Years ago, a common topic of discussion was the Windows 7 upgrade cycle,” Benioff says.
“You will not hear the Windows 8 update cycle.”
One reason the Windows era is the end of high-speed 4G networks becoming more common. They make the WAN and LAN networks obsolete, while at the same time allow the use of cloud services more effectively.
One globally operating company’s CIO’s goal is to get completely rid of PC hardware.
“Instead of CIO hopes byod approach (bring-your-own-device),” Benioff says.
Sure Benioff viewpoint supports his company’s activities.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/hyvasti+windowsaikakausi++se+loppuu+nyt+uskoo+itjatin+toimitusjohtaja/a849140?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-22102012&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel’s Next-Gen Atom “Avoton” Chip for Micro-Servers to Feature Eight-Cores, New Memory Controller – Media.
Intel to Seriously Boost Performance of Atom “Avoton” for Micro-Servers
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20121016235425_Intel_s_Next_Gen_Atom_Avoton_Chip_for_Micro_Servers_to_Feature_Eight_Cores_New_Memory_Controller_Media.html
It is expected that thermal design power of Avoton will range from 5W to 20W, whereas clock-speeds will range from 1.20GHz to 2.40GHz.
based on 64-bit out-of-order code-named Silvermont micro-architecture
Intel Avoton and Valleyview chips are projected to emerge in late 2013.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Even as it launches Windows 8, a key priority for Microsoft is to get customers off the decade-old Windows XP — which still runs on 41 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion PCs. For the last three years, it has urged enterprise customers to move to Windows 7, and it has said it does not expect organizations to drop those plans because of Windows 8.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/22/us-microsoft-windows8-business-idUSBRE89L03N20121022
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8: Microsoft will declare victory, but will anyone believe it?
Channel feeling ‘impotent’ as major launch nears
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/10/22/larry_walsh_on_windows8/
If you’re having a hard time getting excited about Windows 8, you’re not alone.
There’s much to be excited about. Yet, not many in the channel are excited. In fact, the Microsoft ecosystem – component makers, PC manufacturers, distributors and resellers – is bracing for a lull rather than a surge in Windows-related sales.
Consider this: Intel, ARM, Seagate and Western Digital have all revised their fourth quarter sales forecast downwards as they continue to see PC sales slip.
Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Dell and the rest of the PC market saw sales slip nearly 9 per cent in the third quarter as demand shifted from notebooks and desktop computers to tablets and smartphones. And AMD is reportedly preparing to lay off between 10 and 30 percent of its workforce as it sees demand slide.
Windows 8 is actually having a dampening effect. Yes, a large part of the market is shifting toward mobile devices, and this accounts for some of the slacking sales in the Microsoft ecosystem. However, a large number of users – particularly businesses – are taking a wait-and-see approach.
The typical business adoption curve for a new Windows version is 18 months after release. Analyst firm Gartner historically recommends against businesses adopting a new version until after Service Pack 1 is released.
Will Windows 8 be a smashing success? It depends on your perspective. Solution providers are on board for the long haul. Microsoft, of course, will claim victory regardless of what happens.
After all, this is the same company that insisted Windows Vista was a great operating system to the bitter end.
Tomi Engdahl says:
WD blames hard drive woes on dominant mobile gear, feeble PCs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/23/wd_q1_fy2013/
Western Digital’s disk sales slumped in its last quarter, leading to lower revenue and profit than in the previous three months. Its next quarter is going to be even worse.
The reason for the sequential fall in revenue and profit was that 62.5 million disk drives were sold in the quarter, 12 per cent less than the previous quarter – disk drive demand went down. Why was that? CEO John Coyne said: “The macroeconomic environment is dampening near term demand.” The company says it’s confident that long-term demand is growing.
President Steve Milligan went into this in more detail in the earnings call: “There are several dynamics currently limiting market demand: first, global macroeconomic weakness, which is impacting overall IT spending; second, product transitions in the PC industry; and third, the continued adoption of tablets and smartphones, which is muting PC sales growth.”
Disk sales should grow about three per cent in the long-term, WD reckons, because customers have to “store, manage and connect the massive and growing amounts of digital data in their personal and professional lives. This opportunity extends well into the future”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big data to be normal by 2020
If we can convince our kids to be data scientists
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/22/gartner_it_spending_big_data_projections/
Big data is big business right now, and it will not only be embiggening as this decade rolls on, but it will become normal, like enterprise resource planning, supply chain and customer management, and other perfectly normal parts of the corporate computing landscape. But that will only happen, it seems, if we get people involved in becoming data scientists and experts in related fields.
“Despite the hype, big data is not a distinct, stand-alone market, it but represents an industry-wide market force which must be addressed in products, practices and solution delivery,” explained Mark Beyer, a research vice president at Gartner who dices and slices the big data market. (Ah, but does it dice and slice him back? Only seems fair.)
“In 2011, big data formed a new driver in almost every category of IT spending. However, through 2018, big data requirements will gradually evolve from differentiation to ‘table stakes’ in information management practices and technology. By 2020, big data features and functionality will be non-differentiating and routinely expected from traditional enterprise vendors and part of their product offerings.”
The big data market is expected to grow considerably faster than the IT market overall, with sales rising 21.4 per cent to $34bn in 2012. Gartner said in a statement that this year only $4.3bnm, or about 12.6 per cent, of total spending on big data will be for new software licenses and that most of the dough will be blown on adapting “traditional solutions” to the velocity, variety, and voluminous data needs that make big data different from data warehousing and online transaction processing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The good news is that Gartner is projecting that global IT spending is going to rise by 3.8 per cent to $3.7 trillion. In its latest projection, from back in July, Gartner had cut its spending projections for this year to only 3 per cent for spending across hardware, software, and services (including telecom equipment and services) to $3.63 trillion.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/22/gartner_it_spending_big_data_projections/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why admins should know how to code
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/why-admins-should-know-how-code-205301
You don’t need to be a programmer, but you’ll solve harder problems faster if you can write your own code
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM posts healthy Q3 profits: up 22 percent thanks to smart TVs and other growing markets
http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/23/arm-q3-2012-financials/
According to Reuters, the company is attributing its latest bout of success to making “further inroads” into growing markets like smart TVs and microcontrollers. Of course, all of this is stands in stark contrast to the traditional x86 PC world, where giants like Intel and AMD have been struggling with weak demand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data center census: Investment growing 22 percent this year
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2012/10/data-center-growth-22-percent.html
A global data center census conducted by DCD Intelligence (DatacenterDynamics Intelligence) found that worldwide investment in data centers is growing from approximately US$86 billion in 2011 to $105 billion this year.
“Our forecast for 2013 shows a slower rate of growth but still a very healthy 14.5 percent over 2012 levels, with a further $15 billion of additional investment.”
Of data centers overall, Hayes said, “Much of the increase in investment in this sector is being driven by growth in less-developed markets, although we continue to see some growth in the mature data center markets of North America and Western Europe. Regions such as Asia Pacific and Latin America are the ones really fueling global data center investment levels.”
Perhaps the most eye-popping figure coming from the census is a 63.3-percent increase in power requirements over the past 12 months, to a worldwide total of 38 gigawatts. By comparison, the anticipated 17-percent demand increase for the coming year looks modest. Looking a little more closely at power-consumption numbers, DCD Intelligence found that the percentage of racks housing more than 10kW of power rose from 15 percent last year to 18 percent this year.
To reiterate: while white space increased 8.3 percent over a year, the requirement for power increased 63.3 percent over the same period.
The census also found that outsourcing, and particularly colocation, increased significantly from $16 billion to $21 billion – a 31.3-percent jump – over the past year “and is projected to continue with a further $5-billion increase into 2013,” DCD Intelligence said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco: Cloud Services network traffic increases six-fold by 2016
According to Cisco,year 2014 is a turning point for cloud services: more than 50 percent of the IT work load is in cloud.
Global Cloud Index (2011-2016):
Traditional network traffic produced by data centers and cloud will quadruple by 2016, and is then equal to 6.6 zettabytes per year.
This corresponds to the fact that every human being in the world were watching 2.5 hours of HD video on the internet every day.
The growth of cloud services will have sixfold increase in traffic to 4.3 zettabytes.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/cisco+pilvipalveluiden+verkkoliikenne+kuusinkertaistuu+vuoteen+2016+mennessa/a850541?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-25102012&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Public information system projects are generally on track to fail. The effect is partly an illusion, because of successful projects do not make the news.
Even when a project will not fail, one of the government IT projects,’s wrong. All too often, we read about the projects, whose schedule has been torn for years, and the bloated budget of millions.
Problems often accused of being outdated procurement practices.In Finland to save money and prevent corruption in the municipalities and the state has put out to tender all the major purchases. Copier Paper and asphalt paving suitable for competitive bidding practices agree, however, poorly developing information systems.
Competitive bidding requires that you know in advance what you are ordering. In a rapidly changing operating environment information accurate preliminary determination is impossible. The client’s needs have time to change many times before using the system.
The traditional competitive bidding in practice leads to the waterfall model, which has long been known ill-suited to the development of complex information systems.
Ofter appeal to the Market Court may delay the purchase of more than one year. At the same time all of the new information system-dependent development stops and waits for the decision of the Market Court.
Usually there is a wide client and the supplier’s knowledge gap.
In fact, the information systems should not be ordered at all, but of the development, which may require the information system.
Source: http://www.kasvi.org/index.php?11731
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 8 is a revolutionary operating system. But it is a different matter whether the upheaval worthwhile. The transparency of the orientation is low.
In recent years, computer usage has shifted to the browser. It has been a natural evolution, and guaranteed services function in virtually all computer users. Well-designed websites have opened for almost every device, which can be found only a web browser.
Now, Microsoft is pushing development in the other direction. Windows 8 transfer services from the network available to their own applications.
Saddest thing is Windows 8 applications is the fact that some of them have been built html5-description language. In practice, the application could therefore also act as a conventional web browser. But no. I now have to the network address instead of writing navigate Windows Store and download the application.
Sure own applications also offer opportunities that are not a Web browser can be implemented.
But for small applications are a step away, open to all services. In particular, they can be irritating who want to abstain from some other operating systems than fresh Windows 8.
Microsoft’s approach is understandable. Personal computer sales have lagged in recent years, while the tablet computers have been sold.
Source: http://m.tietoviikko.fi/Uutiset/Kaikille+avointa+interneti%C3%A4+suljetaan
Tomi Engdahl says:
Global IT Outsourcing and insourcing runs hot. Now the Indian outsourcing service providers, Infosys leading the way, are beginning to open up data centers in the United States.
Headquartered in Bangalore, Infosys opened its first U.S. data center in the outskirts of Atlanta in April.
Bloomberg reports that Asian American continent reflects the input of IT services, the changes taking place.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/itulkoistusten+suunta+kaantyi+intialaiset+perustavat+konesaleja+usahan/a851355
Tomi Engdahl says:
Outsourcing Turns Inside-Out as Indians Open U.S. Centers
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/outsourcing-turns-inside-out-as-indians-open-u-s-centers.html
Janie James says she was cool at first when Indian outsourcing giant Infosys Ltd. (INFO) approached her about a job near Atlanta, even though she was unemployed.
James is one of thousands of workers filling outsourced jobs that are coming back to the U.S., or at least not going offshore. Indian and U.S. outsourcing companies, along with corporate icons like General Motors Co. (GM) and General Electric Co. (GE), are reversing a 20-year outgoing tide.
These companies and others, including software developer GalaxE.Solutions Inc., say some complex functions, such as human-resources and software development, are better to have closer to their own operations and to respond to customers. Indian outsourcing companies are finding it tougher to get visas for workers brought from India, and some U.S. businesses want to outsource — yet keep jobs in the country.
“It used to be just about getting the job done at the lowest cost,” said Madhusudan Menon, who heads Infosys’s Atlanta center and delivery of U.S. business-process outsourcing. “Now companies are saying some jobs are best done closer to where they are, not cheap as possible somewhere else. They’re rebalancing their onshore and offshore outsourcing.”
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS), the biggest Indian outsourcing concern with $10 billion in revenue, also is growing its U.S. presence, opening an outsourcing center outside Minneapolis in September to employ about 300 IT workers.
‘Even with the 2,000 U.S. workers Tata Consultancy plans to hire this year, which is a 25 percent increase from 2011, Americans remain a minority of its approximately 20,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada, McCabe said. About 92 percent of Tata Consultancy’s 250,000 workers worldwide are Indians, according to the company.
U.S. software engineers who have lost jobs, such as Michael Zureich, say they are heartened to see opportunities reappear in their field.
“The complexity of the business and the agility required was increasing, and I didn’t feel we were achieving the collaboration and innovation our customers required,” Tim Bryan, chief executive officer of GalaxE.Solutions, said in an interview.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Android Captures Record 41 Percent Share of Global Tablet Shipments in Q3 2012
http://blogs.strategyanalytics.com/TTS/post/2012/10/25/Android-Captures-Record-41-Percent-Share-of-Global-Tablet-Shipments-in-Q3-2012.aspx
According to the latest research from our Tablet & Touchscreen Strategies (TTS) service, global tablet shipments reached 25 million units in the third quarter of 2012. Apple iOS slipped to 57 percent global market share, allowing Android to capture a record 41 percent share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Analysis: E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/28/us-ereaders-future-idUSBRE89R0JQ20121028
Amidst our growing love affair with the tablet, spare a thought for its increasingly shelfbound sibling: the e-reader.
Take Taiwan’s E Ink Holdings Inc, which makes most of the monochrome displays for devices such as Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble Inc’s Nook. After five years of heady growth during which shipments rose 100-fold, it got a jolt at the end of 2011 when monthly revenues dropped 91 percent in two months.
“The bottom fell out of the market,” says E Ink Chief Marketing Officer Sriram Peruvemba.
Now electronic paper companies like E Ink are scrabbling for new ways to sell the technology or in some cases, are pulling the plug entirely.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that of those Americans over 30 who read e-books, less than half do so on an e-reader. For those under 30, the number falls to less than a quarter.
Not all the news is bad. A new generation of e-readers with front lighting, which allows reading in the dark, is hitting the market. The Kindle Paperwhite sold out quickly and that device and the basic $69 Kindle e-reader are the No. 2 and No. 3 top selling products on Amazon, based on unit sales. Amazon also recently launched Kindles in two big new markets – India and Japan.
But not all are so optimistic. Not only has E Ink been outflanked by the emergence of the tablet, it’s also been slow to innovate.
Although the screens of the latest Kindles refresh faster than earlier models, critics say they still look a little old-fashioned alongside displays from Apple or Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
“I don’t see any significant improvements in the technology in the past few years,” says Calvin Shao of Fubon Securities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Licenses 64-bit Processor Design From ARM
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/10/30/0413251/amd-licenses-64-bit-processor-design-from-arm
“AMD has announced it will sell ARM-based server processors in 2014, ending its exclusive commitment to the x86 architecture and adding a new dimension to its decades-old battle with Intel. AMD will license a 64-bit processor design from ARM and combine it with the Freedom Fabric interconnect technology it acquired when it bought SeaMicro earlier this year.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Announces 64-bit ARM Server Partnership; Proclaims “Seminal Moment” in Computing
http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Announces-64bit-ARM-Server-Partnership-Proclaims-Seminal-Moment-in-Computing/
AMD CEO Rory Read has announced that the company intends to develop dense computing platforms based on the 64-bit ARM architecture today.
It’s an announcement that raises as many questions as it answers. The good news is that AMD is scarcely alone in eyeing the ARM server market; there are a number of companies considering whether such a move makes good sense for them, as well. The 64-bit ARMv8 architecture looks solid, and low power is a hot market in every segment.
AMD’s presentation claims that the secret to the company’s resurgence into servers is going to be driven by SeaMicro’s fabric, but if that’s the case, it doesn’t answer why ARM is a better option than AMD’s own in-house technology. It also doesn’t explain why AMD maintains that it’ll be the only company shipping ARM and x86 servers
he company waxes rhapsodic on the importance of data center power consumption, optimized CPU interconnects, multi-core data sharing, and the ability to scale current technology to meet the demands of future supercomputers — and it’s all true.
ARM in the data center? That’s interesting — but with AMD’s stock currently priced at $2.07, investors are a lot more concerned with whether or not the company can make it to launch day as a going concern.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD to sell ARM-based server chips in 2014
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/440450/amd_sell_arm-based_server_chips_2014/
AMD has signed a license for a 64-bit processor design from ARM, ending its exclusive commitment to x86
AMD will license a 64-bit processor design from ARM and combine it with the Freedom Fabric interconnect technology it acquired when it bought SeaMicro earlier this year, AMD said Monday.
Server chips based on the x86 architecture will continue to be the mainstay of AMD’s server business, Read said, but he thinks the ARM-based chips will open up new markets for the company. And while AMD is focused initially on servers, he didn’t rule out the possibility that it will eventually make ARM processors for client devices such as tablets as well.
AMD hopes to sell the new server chips to vendors such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, and will also sell them in its own servers under the SeaMicro brand. Today those systems are based on x86 processors.
“The data center is being inundated with massive amounts of data and there has to be a way to do it more efficiently in a smaller space with a lower cost point,” she said.
ARM architectures are considered more energy-efficient for some workloads because they were originally designed for mobile phones and consume less power. That has attracted several vendors to the space, including Calxeda, Applied Micro and Marvell, all of whom are developing ARM-based chips for servers.
AMD hopes to distinguish itself with two SeaMicro technologies — a custom chip that integrates many components from a traditional server board onto one chip, allowing for dense server designs; and its Freedom Fabric, which can connect thousands of servers in a cluster with low latency and at relatively low cost.
“The fabric technology is the secret sauce; this is what will make AMD’s server solution different from other vendors,” Su said.
“Think of the chip as half the battle,” said Moorhead, the industry analyst. “The part of the battle [Intel] hasn’t discussed yet is the fabric that makes hundreds or thousands of these parts talk to each other. That’s the magic that guys like Calxeda and AMD are bringing to the table.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fake Cloud Services annoy IT departments
The chief information officer is often offered to traditional storage solutions under cloud services name, says a recent study. Up to 83 percent of the respondents said they encountered irritated false marketing.
Vanson Bourne survey found many “cloud washed” services on the market, which are really some else than what they claim to be.
67 per cent of the respondents had been offered a “cloud services” firm agreement. 40 per cent had been marketed services that were not flexible or scalable. 32 per cent of the respondents had encountered the services that were not in your control.
“It is sad to see the service providers, which impede the development of the market frustrated end users and by lying to customers.”
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/valepilvipalvelut+pannivat+itosastoa/a851698?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-30102012&
elektrisk says:
Useful info. Lucky me I found your website by accident, and I am surprised why this twist of fate didn’t took place in advance! I bookmarked it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC builder Lenovo to pump iron, invade hefty biz systems sector
Sure it’s the post-PC era – just not the way you think
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/10/31/lenovo_enterprise_product_group/
PC builder Lenovo is making a play for heavier duty infrastructure kit as it tries to make its presence felt beyond commoditised desktops and mobile systems.
The Enterprise Product Group (EPG) has launched stateside ahead of a Euro blitz in 2013 – it will house server, storage, networking, software and cloud services to be fired at SMEs, large corporates and system integrators.
“The new EPG will include development, operations, and marketing teams whose job is to manage and grow our portfolio of products, identify new alliances and partnerships and accelerate Lenovo’s credibility as a supplier of enterprise solutions,” he said.
Lenovo held 1 per cent server market share across Europe in Q2 equating to just a few thousand units, IDC shipments numbers reveal.
“They are not a major player in Europe so far,” said Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC research manager for servers, noting: “It only sells only Rack and Tower x86 machines, not blades”.
He said Lenovo needed to “beef up” the portfolio,
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARMed warfare on the server: Intel versus AMD plus world?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/31/live_chat_amd_servers/
AMD rose on the strength of its 64-bit, x86-compatible server processors as Intel was penalised on Itanium; Intel re-bounded with the Xeon E5 as AMD got dragged down by IT spending cuts and problems with its Barcelona Opterons.
Intel up, AMD down; order has been restored to The Force.
Or has it? AMD this week opened a new front by jumping on the freshest, most fashionable idea to hit servers since SSD: ARM. It became an ARM licensee.
AMD is the latest to go ARM: Hewlett-Packard and Samsung are in the ARMs race, too, while Ubuntu-shop Canonical’s tuned its Linux to run on ARM servers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace offering lets users build customized virtual networks
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/103012-rackspace-cloud-networks-263797.html
Rackspace leverages OpenStack’s Quantum project to offer virtual networking capabilities to its cloud; partners with Hortonworks on Hadoop
Rackspace says it is now offering customers the ability to create customized virtual networks in a public cloud, using software defined networking-like capabilities.
Rackspace today announced Cloud Networks, which will let customers create multiple networks, or tiers of networks when spinning up cloud-based virtual machines. CTO John Engates says customers can now set up individual networks to support Web servers, application servers and databases through a virtualized layer 2 network, for example.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data center containers are old trick, how about computerized Internet connected school in a container?
Samsung solar-powered school shines in rural South Africa
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57542623-1/samsung-solar-powered-school-shines-in-rural-south-africa/
Samsung turns a shipping container into a portable wired classroom to bridge the divide between rural and urban South African schools.
The Solar Powered Internet School — a product of Samsung’s corporate-social responsibility initiative — has solar panels on the roof that can generate nine hours of electricity a day. That power’s needed to juice the electronics inside — a 50-inch electronic board, Samsung Internet-enabled solar-powered notebooks, Samsung Galaxy tablets, and Wi-Fi cameras.
Though Samsung installed the school last year, the company only recently shared extensive details of it on its official global blog. Earlier this year, the school was named African Solar Project of the Year by the Africa Energy Awards, which celebrate the growth and success of energy projects in Africa.
Solar Powered Internet School Brightens South Africa
http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/?p=19812
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner Symposium: 10 technology trends to watch
http://www.rcrwireless.com/article/20121031/enterprise/gartner-symposium-10-technologies-trends-watch/
In the U.S., Gartner analysts presented the following list:
Mobile device battles
Mobile applications and HTML5
Personal cloud
Enterprise app stores
The Internet of things
Hybrid IT and cloud computing
Strategic big data
Actionable analytics
In memory computing
Integrated ecosystems
Tomi Engdahl says:
The chip manufacturer ARM has revealed to work with Microsoft Windows stimulate RT operating system to suit later disclosed to the public 64-bit architecture-based arm processors.
ARM is preliminarily estimated to have 64-bit processor on market in 2014.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/microsoft+ja+arm+tyostavat+yhdessa+64bittista+windows+rtta/a853032?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-02112012&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook joins Linaro Linux-on-ARM effort
More ARM chippies, plus Red Hat and Canonical
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/02/facebook_joins_linaro_linux_arm_server/
It has been more than two years since Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments formed a non-profit software company called Linaro to help focus the disparate efforts to get Linux running well on ARM processors and system-on-chip designs. A slew of companies, some new to the ARM racket, have joined the Linaro effort – and as of Thursday afternoon, so has social media juggernaut Facebook.
Facebook has been non-committal about its intention to use ARM-based servers in its data centers, but the Open Compute Project open source hardware engineering effort would probably accept ARM-based machines if the chips from Marvell, Calxeda, and others that have been tuned up for servers were more widely available.
Facebook and AMD are joining the Linaro Enterprise Group, which was formed to focus on “the development of foundational software for ARM server Linux,” as the announcement put it.
Commercial Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical, which are supporting ARM server processors from Calxeda and Marvell with their respective Fedora and Ubuntu Server wares, have also joined the enterprise group. Calxeda and Applied Micro, which are on the front wave of ARM server chip and related fabric interconnect development, have joined up, too, and new ARM server chip enthusiast Cavium
ARM designs are licensable and mutable, and that has inspired a kind of hippie culture of sharing and modification on the hardware front that is akin to open source software
The plethora of ARM hardware is a challenge for any operating system maker, and no lesser light than Linux creator Linus Torvalds has chewed out the chippies for making this harder than it needs to be, and to vent that “[s]omebody in the ARM community really needs to step up and tell people to stop dicking around.”
The Linaro Enterprise Group is working on low-level booting and kernel software for ARM-based servers initially, with both 32-bit and 64-bit variants. Linaro is not creating an ARM Linux distribution, but funding the foundational work that can lead to an ARM distribution.
There’s lots of talk of ARM-based servers
Tomi Engdahl says:
Olympics is over, prepare for a COMPUTER SPORTS SMACKDOWN
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/05/sc12_cluster_competition_1/
It’s November, which can mean only one thing for computer sports enthusiasts: it’s time for another Student Cluster Competition. The seventh edition of this annual event begins in about two weeks at the SC12 conference in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah. The competition pits teams of university undergrads against each other in a marathon battle to prove that they can design, build, and run the fastest (and most efficient) cluster.
For the big iron competition, the rules are pretty simple. Each team is composed of six undergraduate students, typically from a single university. The teams design and build their own clusters, getting equipment from one or more sponsors. They can use any hardware or software that’s available on the market and that they can wheedle out of their sponsors. The only limit on their systems is that they can’t draw more than a total of 26 amps of juice.
The second track is a new pilot competition: teams are issued the same hardware (a six-node, Atom-based LittleFE cluster in a box) and challenged to wring the most performance out of it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD unveils Opteron 6300, hopes to put servers in a Piledriver
http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/05/amd-unveils-opteron-6300-hopes-to-put-servers-in-a-piledriver/
AMD’s advantage these days most often rests in datacenters that thrive on the chip designer’s love of many-core processors
The sequel to the 6200 fits into the same sockets and consumes the same energy as its ancestor, but speeds ahead through Piledriver’s newer layout and instructions
there’s a wide spread of chips that range from a quad-core, 3.5GHz example to a 16-core, 2.8GHz beast for massively parallel tasks.
Cray, Dell, HP and others plan to boost their servers
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco CEO: ‘Government regulation of IT will not achieve intended objectives’
http://www.cablinginstall.com/blogs/2012/10/cisco-ceo-government-regulation-of-it-will-not-achieve-intended-objectives.html?cmpid=EnlCIMNovember52012
Mincing no words, Chambers said that “over the next 5 years the fabric of IT will be deeply embedded with every business process (3).”
“Of the top 6 IT vendors, only three or four will be in top six 5 years from now,” he added (4). “Any of the top 6 vendors who think they will be in top 6 in next 5 years are probably wrong,” the Cisco CEO reportedly said (5) — owing to the “magnitude of the changes” that stand before the telecom and datacom industries in the coming years.
To that end, at the talk, Chambers’ main contention (6) was that “the Internet of Everything will be the platform of the future” — to which he added provocatively (7) that “government regulation of IT will not achieve [its] intended objectives.”
Edwin Grimmius says:
You just need access to the printers’ web page which if left open to the internet doesnt require network level authentication.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner: IT consumption growth from next year
Research firm Gartner, IT spending will increase next year. Manufacturers’ point of view, a bleak post-2012 growth is expected to moderate 1.4 per cent.
Growth comes mainly from mobile devices.
This year, the IT expenditure will decrease by a total of about 3.6 per cent in Europe, Middle East and Africa in the EMEA region. Western Europe has dropped a total of up to 5.9 per cent.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/gartner+itkulutus+lahtee+ensi+vuonna+kasvuun/a853738?s=u&wtm=tivi-06112012
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple Said to Be Exploring Switch From Intel for Mac
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-05/apple-said-to-be-exploring-switch-from-intel-chips-for-the-mac.html
Apple Inc. (AAPL) is exploring ways to replace Intel Corp. (INTC) processors in its Mac personal computers with a version of the chip technology it uses in the iPhone and iPad, according to people familiar with the company’s research.
Apple engineers have grown confident that the chip designs used for its mobile devices will one day be powerful enough to run its desktops and laptops, said three people with knowledge of the work, who asked to remain anonymous because the plans are confidential. Apple began using Intel chips for Macs in 2005.
Bill Evans, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, declined to comment. Intel referred questions on Apple’s plans to Apple.
The shift is part of Apple’s push to make products thinner and smaller without sacrificing performance. It is aiming to move computing tasks that now require separate parts into the central chip, said one person, who said this has long been an interest of Mansfield’s.
Meantime, Apple’s success in mobile computing has been central to the rise of ARM technology and its expansion into larger devices, such as tablets, that have challenged the role of larger computers running Intel chips. Apple engineers won a fight with Jobs to have the iPad built on phone chips –which use ARM technology — rather than Intel’s PC processors, according to Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson.
Intel helped allay some of Apple’s most pressing concerns when it announced that it would develop chips that don’t require as much power as existing chips, this person said.
Amada Hank says:
When it comes to notebook computers, i always buy the lightest and smallest ones. ..
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Meeker Gives Mid-Year Internet Trends Report: Android Adoption Ramping Up 6X Faster Than iPhone
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/05/mary-meeker-internet-trends/
KPCB partner Mary Meeker usually publishes her famed Internet Trends report once a year, but gave a small San Francisco crowd a mid-year update tonight. The biggest new facts? Android phone adoption is ramping up six times faster than iPhone, and Android surpassed Windows as the #1 OS for Internet-enabled devices in Q1 2012.
Meeker noted that iPad adoption is now ramping up five times faster than iPhone adoption, up from 3X in her May report. Meanwhile Android adoption is increasing six times faster than iPhone adoption, up from 4X.
According to her research, there will be 1 billion smartphone users but 5 billion mobile phone users by the end of 2012, showing the massive popularity of the cheap feature phone. In May, Meeker reported that there were 953 million smartphone subscriptions and 6.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions, though those count multiple subscriptions by the same person.
Meeker says that in Q1 2012 the amount of Internet-enabled Android devices shipped surpassed the number of Windows Internet-enabled devices shipped. That was when Android was at around 90 million units shipped per quarter. By the end of 2013, Meeker expects there to be 160 million Android devices, 100 million Windows devices, and 80 million iOS devices shipped per quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace sales and revenues pop 27 percent in Q3
‘We are the birth mother of OpenStack’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/rackspace_q3_2012_numbers/
The cloud computing wave and the goodwill and technical expertise that Rackspace Hosting has attained through its founding of the OpenStack cloud control freak, more than two years ago, are helping to puff up the company’s finances.
And perhaps, now that it has shifted its compute cloud to OpenStack and is now operating the largest public cloud based on that control freak in the world as well as helping to code it, it is also benefitting from some migrations off Amazon Web Services, which has had a number of challenges with outages this summer and fall.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung last week licensed ARM’s first 64-bit Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 processors, a sign the chip maker is preparing the groundwork to develop 64-bit chips for low-power servers
Samsung’s recent licensing of 64-bit processor designs from ARM suggests that the chip maker may expand from smartphones and tablets into the server market, analysts believe.
Source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/11/08/0444243/samsung-may-start-making-arm-server-chips
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung laying groundwork for server chips, analysts say
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/441253/samsung_laying_groundwork_server_chips_analysts_say/
Samsung could enter the low-power server market with chips based on ARM’s 64-bit processors
Samsung’s recent licensing of 64-bit processor designs from ARM suggests that the chip maker may expand from smartphones and tablets into the server market, analysts said this week.
Samsung last week licensed ARM’s first 64-bit Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 processors, a sign the chip maker is preparing the groundwork to develop 64-bit chips for low-power servers, analysts said.
Samsung currently develops chips based on ARM processors for devices like the Galaxy S III smartphone and Galaxy Note II hybrid device. Samsung’s Google Nexus 10 tablet, which will ship next week, and the latest Chromebooks are the first devices with the Exynos 5 Dual chip, which is based on ARM’s latest Cortex-A15 design. Samsung also uses chips from Intel in PCs.
A Samsung spokeswoman said the company couldn’t talk about its future chip or server plans.
“Samsung is a lead partner of ARM’s new Cortex A50 processors. However, we’re not in a position to comment on our plans for how we’ll use the Cortex A50 as part of our Exynos product family,” said Lisa Warren-Plungy, a Samsung Semiconductor spokeswoman, in an e-mail.
The rise of ARM is seen as a threat to Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, which supply the x86 chips used in most servers today. The x86 chips are power hungry but considered faster for data-intensive applications such as databases and analytics. Intel will start shipping new low-power Atom chips for servers later this year to tackle ARM’s threat. AMD has said it will offer servers that support both ARM and x86 architectures.
While the hype is heavy, the ARM server infrastructure is highly underdeveloped, analysts said. Current ARM chips with 32-bit addressing are not ready for servers, and issues relate to application compatibility and memory ceiling of 4GB. Chips with 64-bit ARM processors will bring larger memory support, virtualization and more error correction features considered important in servers.
The success of ARM in servers also lies on software support, said Mercury Research’s McCarron. Many of the popular Linux builds in the future will support the 64-bit ARM instruction set, so the software development effort is well underway, McCarron said.
At last week’s TechCon, Oracle, Cloudera and Citrix also announced plans to develop software for 64-bit ARM hardware.
Samsung’s likely competitors will include Calxeda, Nvidia and AMD, which plan to offer 64-bit processors for servers
While Calxeda and AMD plan to incorporate proprietary networking and storage fabric to provide a highly integrated server chip, Samsung’s approach will be more like Marvell, meaning it may offer a lower-cost commodity server chip by not integrating the fabric, Brookwood said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Exclusive: Microsoft Office for iPhone, iPad, and Android revealed
Office Mobile will arrive in early 2013
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3612422/microsoft-office-mobile-ipad-iphone-android-screenshots
Microsoft’s Office for iPad, iPhone, and Android is a reality. Although Office Mobile has been rumored and reportedly spotted in the wild, Microsoft has remained persistently quiet about its plans for the product. The Verge has learned through several sources close to Microsoft’s plans that the company will release Office versions for Android and iOS in early 2013.
Office Mobile will debut in the form of free apps that allow Android and iOS users to view Microsoft Office documents on the move. Like the existing SkyDrive and OneNote apps, Office Mobile will require a Microsoft account.
Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents will all be supported, and edit functionality can be enabled with an Office 365 subscription.
A recent Microsoft press release from the company’s Czech Republic subsidiary revealed that Office Mobile apps for Android and iOS would be made available from March 2013.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lenovo insists it is NOT world’s largest PC maker
‘It is totally our dream to be though,’ says CEO
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/11/08/lenovo_q2/
If Gartner is right and Lenovo has indeed become the largest PC maker on the planet, someone forgot to tell the Chinese juggernaut’s top brass.
Talking at the release of Q2 numbers that showed a double-digit spike in sales and turnover, albeit slower than recent growth rates, CEO Yang Yuanqing seemed oblivious to last month’s controversial analyst report.
“With the strong execution of our Protect and Attack strategy, Lenovo has continued its strong and balanced growth momentum. Our global PC market share reached another historic high, moving us closer to our dream of becoming the worldwide PC leader,” he said.
In EMEA, Lenovo bagged double-digit market share for the first time since taking over IBM’s PC business, up three share points to 10.8 per cent. Shipments were up 27 per cent as the regional average dropped 8 per cent.
Lenovo is still in the upper reaches of the PC space – and is certainly ahead of its own forecast to become the world’s largest producer of desktops and notebooks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Why the hell does this mouse need to connect to the Internet?”
Razer asks users to activate gaming mice online, uproar follows.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/why-the-hell-does-this-mouse-need-to-connect-to-the-internet/
In this hyper-connected, networked world, many more of our devices are getting linked to the cloud, whether we want them to or not. That’s sometimes good, and sometimes bad, so when a basic device like a mouse requires a user to go online and set up an account to activate all of its functionality, people are understandably going to ask why?
We’ve seen really bad implementations of cloud connectivity for devices that simply don’t need it. Witness Cisco’s “Connect Cloud” program that replaced the traditional management interface for wireless routers with a cloud-connected one that was less useful and contained some bizarre anti-porn and anti-piracy terms of service
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using nvSRAMs for power-fail reliability in enterprise SSDs
http://www.eetimes.com/design/communications-design/4400577/Use-nvSRAMs-for-power-fail-reliability-in-enterprise-SSDs?Ecosystem=communications-design
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are data storage devices that use a solid-state semiconductor memory, such as NAND Flash, to persistently store information, instead of a magnetic element as used in traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). This results in a faster input/output (I/O) performance for SSDs since data can be randomly accessed and does not depend on read/write head synchronizing with a rotating disk as is required with HDDs. In addition, the time required to move the head to the correct position in HDDs is in the order of several milliseconds.
The basic architecture of a SSD is composed of a SSD controller/processor, a memory controller, an interface controller, a bank of NAND flash memory devices, SDRAM cache, and an interface connector.
SSDs have no moving parts and emulate HDDs because they are manufactured in the same form factors and support standard HDD interfaces, such as serial advanced technology attachment (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fiber Channel (FC). No moving parts result in higher reliability over a longer operational life.
Another major advantage of SSDs is significantly lower power consumption compared to HDDs.
Enterprise-grade SSDs represent the highest tier of nonvolatile storage available today and a step-change improvement for storage technology in terms of read/write performance, heat dissipation and energy consumption over HDD alternatives. The enterprise applications that can derive the greatest benefits from SSDs, which act as storage network accelerators, include banking and financial applications, online transaction processing, front-end Web servers, search engines, messaging, and high performance computing.
Need for SDRAM cache
NAND flash memory is the basic storage element in an Enterprise SSD. Due to its architecture, the main limitation of NAND flash memory is that its write speed cannot match the data transfer speeds of Enterprise storage systems. Because data transfer speed exceeds NAND flash write speed, Enterprise SSD write performance can be improved by using a high-speed data cache. Enterprise SSDs typically use SDRAM as a cache to hold and work on portions of the data streams received from the storage system controller. In addition, the SDRAM holds a working copy of the Enterprise SSD metadata, a portion of which must be modified corresponding to allocation of blocks for the data being written.
Enterprise SSDs cannot lose data that they have reported as “committed to NAND flash” back to the storage system controller. The enterprise SAS/SATA market has a hot swap specification that requires no “committed” data be lost at any time, even if the power is suddenly cut. An example of this would be an operator error where the wrong drive is ejected during a hot swap servicing session.
There are two mechanisms with which Enterprise SSD controllers report the status of the data received back to the storage system controller.
To ensure proper working of “write back” implementation, Enterprise SSDs contain a power failure detection circuit that monitors the voltage supply and sends a signal to the SSD controller if the voltage drops below a predefined threshold. A secondary voltage hold-up circuit is implemented to ensure the drive has sufficient power for a sufficient duration to back-up the SDRAM cache data. When power is lost, these secondary voltage sources provide the energy needed for the required duration in order to transfer the contents from SDRAM to NAND flash.
The nonvolatile SRAM (nvSRAM) value proposition for Enterprise SDD is to eliminate or minimize the supercapacitor or bank of discrete capacitors, and reliably back-up the in-transit SDRAM cache data and metadata with a single-chip, battery-less, non-volatile RAM-based technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Midori operating-system skunkworks project soldiers on
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-midori-operating-system-skunkworks-project-soldiers-on-7000007110/
Summary: A new research paper makes a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to Microsoft’s secret project to develop a non-Windows-based operating system and programming environment.
Midori is a new operating system being developed by a team of all-star Microsoft programmers. Midori is not based on the current NT kernel; instead, its original roots can be traced back to Singularity, a Microsoft-Research-developed microkernel operating system. Headed (at least at one point) by Senior Vice President of Technical Strategy Eric Rudder, Midori is believed to be a distributed, concurrent operating system. The product and associated deliverables (a related programming language/framework, etc.) are in technical incubation.
The latest, not-so-thinly-veiled reference to Midori comes via a presentation at last month’s OOPSLA 2012 conference. At that event, several Microsoft employees presented a paper entitled “Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism.” The paper outlines a prototype extension to C# that extends C# so that it supports safe task and data parallelism.
“A source-level variant of this system, as an extension to C#, is in use by a large project at Microsoft, as their primary programming language.”
This “large project” is the Midori project.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia CEO: Consumers realize a great tablet is better than a cheap PC
http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/08/nvidia-ceo-consumers-realize-a-great-tablet-is-better-than-a-cheap-pc/
Graphics chip giant Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang said in a conference call with analysts today that consumers realize “a great tablet is better than a cheap PC.”
That’s an interesting statement coming from a PC industry leader who plays in both the PC and mobile markets. But Huang pointed out that in the most recent third fiscal quarter ended Oct. 28, 30 percent of Nvidia’s revenues now come from non-PC chips, up from just 3 percent three years ago.
Nvidia’s Tegra graphics-processor chips for mobile devices are grabbing solid market share in tablets and smartphones. Net income in the quarter was $209.1 million
Nvidia hasn’t seen much cannibalization in its markets because “we don’t really play in the cheap PC market.”
The bright spot is PC gaming, where players are buying advanced PCs with graphics that are much better than the current generation of game consoles.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia Third-Quarter Earnings Top Estimates on Tablet Orders
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-08/nvidia-s-third-quarter-earnings-top-estimates-on-tablet-orders.html
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), a maker of graphics processors, reported fiscal third-quarter earnings that topped analysts’ estimates as it grabbed market share and won orders for chips used in tablet computers.
Net income in the period that ended Oct. 28 rose to $209.1 million, or 33 cents a share, from $178.3 million, or 29 cents, a year earlier, Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia said yesterday in a statement. Revenue climbed 13 percent to $1.2 billion. Analysts on average had estimated earnings of 30 cents on sales of $1.2 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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Jason Williams says:
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Tomi says:
Qualcomm Value Surpasses Intel’s on Robust Smartphone Demand
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-07/qualcomm-forecasts-sales-profit-that-exceed-analysts-estimates.html
Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM) gained a bigger market value than Intel Corp. (INTC) for the first time after it forecast results that topped analysts’ predictions, adding to evidence that smartphones are gaining ground at the expense of computers.
Qualcomm reached the milestone after forecasting earnings and sales this quarter that showed robust demand for handheld devices.
“Qualcomm has absolutely been one of the prime beneficiaries in smartphones and tablets,” said Mike Burton, an analyst at Brean Capital LLC. “This is a very strong report.”
The majority of Qualcomm’s revenue comes from baseband chips, which connect phones to cellular networks, sold to wireless device makers such as Samsung Electronics Co., Apple Inc. and HTC Corp. (2498) The bulk of the company’s profit comes from the licensing of so-called code division multiple access technology, a radio-communications standard used in other chips, handsets and phone systems.
Qualcomm’s licensing revenue is calculated as a percentage of the average selling price of phones,
The company is also expanding into the market for application processors, the chips that run programs in phones and tablet computers, and will be supplying its Snapdragon product to computer makers using the new version of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.