I did not have time to post my computer technologies predictions t the ends of 2016. Because I missed the year end deadline, I though that there is no point on posting anything before the news from CES 2017 have been published. Here are some of myck picks on the current computer technologies trends:
CES 2017 had 3 significant technology trends: deep learning goes deep, Alexa everywhere and Wi-Fi gets meshy. The PC sector seemed to be pretty boring.
Gartner expects that IT sales will growth (2.7%) but hardware sales will not have any growth – can drop this year. TEKsystems 2017 IT forecast shows IT budgets rebounding from a slump in 2016, and IT leaders’ confidence high going into the new year. But challenges around talent acquisition and organizational alignment will persist. Programming and software development continue to be among the most crucial and hard-to-find IT skill sets.
Smart phones sales (expected to be 1.89 billion) and PC sales (expected to be 432 million) do not grow in 2017. According to IDC PC shipments declined for a fifth consecutive year in 2016 as the industry continued to suffer from stagnation and lack of compelling drivers for upgrades. Both Gartner and IDC estimated that PC shipments declined about 6% in 2016.Revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 10.8 per cent year over year in the third quarter of 2016. Only PC category that has potential for growth is ultramobile (includes Microsoft Surface ja Apple MacBook Air). Need for memory chips is increasing.
Browser suffers from JavaScript-creep disease: This causes that the browing experience seems to be become slower even though computer and broadband connections are getting faster all the time. Bloat on web pages has been going on for ages, and this trend seems to continue.
Microsoft tries all it can to make people to switch from older Windows versions to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses as malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Microsoft: Windows 7 Does Not Meet the Demands of Modern Technology; Recommends Windows 10. On February 2017 Microsoft stops the 20 year long tradition of monthly security updates. Windows 10 “Creators Update” coming early 2017 for free, featuring 3D and mixed reality, 4K gaming, more.
Microsoft plans to emulate x86 instructions on ARM chips, throwing a compatibility lifeline to future Windows tablets and phones. Microsoft’s x86 on ARM64 Emulation is coming in 2017. This capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until “Redstone 3″ in the Fall of 2017.
Parents should worry less about the amount of time their children spend using smartphones, computers and playing video games because screen time is actually beneficial, the University of Oxford has concluded. 257 minutes is the time teens can spend on computers each day before harming wellbeing.
Outsourcing IT operations to foreign countries is not trendy anymore and companied live at uncertain times. India’s $150 billion outsourcing industry stares at an uncertain future. In the past five years, revenue and profit growth for the top five companies listed on the BSE have halved. Industry leader TCS too felt the impact as it made a shift in business model towards software platforms and chased digital contacts.
Containers will become hot this year and cloud will stay hot. Research firm 451 Research predicts this year containerization will be US $ 762 million business and that Containers will become 2.6 billion worth of software business in 2020. (40 per cent a year growth rate).
Cloud services are expected to have 22 percent annual growth rate. By 2020, the sector would grow from the current 22.2 billion to $ 46 billion. In Finland 30% of companies now prefer to buy cloud services when buying IT (20 per cent of IT budget goes to cloud).Cloud spend to make up over a third of IT budgets by 2017. Cloud and hosting services will be responsible for 34% of IT budgets by 2017, up from 28% by the end of 2016, according to 451 Research. Cloud services have many advantages, but cloud services have also disadvantages. In five years, SaaS will be the cloud that matters.
When cloud is growing, so is the spending on cloud hardware by the cloud companies. Cloud hardware spend hits US$8.4bn/quarter, as traditional kit sinks – 2017 forecast to see cloud kit clock $11bn every 90 days. In 2016′s third quarter vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 8.1 per cent year over year to $8.4 billion. Private cloud accounted for $3.3 billion with the rest going to public clouds. Data centers need lower latency components so Google Searches for Better Silicon.
The first signs of the decline and fall of the 20+ year x86 hegemony will appear in 2017. The availability of industry leading fab processes will allow other processor architectures (including AMD x86, ARM, Open Power and even the new RISC-V architecture) to compete with Intel on a level playing field.
USB-C will now come to screens – C-type USB connector promises to really become the only all equipment for the physical interface.The HDMI connection will be lost from laptops in the future. Thunderbolt 3 is arranged to work with USB Type-C, but it’s not the same thing (Thunderbolt is four times faster than USB 3.1).
World’s first ‘exascale’ supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017, says China
It seems that Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees in 2017. Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not. Oracle is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences – six years after it bought Sun Microsystems. Huge sums of money are at stake. The version of Java in contention is Java SE, with three paid flavours that range from $40 to $300 per named user and from $5,000 to $15,000 for a processor licence. If you download Java, you get everything – and you need to make sure you are installing only the components you are entitled to and you need to remove the bits you aren’t using.
Your Year in Review, Unsung Hero article sees the following trends in 2017:
- A battle between ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs to run emerging workloads in artificial intelligence
- A race to create the first generation of 5G silicon
- Continued efforts to define new memories that have meaningful impact
- New players trying to take share in the huge market for smartphones
- An emerging market for VR gaining critical mass
Virtual Reality Will Stay Hot on both PC and mobile.“VR is the heaviest heterogeneous workload we encounter in mobile—there’s a lot going on, much more than in a standard app,” said Tim Leland, a vice president for graphics and imaging at Qualcomm. The challenges are in the needs to calculate data from multiple sensors and respond to it with updated visuals in less than 18 ms to keep up with the viewer’s head motions so the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, sensor fusion core, display engine, and video-decoding block are all running at close to full tilt.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
HTC Vive Focus is a standalone VR headset with ‘world-scale’ tracking
No PC nor base stations required for this 6DoF VR device.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/13/htc-vive-focus-standalone-vr-headset-daydream/
After a couple of teases earlier this year, HTC has finally unveiled its upcoming standalone VR headset at today’s Vive Developer Conference in Beijing. Dubbed the Vive Focus, this all-in-one device features inside-out 6-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) “world-scale” tracking, meaning it doesn’t require external base stations nor sensors, so you can get positional tracking anywhere at any time — even on a train or plane, should you wish to. While at least a couple of Chinese manufacturers have announced standalone 6DoF VR headsets before, HTC claims that the Focus will be the first of such kind to actually hit the market.
“Now you can essentially do most of the things that you could do on a high-end machine on a standalone.”
We already knew that the Focus packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 with instant on support, and now we’re told that it also features a “high-resolution” AMOLED screen plus a rotational head strap that’s similar to the Vive’s Deluxe Audio Strap. Perhaps the only surprising bit of info is that the Focus comes with a 3DoF controller, though I was assured that it will still give “a very good experience” when paired with the 6DoF headset.
But that’s not to say that developers can’t add 6DoF hand input to the Focus.
Tomi Engdahl says:
All Major Browsers Now Support WebAssembly
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/13/2338215/all-major-browsers-now-support-webassembly
“It took only two years for all browser vendors to get on the same page regarding the new WebAssembly standard, and as of October 2017, all major browsers support it,”
Project spearheads Firefox and Chrome were the first major browsers to graduate WebAssembly from preview versions to their respective stable branches over the summer. The second wave followed in the following weeks when Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Vivaldi also rolled out the feature as soon as it was added to the Chromium stable version. The last ones to ship WebAssembly in the stable branches were Apple in Safari 11.0 and Microsoft in Microsoft Edge (EdgeHTML 16)
http://webassembly.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox Quantum arrives with faster browser engine, major visual overhaul, and Google as default search engine
https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/14/firefox-quantum-arrives-with-faster-browser-engine-major-visual-overhaul-and-google-as-default-search-engine/
Mozilla today launched Firefox 57, branded Firefox Quantum, for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The new version, which Mozilla calls “by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004,” brings massive performance improvements and a visual redesign.
The Quantum name signals that Firefox 57 is a huge release that incorporates the company’s next-generation browser engine (Project Quantum). The goal is to make Firefox the fastest and smoothest browser for PCs and mobile devices — the company has previously promised that users can expect “some big jumps in capability and performance” through the end of the year. Indeed, three of the four past releases (Firefox 53, Firefox 54, and Firefox 55) included Quantum improvements. But those were just the tip of the iceberg.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 cloud mistakes that can sink your business
https://www.cio.com/article/3237168/cloud-computing/10-cloud-mistakes-that-can-sink-your-business.html
The cloud offers a wide range of tangible business benefits, but don’t let these common blunders cast a shadow on your company’s success.
“The sun always shines above the clouds,” optimists enjoy telling us. What they fail to mention is that beneath the clouds there’s often high winds, torrential downpours, lightning and the occasional golf-ball-size hail bombardment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel-Micron scrap the summer diet, enlarge 3D XPoint mem DIMM fab
Size does matter… especially when you’ve got launch deadlines to hit
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/16/intel_micron_3d_xpoint/
Intel and Micron have expanded their XPoint production fab in Utah, USA, as the clock ticks down to the launch of XPoint DIMMs in the second half of 2018.
3D XPoint is the Intel-Micron solid-state storage technology that’s a little faster and more expensive than NAND, and not as fast nor as expensive as DRAM. The point of it is to provide bit-addressable nonvolatile capacity greater than typical RAM banks with access times faster than NAND. It available in drive form, but not yet as system memory DIMMs.
Today’s first-generation chips have two layers, and Intel has just announced a 750GB Optane drive using them. Micron has its own QuantX brand of 3D XPoint products, but so far hasn’t actually got any shipping gear.
“We are going to apply this 3D XPoint technology in the data center with DIMMs that operate much like memory DIMMs, DRAM DIMMs, do today starting in [the second half of] 2018.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Pentagon is set to make a big push toward open source software next year
The Pentagon is a software-intensive workplace
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/14/16649042/pentagon-department-of-defense-open-source-software
“Open source” is the industry term for using publicly accessible code, published for all to see and read. It’s contrasted with “closed source” or “proprietary” code, which a company guards closely as a trade secret. Open source, by its nature, is a shared tool, much more like creative commons than copyright. One big advantage is that, often, the agreements to run open-source software are much more relaxed than those behind proprietary code, and come without licensing fees. The license to run a copy of Adobe Photoshop for a year is $348; the similar open-source GNU Image Manipulation Program is free.
We don’t typically think of the Pentagon as a software-intensive workplace, but we absolutely should. The Department of Defense is the world’s largest single employer, and while some of that work is people marching around with rifles and boots, a lot of the work is reports, briefings, data management, and just managing the massive enterprise. Loading slides in PowerPoint is as much a part of daily military life as loading rounds into a magazine.
Tomi Engdahl says:
When should you turn to open source cloud?
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/public-cloud/7044/when-should-you-turn-to-open-source-cloud
Proprietary cloud proliferates, but open source is often the better option
It seems that not a day passes without news of a big win for AWS or Azure, raising the prospect that open source cloud efforts are paling into insignificance; but are they?
According to Al Sadowski, research VP of Infrastructure at 451 Research, there’s been no slowdown in open source, generally speaking.
“Cloud Foundry is the standard-bearer for open source PaaS and Kubernetes for container management. NGINX is an open source load balancer that powers over 60% of the top 10,000 websites; AWS use it too. OpenStack is the de facto choice for an open source private cloud,” he says.
But Sadowski adds that when it comes to market size, AWS’ revenue is greater than the next 200+ service providers combined.
“It’s a runaway success by many measurements,” he says. “Everyone at AWS is rowing in the same direction in terms of product roadmap and development priorities. With open source, and namely OpenStack, this isn’t the case and some projects, like Neutron (networking), have suffered. Instead of trying to reinvent things like PaaS, container management and SDN, the OpenStack community was smart to change direction and instead embrace Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and OPNFV.”
According to Paul Miller, senior analyst at Forrester, open source components are a key piece of any credible hyperscale cloud platform.
“100% open source cloud projects, like OpenStack, have achieved significant traction in a number of areas,” he says. Miller adds that OpenStack, for example, is used by most large telecoms companies as a key part of their network modernisation initiatives.
“OpenStack has also seen some success in the private cloud world,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Created AIs That Can Teach and Program Themselves
https://www.designnews.com/automation-motion-control/google-created-ais-can-teach-and-program-themselves/65133272757764?ADTRK=UBM&elq_mid=2059&elq_cid=876648
Two breakthrough projects from Google – a new, self-taught version of the AlphaGo AI and AutoML, an algorithm capable of creating machine learning architectures – are pointing toward the next level of artificial intelligence.
Expert Tells Robot Makers to Focus on the ‘Good’ of AI
Eliminate hidden biases and concentrate on the social benefits, engineering prof tells attendees at ATX Minneapolis.
https://www.designnews.com/automation-motion-control/expert-tells-robot-makers-focus-on-good-ai/31757978157809?ADTRK=UBM&elq_mid=2059&elq_cid=876648
Tomi Engdahl says:
Uber Open-Sources Its AI Programming Language, Encourages Autonomous Car Development
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/uber-open-sources-its-ai-programming-language-encourages-autonomous-car-development/3428305357816?ADTRK=UBM&elq_mid=2059&elq_cid=876648
Uber, the popular ride sharing service, is moving to encourage AI research such as autonomous vehicle development by open-sourcing its own AI programming language, Pyro.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andrew Nusca / Fortune:
Profile of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who cofounded the firm and has maintained its 70% share of the GPU market as competition and demand explode, driven by AI
This Man Is Leading an AI Revolution in Silicon Valley—And He’s Just Getting Started
http://fortune.com/2017/11/16/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang/
The cofounder and CEO of semiconductor and software maker Nvidia saw the future of computing more than a decade ago, and began developing products that could power the artificial intelligence era. Thanks to that vision, and relentless execution, his chipmaker today is perhaps the hottest company in Silicon Valley. And it may just be getting started.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Live Share to improve developer collaboration
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-visual-studio-live-share-to-improve-developer-collaboration/
Microsoft plans to debut a new developer collaboration service in early 2018 that could make it easier for developers to work in tandem even when located remotely.
Microsoft is offering a sneak peek today, November 15, of a coming Visual Studio service aimed to make developer collaboration more seamless.
vsliveshare.jpg
That service, known as Visual Studio Live Share, is expected to be one of the highlights of Day 1 of the company’s Connect(); developer conference in New York City.
Microsoft won’t be making a preview of Visual Studio Live Share available for testing until early 2018. But officials are promising that developers will be able to use it to share projects with teammates or other developers, while maintaining full project context in a secure way.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A serious warning from Sweden: thousands of IT houses will disappear in the next few years
The popularity of cloud services is hit badly in Sweden, writes Computer Sweden. According to an analyst interviewed by the magazine, up to one third of IT service providers may be lost in the next two years.
Hans Werner , Managing Director of Radar Analyst, says dramatic changes will occur in the market.
“found that about one in three companies are in danger, ”
That means thousands of actors.
“[Sweden] has about 400 companies with a turnover of 60-70 million SEK (6 to 7 million) and a large number of others who sell less.”
Werner speaks of the “industrialization of the IT”, where traditional service providers do not succeed in the scalability offered by the larger, global players. Google, Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft offer a completely different level of standardized service and mass production than smaller companies.
“The transition from traditional industry to mass production took 250 years. It’s been born 40 years ago and is taking the same step now, “she says.
According to Computer Sweden, cloud computing is not yet in full swing in Sweden. According to the magazine, only 2.9 percent of Swedish companies’ IT spending goes to general cloud services and just over half to large global operators.
It remains to be seen what effect cloud cover is for Finnish service providers. According to a recent EU survey , Finnish companies use the most cloud services in the EU.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/vakava-varoitus-ruotsista-tuhansia-it-taloja-katoaa-lahivuosina-6687952
Tomi Engdahl says:
Antonio Scandurra / The GitHub Blog:
GitHub introduces Teletype for Atom in beta, a feature for letting developers collaborate on code in real time in its Atom text editor
Introducing Teletype for Atom: Code collaboratively in real time
https://github.com/blog/2468-introducing-teletype-for-atom-code-collaboratively-in-real-time
Writing code with other developers can be a great way to onboard teammates, get to know how your peers think, and learn new skills. Unfortunately, writing code together can be difficult to coordinate.
Now social coding is easier than ever with Teletype for Atom—a new way to dive right into code with remote collaborators. Work together in real time with your own configurations in your own programming environment on any file you can open in Atom.
Today we’re releasing the Teletype package in beta, but there’s so much more to come. Visit teletype.atom.io to start coding together in Atom today.
https://teletype.atom.io/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Do Today’s Server Applications Use 54-V BLDC Motors?
http://www.electronicdesign.com/power/why-do-today-s-server-applications-use-54-v-bldc-motors?NL=ED-003&Issue=ED-003_20171117_ED-003_155&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_1_b&utm_rid=CPG05000002750211&utm_campaign=14141&utm_medium=email&elq2=116e890a1d86456cbb711a1f2cd8b28c
More server manufacturers are adopting 54-V brushless dc motors over traditional 12-V BLDCs to achieve significant savings on a couple of fronts.
Cloud-based computing refers to a mesh of remote servers that stores and moves data around the world so that we can access via Wi-Fi, local-area network (LAN), or a cellular network.
These remote servers act as a large storage device that consists of clusters of servers in a warehouse commonly referred to as a server farm. These server farms require a constant ambient temperature (optimal temperature range is between 68° and 71°F) to operate at their highest performance and to minimize any failure. They’re typically cooled by central air conditioning or heated with central heating depending on their location, just like a typical office space.
Traditionally, server applications have used 12-V BLDC fans to cool the electronics in a cabinet. However, just like automotive applications, 54-V BLDC motors are being adapted for server applications for several reasons.
Server manufacturers are adopting 54-V BLDC motors over traditional 12-V BLDC motors because it allows them to use one fourth of the current. In turn, motor manufacturers can use thinner copper wire. This also enables motor manufacturers to reduce the size of the motor and, therefore, the overall cost of the motor
For example, in a 450-W server, 32 W are consumed by the 12-V BLDC fans.
One issue does emerge when dealing with the electronics that drive a 54-V BLDC fan motor: Server engineers can’t use the old 12-V hardware to drive 54-V motors. They’re required to use electronic components with a higher operating voltage that are suitable for a 54-V power supply with plenty of margin.
Nonetheless, several hardware solutions on the market can help ease this transition.
The MIC28514 converts the 54-V supply bus rail to a traditional 12-V power rail with better than 90% power efficiency. As a result, server engineers can continue to use the same motor-control algorithms and proven active components.
These high-voltage devices make it feasible for server manufacturers to adopt 54-V power bus technology and, in turn, reduce overall system cost by utilizing smaller motors and less copper width on PCB boards and cabling.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Surface Book 2 gets torn down, repairs are tough but SSD replaceable
https://www.neowin.net/news/surface-book-2-gets-torn-down-repairs-are-tough-but-ssd-replaceable
The Surface Book 2 was available for pre-order last week, but you can now head to a store and make your purchase on the spot, as it made its official retail debut on November 16. While it is a beautifully crafted machine, it seems that just like its predecessor, the Surface Book 2 isn’t terribly easy to repair.
This information comes from the folks at iFixit, who took the unit apart and gave it a repairability score based on the difficulty of dismantling it. The Surface Book 2 seems to be glued into place at every access point and requires quite a bit of heat and force with prying tools. Once inside, there are tons of screws that keep things together on the tablet portion, along with many ribbon cables and various connectors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data Centre Arrow Storage
‘Urgent data corruption issue’ destroys filesystems in Linux 4.14
Using bcache to speed Linux 4.14? Stop if you want your data to live
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/22/linux_4_14_bcache_bug_destroys_data/
A filesystem-eating bug has been found in Linux 4.14.
First reported last week by developer Pavel Goran, the problem struck bcache, a tool that lets one use a solid state disk drive as a read/write cache for another drive. bcache is often used to store data from a slow disk on faster media.
Goran noticed the problem after trying to upgrade Gentoo from version 4.13 of the Linux kernel to version 4.14. During that effort he noticed “reads from the bcache device produce different data in 4.14 and 4.13.
Regression in 4.14: wrong data being read from bcache device
https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-bcache/msg05290.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meg Whitman stepping down as HP Enterprise CEO
https://in.reuters.com/article/us-hpe-results/meg-whitman-stepping-down-as-hp-enterprise-ceo-idINKBN1DL2PO
Meg Whitman on Tuesday announced that she will step down as chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co (HPE.N), ending a 6-year tenure that included overseeing one of the biggest corporate breakups in history.
Shares of HPE fell more than 6 percent in after-hours trading. Hewlett Packard Enterprises, known for its computer servers, is still adjusting to a new landscape in which corporate customers are placing more of their digital operations in the cloud and moving away from purchasing their own equipment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Confirms Surface Book 2 Can’t Stay Charged During Gaming Sessions
https://games.slashdot.org/story/17/11/21/2215250/microsoft-confirms-surface-book-2-cant-stay-charged-during-gaming-sessions?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
The Verge mentioned in their review that the Surface Book 2′s power supply can’t charge the battery fast enough to prevent it from draining in some cases. Microsoft has since confirmed that “in some intense, prolonged gaming scenarios with Power Mode Slider set to ‘best performance’ the battery may discharge while connected to the power supply.” Engadget reports:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/21/surface-book-2-battery-charging-gaming-issues/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Anita Balakrishnan / CNBC:
HPE says its CEO, Meg Whitman, will step down next year and remain on the board; President Antonio Neri will take over as CEO on February 1, 2018 — – President Antonio Neri will take on the role of CEO as of Feb. 1, 2018, and both Whitman and Neri will be on the board.
Meg Whitman to leave role as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, shares tumble 6%
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/meg-whitman-to-leave-role-as-ceo-of-hewlett-packard-enterprise-hpe.html
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Chief Executive Meg Whitman will step down as CEO early next year.
President Antonio Neri will take on the role of CEO as of Feb. 1, 2018, and both Whitman and Neri will be on the board.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HPE Names Engineer to Succeed CEO Whitman
Reorg continues, but tech may take bigger focus
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332652&
After six years restructuring the storied Hewlett Packard Co., Meg Whitman will step down in February as chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. HPE named computer engineer and 22-year HP veteran Antonio Neri as its next CEO, suggesting technology changes may play a bigger role in its future than financial ones.
The move was announced as HPE reported quarterly earnings with strong revenue growth, but profits still lagging due to high memory prices and the ongoing commoditization of servers. Neri will continue a restructuring effort announced last month, HPE Next, that aims to shed in 2018 another $250 million in costs at the server and comms infrastructure giant.
Wall Street analysts called the move a surprise given the on-going restructuring and Whitman’s decision earlier this year not to seek a CEO role at Uber. However, HPE insiders said Whitman was expected to leave soon and name Neri her successor.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Summit for the readers who are hot for petaFLOPs: Server nodes flashed at SC17
Oak Ridge Top 500-leading system’s innards
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/23/oak_ridge_top_500leading_summit_getting_closer/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Best Motherboards 2017
by Ian Cutress on November 23, 2017 10:00 AM EST
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12072/best-motherboards
Tomi Engdahl says:
Munich council finds €49.3m for Windows 10 embrace
Open source dream officially dies in Bavarian city
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/24/munich_will_spend_about_50_million_euros_on_windows_migration/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tight IT budgets demand smarter installations, infrastructure and operations
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2017/11/tight-it-budgets-demand-smarter-installations-infrastructure-and-operations.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cim_data_center_newsletter_2017-11-27
When it comes to the purchase of data network, communications and other IT infrastructure, it’s often tempting to buy cheap, quick-fix solutions to meet the immediate needs with as little pressure on the company coffers as possible. But that buck saved now could come at greater expense down the line, cautions BT-SA, South Africa’s leading ICT infrastructure solutions partner.
Despite shrinking ICT budgets, technology continues to develop rapidly, often necessitating an unplanned and unbudgeted revamp of infrastructure, hardware and/or software. That’s where the smart companies that opted for solutions based on their adaptability win over those that took the short-term view and settled for cheap solutions that meet only their immediate needs.
According to Erik Jordaan, director of BT-SA, when it comes to infrastructure and operations (I&O), a properly and strategically designed solution will save companies exponentially more money in the long term than this week’s discounted deal.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Munich abandoned, but Linux is becoming more common in public organizations
Munich is a major big city for Linux and open-minded music in general, since 14 years there has been its own Linux version. Now the Bavarians move to Windows, but the truth is that more and more public organizations are moving to Linux.
Munich’s decision has been regarded as some sort of major back-up for Linux. Yet, for example, in the world, they say that organizations more often choose an open code based system.
For example, ZDNet reports that Ubuntu is the most common operating system in Amazone’s public AWS cloud service. The French Police Department has 70,000 PCs running Gendbuntu, and this is a version developed by Ubuntu like LiMux in Munich.
In France, 15 ministries have replaced Microsoft Office with LibreOffice
In Austria, the Vienna administration is, in turn, on the move to Wienux. The German National Employment Office uses OpenSUSE
Similar examples can be found in a lot.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7221&via=n&datum=2017-11-27_15:22:29&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
The PCI bus will switch to 5.0
The PCIe 3.0 version has been used for information technology for a long time, from 2011 onwards. Originally, the fairway had to move to quadruple already in 2013, but the standard was not completed until this year. The next or 5.0 release will be released next year.
PCIe 4.0 comes to 16 gigahertz (GT, gigatransfers) per second. 5.0 version doubles this, so within a couple of years the speed of the PCI bus will be quadrupled. It may also be that the 4.0 version of the bus will remain short-lived.
The Verification IP allows the hardware manufacturer to ensure that the design bus supports the next standard of the PCI-SIG organization. This is to make sure that your own storage system or server works as defined in the standard.
Of course, the 5.0 version of PCIe is not yet ready. It comes according to preliminary plans to encode data 128/130 bit. At best, data is transferred to the system at 128 gigabytes per second. With one line (wire) the data would be switched to four gigabytes per second, i.e. the current fastest x16-type PCIe interfaces, the speed will quadruple.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7237-pci-vaylassa-siirrytaan-5-0-aikaan
Tomi Engdahl says:
The most popular programming languages in 2017, according to TIOBE and PYPL
https://www.techworm.net/2017/11/popular-programming-languages-2017-according-tiobe-pypl.html
Java Tops TIOBE’s and PYPL’s Programming Language Popularity Index
Tomi Engdahl says:
U.S. Angles to Retake Supercomputer Lead
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332663
The latest Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers turns the spotlight on China, which overtook the United States in the total number of ranked systems and which scored the top two fastest installations on the list. Announcements from IBM, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices, however, position the U.S. industry for a comeback. Rather than target systems that test well on the Top500’s distributed-memory version of the Linpack benchmarks (High Performance Linpack), the companies aim to render those measurements irrelevant on their way to beating China to exascale computing.
https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blair Hanley Frank / VentureBeat:
AWS Cloud9 collaborative cloud-and-browser-based IDE launches, pre-packaged with popular programming languages, based on open source Ace Editor and c9.io IDE
AWS relaunches Cloud9 collaborative development environment, a year after acquisition
https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/30/aws-relaunches-cloud9-collaborative-development-environment-a-year-after-acquisition/
Amazon Web Services launched a new service today that’s designed to provide developers with a full development environment running in its cloud. Called AWS Cloud9, it’s designed to give developers a collaborative workspace for writing code and running the terminal commands necessary to create and deploy software.
Using AWS Cloud9, developers will be able to provide read-only or read and write access to their workspace for other collaborators, who will then be able to concurrently edit code and chat about changes they’re making. The software integrates with AWS Lambda, the cloud provider’s service for running short, event-driven code functions, as well.
Live collaboration is important for the practice of pair programming, when two people work together to write code and smash bugs.
Live collaboration has become a key feature for developer tool companies over the past several months. Microsoft announced live collaboration for its Visual Studio development environment a few weeks ago, while GitHub recently announced a new feature for its Atom text editor that provides co-editing capabilities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Outsourcing remains strategic in the digital era
https://www.cio.com/article/3239324/outsourcing/outsourcing-remains-strategic-in-the-digital-era.html
Companies racing to digitalize their businesses are adopting cloud computing at a rampant rate. But traditional outsourcing also remains a crucial option for CIOs looking to free up valuable IT resources.
With all its emphasis on forward-looking innovation, digital transformation is also triggering increased interest in an age-old IT practice: outsourcing.
Most CIOs are migrating applications to public cloud services, offloading operations and maintenance of computing, storage and other capabilities so they can reallocate staff to focus on what’s strategic to their business. The same is true of services more traditionally handled by IT outsourcing providers, such as back-office work and managed services.
The global IT outsourcing market, on pace to top $299 billion in 2017, is growing at an annual rate of 6.3. percent and will total $363 million by 2020, according to data Gartner released in June.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Total recog: British AI makes universal speech breakthrough
SpeechMatics bests world+dog at adding new language. How did it do it?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/british_ai_makes_universal_speech_breakthrough/
SpeechMatics, the company founded by British neural network pioneer Tony Robinson, has made major advance in speech recognition.
Speechmatics’ Automatic Linguist can now add a new language to its system automatically – without human intervention or tuning – in about a day, crunching through 46 new languages in just six weeks.
Consider that there are around 7,000 languages in the world, and that the top 10 languages cover less than half the world’s population. The top 100 most popular languages still only get you to about 85 per cent. So speeding things up is significant.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cryptomining Demand Wanes as Q3 2017 Discrete Graphics Cards Shipments Hit 5-Year-High
by Nate Oh on December 1, 2017 9:00 AM EST
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12107/q3-2017-graphics-cards-shipments-hit-5-year-high
This week, Jon Peddie Research (JPR) released their quarterly discrete video card sales report for Q3 2017. According to JPR’s figures, the quarter was a strong one for discrete desktop GPU shipments, with vendors shipping upwards of 15 million units, reaching volumes not seen in four or five years. This high point in card shipments was fueled by positive seasonality, desktop PC gaming, and the tail end of cryptocurrency mining demand, leading to add-in board (AIB) shipments increasing 29.1% over last quarter, more than double the 14% ten-year Q2-to-Q3 average increase. In terms of discrete desktop graphics market share, NVIDIA gained around 3% compared to JPR’s revised Q2 figures, putting the balance at 27.2% for AMD and 72.8% for NVIDIA.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stephen Shankland / CNET:
Mozilla reports $520M in 2016 revenues, up 24% YoY
Mozilla revenue jump fuels its Firefox overhaul plan
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-revenue-jump-fuels-its-firefox-overhaul-plan/
The nonprofit pulled in more than a half billion dollars. Now it’s spending it on making Firefox worth using again.
Tomi Engdahl says:
From Linux to Cloud, why Red Hat matters for every enterprise
http://www.zdnet.com/article/from-linux-to-cloud-why-red-hat-matters-for-every-enterprise/
Today, Red Hat dominates enterprise Linux. Tomorrow, it wants to rule the cloud. Don’t bet against it.
In 1994, if you wanted to make money from Linux, you were selling Linux CDs for $39.95. By 2016, Red Hat became the first $2 billion Linux company. But, in the same year, Red Hat was shifting its long-term focus from Linux to the cloud.
Here’s how Red Hat got from mail-order CDs to the top Linux company and a major cloud player.
Red Hat Linux was not the first Linux distribution. That honor goes to 1992′s Manchester Computing Center (MCC) Linux. It was followed in quick succession by Softlanding Linux System (SLS), and then Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and Debian Linux
Except for Debian, unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Linux fan, you probably haven’t heard of these, and, if you know Debian, you know it’s never been a commercial program. That might’ve been the fate for Red Hat Linux as well — except Ewing met Bob Young, a young entrepreneur with big, albeit unformed, dreams.
From CDs to servers and services: Young had started a business selling Slackware CDs, but he wanted more. So, starting from Young’s wife’s sewing closet, they launched Red Hat Linux. The early years were hard.
Young admitted, “I knew how to sell hardware, not software, and we were selling a concept that no one was buying.” First, they sold CDs and then servers and services. “We would literally go and visit them one customer at a time. There was no magic bullet. We did a lot of hard work staying up with our customers.”
But Young also realized that while he couldn’t sell Linux as being better, faster, or having more features than Unix, he could sell one benefit: Users could tune it to meet their needs. That turned out to be Linux’s selling point.
Open source, a radical notion: Young also realized that Red Hat would need to work with other companies for long-term success. Today, everyone uses open source to work together. In the 90s, it was a radical notion. Red Hat was one of the first to realize that technology was not a zero-sum game. That, in fact, by making the pie bigger, rather than fighting for a larger slice of the pie, you could become more profitable.
Young also realized early on that Linux would not be just for rebellious users who didn’t want to use Windows or Unix.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HEVC and the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update
by Ganesh T S on November 30, 2017 11:55 PM EST
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12106/hevc-and-the-windows-10-fall-creators-update
The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU) came with a host of welcome changes. One of the aspects that didn’t get much coverage in the tech press was the change in Microsoft’s approach to the bundled video decoders. There had been complaints regarding the missing HEVC decoder when the FCU was in the Insider Preview stage. It turned out to be even more puzzling when FCU was released to the stable ring. This has led to plenty of erroneous speculation in the user community. We reached out to Microsoft to clear things up.
The missing HEVC decoder is not a factor for users playing back media through open source applications such as Kodi, MPC-HC, or VLC. However, users of the Movies and TV app built into Windows 10 FCU or software relying on the OS decoders such as Plex will find HEVC videos playing back with a blank screen. While this is a minor inconvenience at best, a more irritating issue is the one for users with systems capable of Netflix 4K playback. Instead of 4K, FCU restricts them to 1080p streams at 5.8 Mbps (as those are encoded in AVC).
Tomi Engdahl says:
How should businesses upgrade their own data networks so that they can take digital business to the next level? In me, this raises a lot of thoughts.
1. Businesses need a roadmap that takes business from a starting point towards a pervasive network. The network devices to be acquired should adapt to new technologies and digital architecture. The life cycle of a network architecture is up to 10 years, so you should take care to reform it. Is the switch re-encoded? Does the equipment provide sufficient flexibility?
2. Security is getting stronger and stronger . The importance of Networks is growing all the time, and now we need more. the ability to conceal traffic.
3. Processes and procedures are undergoing and reformed. It needs enough resources and time. Efficiency is a thrill as business units are demanding faster and faster digicam services and software innovation.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kumppaniblogit/fujitsu/tavoitteena-digiloikka-ilman-oivaltavaa-verkkoa-et-onnistu-6689591
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft launches Windows 10 on ARM, with HP and ASUS promising 20+ hours of battery life
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/05/windows-10-on-arm-is-here-always-connected-devices/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Microsoft launches Windows 10 on ARM, with HP and ASUS promising 20+ hours of battery life
Posted 32 minutes ago by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)
Windows laptops and tablets have traditionally run on X86 processors from the likes of Intel and AMD. Microsoft experimented with using ARM-based processors when it launched the Surface RT and Windows RT in 2012 — and it cost the company dearly. The failure of the Surface RT was mostly due to software, though. The system could only run a small subset of applications that had been specifically compiled for it — and hence you couldn’t just install Chrome or Photoshop, for example.
Fast-forward to today and Microsoft is ready to give ARM on laptops another try. But this time, you will be able to run any program you wish. Windows 10 for ARM is officially launching today, and while Microsoft itself isn’t launching an ARM-based Surface device just yet, the company has partnered with the likes of HP to launch a new class of laptops that Microsoft officially brands as “Always Connected Devices.”
The promise of using ARM-based chips (and we’re mostly talking Qualcomm Snapdragon processors here), is that you’ll get the kind of user experience that you’ve become accustomed to from your smartphones. That means these devices will turn on almost immediately, feature wireless LTE connectivity and — maybe most importantly — offer the kind of battery life that’ll let you get through a day or two (and, in the future, maybe a week)
The biggest difference between the failed RT experiment and these new devices is that users will be able to run any existing Windows applications and that all modern peripherals will just work, too.
the company recompiled the Windows 10 operating system for ARM. There is no emulation at the operating system level.
Microsoft decided to natively compile all of the DLLs (that is, most of the Windows libraries) and set the emulation layer above that.
For everything that sits above this and needs to be emulated, Windows 10 on ARM uses a dynamic binary translator to translate X86 code into ARM64 code on-the-fly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s new Power9 chip was built for AI and machine learning
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/05/ibms-new-power9-chip-architected-for-ai-and-machine-learning/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
In a world that requires increasing amounts of compute power to handle the resource-intensive demands of workloads like artificial intelligence and machine learning, IBM enters the fray with its latest generation Power chip, the Power9.
The company intends to sell the chips to third-party manufacturers and to cloud vendors including Google. Meanwhile, it’s releasing a new computer powered by the Power9 chip, the AC922 and it intends to offer the chips in a service on the IBM cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 for PCs, mobes: Cortex-A75s, fat caches, vector math, security stuff, and more
Specs, features summarized
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/07/qualcomm_snapdragon_845/
Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip will include an isolated security core for handling sensitive personal information, among other new features.
The California chip designer showed off its upcoming 845 component at a tech summit in Hawaii on Wednesday, promising the silicon will power 2018′s high-end Android smartphones and most likely future Windows 10 PCs – following in the footsteps of its older sibling, the Snapdragon 835.
The 845 will be a 64-bit Armv8-compatible 10nm FinFET system-on-chip fabricated by Samsung using the Korean manufacturing giant’s 10LPP (low power plus) process technology. The package is about the same size as the 10nm FinFET 835, and packs in three or more billion transistor gates.
It uses four customized Arm Cortex-A75 and four customized Cortex-A55 CPU cores. The tweaked A75s are the beefy power-hungry general-purpose brains of the device, clocked at up to 2.8GHz, and kick in when whatever code is running needs a burst of performance at a cost of battery life.
The modified A55s are called the efficiency cores because they require less power and provide less performance, and run application and operating system code most of the time, leaving the power cores to sleep. The A55s are clocked up to 1.8GHz.
One potential differentiator is the Secure Processing Unit (SPU), which is new to the 845. This is a modified Arm SC300.
It has its own CPU core, embedded private RAM, hardware random number generator and accelerated cryptographic functions, all on its own power island within the system-on-chip die. It runs code supplied by Qualcomm and whoever manufactured the device housing the system-on-chip.
But wait, there’s more
As well all this semiconductor nerd stuff, the 845 has various things to make next year’s smartphones using the silicon take better photos and video and do better at machine-learning tasks – the kind of thing normal people will notice immediately over their older handsets.
One thing Qualcomm was a little sore about is that it has been designing chips for years that can crunch vector math calculations rapidly in hardware, in its GPUs and its DSPs.
However, unlike a few other vendors, Qualcomm didn’t slap an “AI processor” or ‘neural network chip” label on its stuff, so now it’s grumpy that it looks like it’s behind the times, when really, its chips have been accelerating machine-learning inference code for ages.
The 845′s Spectra 280 image signal processor can capture Ultra HD Premium video: 4K resolution video at 60 frames per second, with 10bit-per-RGB-color and the Rec.2020 color gamut. That’s 30 bits of color per pixel as opposed to 24 bits. It can also capture up to 32Mp total from up to two cameras, and record slow-motion 780p video at 480 frames per second.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Taking Hybrid IT from Accident to Strategy
http://www.securityweek.com/taking-hybrid-it-accident-strategy
Most enterprises have an accidental Hybrid IT reality, rather than a strategy. As various groups and geographies within enterprise organizations procure their own cloud services independently of the IT organization, conflict emerges between the use of traditional computing infrastructure and cloud options. As this situation grows, it exposes inefficiencies and risks that demand a more strategic approach.
How did we get here?
The potential for Hybrid IT was created by two flavors of cloud computing – SaaS and IaaS.
While Concur is often cited as the first SaaS offering, Salesforce deserves credit for normalizing the SaaS model in the minds of enterprise buyers whose initial concerns over security and performance were sidelined by business demands for its capabilities.
IaaS became mainstream when Amazon Web Services launched on March 14, 2006. It armed developers with direct access to infrastructure and an ability to bypass the IT operations provisioning bottleneck. This, combined with Agile development practices, unlocked the potential for DevOps, which emerged in 2009.
Web scale companies took full advantage with a cloud-first (or cloud-only) policy, but around 2014, enterprise developers took notice.
Why the status quo must change
The impact of running cloud and traditional services in parallel in the enterprise is most painfully felt within application development teams and IT operations. As long as cloud and traditional services operate independently, there is a division that increases management complexity and reduces the agility of the organization, impacting the overall competitive posture of the business.
From an application development perspective:
● The deployment pipelines across multiple cloud and legacy services are highly segregated. Where services are redundant, the enterprise misses out on potential volume discounting and efficiency gains.
● Cloud-based services often need access to rigid legacy systems. This dependency creates a flexibility mismatch that reduces the speed and agility benefits of cloud computing.
From the perspective of IT operations and security, there are several challenges:
● Management is divided in silos defined by computing platform, requiring multiple teams and tools. This increases complexity, costs and errors while slowing operations and frustrating users.
● Services delivered on legacy platforms are often unable to elastically respond to peaks or decline in demand, in the same way that cloud services can.
● IT operations models based on manual management of changes and configurations cannot scale to the pace demanded by the business. As process is bypassed, potential security policy and compliance violations emerge.
Getting to a strategic approach to Hybrid IT
A strategic approach to Hybrid IT means enabling the choice of environment for a workload to be made entirely based on what is best for the business. This is true both for newly developed applications and those that have run faithfully for decades.
This doesn’t automatically mean that public cloud services will always be selected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Power 9 Servers Target AI
Linux systems are first to support PCIe Gen 4
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332684&
IBM announced its first Linux servers to use its Power 9 processors, targeting businesses that want to accelerate machine learning jobs. The systems are the first to use PCI Express Gen 4 as well as NVLink 2.0 to attach Nvidia GPUs and IBM’s OpenCAPI for FPGAs and other accelerators.
The company claims it will approach the prices of rival x86 systems while delivering greater bandwidth. However, it’s unclear what accelerators will be available for the new interconnects.
The NVLink 2.0 attaches up to six Nvidia GPUs to a Power 9 system delivering 5.6 times the bandwidth of the PCIe Gen 3 links used on x86 server, IBM claimed. The additional bandwidth translates to about 3.7-times speed up on machine learning jobs using frameworks such as Chainer or Caffe, it said.
IBM provides optimized versions of AI frameworks that can distribute compute-intensive training jobs across hundreds of GPUs with 95 percent scaling, it added.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snapdragon 845, ARM PCs Debut
Broadcom clouds Qualcomm’s SoC event
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332695
Qualcomm described and showed working silicon of its next-generation flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 845, at an event here. The chip is a significant, but stepwise enhancement of its 835 widely used in smartphones and angling for new kinds of sockets including PCs with cellular modems.
The SoC sports redesigned CPU and GPU blocks and a new layer of cache to boost performance 25-30 percent and support features such as Ultra HD Premium video encoding. The advance is impressive given the SoC is built in the Samsung 10nm node and fits in the same 12mm2 package as the 835.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Yes sir, no sir, 3 bags NoSQL sir: It’s a whizz-bang benchmark … but WTF does it signify?
Why you should check the load type and other tips
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/07/benchmarks_and_keeping_it_real/
Sometimes fast just isn’t fast enough and in the fast moving world of NoSQL databases, what was considered blindingly fast yesterday can be seen as slow today. For instance, Cassandra has always been thought of as a fast solution for ingesting data into a database cluster, but today upcoming systems such as Aerospike and Scylla are wiping the floor with Cassandra in benchmarks.
Aerospike claims to be 10 times faster than Cassandra while Scylla reckons one of its three-node clusters can do the work of a 30-node Cassandra setup. Scylla also claims to be a drop-in replacement for Cassandra using the same data model, data storage and query interface language.
Both of these databases take common NoSQL models and rework the implementation taking advantage of modern advancements. In the case of Aerospike, it’s the cheapness of memory and solid state drives, while for Scylla it’s the asynchronous programming models. Both also score advantages by forgoing the Java programming languages and replacing them with lower level languages (C and C++) – thus doing away with Java’s two main speed downsides, heap optimisation and garbage collections. However, these raw figures shouldn’t be taken at first sight, we need to know how benchmark figures are obtained.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Drunk’ developers delay software vendor’s release
Na Zdorovie to the hard-working devs at Russia’s Arusoft
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/07/drunk_developers_delay_software_vendors_release/
Russian software vendor Arusoft claims it delayed a product release because its developers were drunk.
Arusoft’s mission, according to its web page, is “… to crack a variety of disc protection especially for 4K UHD, so that people’s audio-visual life will be more convenient.” In the service of that goal it makes a Blu-Ray ripper named DeUHD that usually updates weekly.
But visitors to the company’s site on Tuesday, December 5th, instead found the following message:
Attention: Attention: We are drunk today, so updates will be tomorrow! This is the last day when you can buy a lifetime DeUHD! Catch the moment!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blair Hanley Frank / VentureBeat:
Nvidia unveils Titan V GPU aimed at machine learning applications, says Titan V has 110 teraflops of raw computing capability, 9x that of Pascal-based Titan X
Nvidia launches Titan V desktop GPU to accelerate AI computation
https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/07/nvidia-launches-new-titan-v-desktop-gpu-to-accelerate-ai-computation/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hyperscaling The Data Center
https://semiengineering.com/hyperscaling-the-data-center/
The enterprise no longer is at the center of the IT universe. An extreme economic shift has chipmakers focused on hyperscale clouds.
Enterprise data centers increasingly will look and behave more like slimmed-down versions of hyperscale data centers as chipmakers and other suppliers adapt systems developed for their biggest customers to in-house IT faciilities.
The new chips and infrastructure that will serve as building blocks in these facilities will be more power-efficient, make better use of space and generate less heat. They also will be capable of managing enormous and unpredictable data streams, and they will integrate more easily with cloud platforms that have become part of nearly every organization’s extended IT infrastructure.
Google announced last March, for example, that it had spent $30 billion during the previous three years to expand its network of data centers beyond the 15 it already built to support its consumer-services business. Microsoft and Amazon each spend more than $10 billion per year on data center infrastructure, as well.
That’s not all bad, however. Cloud infrastructure, whether private or public, is viewed as the best approach for dealing with huge and growing amounts of data, as well as fluctuations and inconsistencies in that volume.
“The increasing dominance of hyperscale players continues to play out, with all four leading companies having cause to celebrate,” Synergy analyst John Dinsdale wrote in a July report. That report detailed dramatic ongoing growth and an increasing concentration of market share among the cloud leaders.
Looked at from another angle, spending on traditional data center infrastructure dropped 18% between 2015 and 2017, while spending on infrastructure products for the public cloud rose 35%, according to a September report from Synergy Research Group.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
Sony says PS4 sales reached 70M units and PlayStation VR sold 2M units worldwide; PS4 now on track to surpass PS3′s 80M+ lifetime sales
The PS4 has sold 70 million units, while PSVR tops 2 million
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/7/16745752/playstation-4-70-million-sales
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia announces $2,999 Titan V, ‘the most powerful PC GPU ever created’
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/8/16750326/nvidia-titan-v-announced-specs-price-release-date
It seems like Nvidia announces the fastest GPU in history multiple times a year, and that’s exactly what’s happened again today; the Titan V is “the most powerful PC GPU ever created,” in Nvidia’s words. It represents a more significant leap than most products that have made that claim, however, as it’s the first consumer-grade GPU based around Nvidia’s new Volta architecture.
That said, a liberal definition of the word “consumer” is in order here — the Titan V sells for $2,999 and is focused around AI and scientific simulation processing. Nvidia claims up to 110 teraflops of performance from its 21.1 billion transistors, with 12GB of HBM2 memory, 5120 CUDA cores, and 640 “tensor cores” that are said to offer up to 9 times the deep-learning performance of its predecessor.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Toshiba has introduced a corporate hard disk drive based on traditional mechanical, rotary and magnetic storage for business servers and storage systems for up to 14 terabytes of data. The disk is the largest HDD disk on the market.
The MG07ACA is made up of as many as nine discs. Previously, in such multilayer discs, heat generation has been a big problem.
The 14-terabyte and 8-inch 12-terabyte hard drive support six gigabit per second SATA bus. This is virtually the fastest bus available for large mechanical HDDs.
HDDs are moving into so-called ” SMR (Shingled MAgnetic Recording), in which the recording strings partially overlap. In Toshiba’s new products, the tracks are in the traditional way in parallel.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7288&via=n&datum=2017-12-08_15:09:01&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD’s CEO Hails Era of ‘Immersive Computing’
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332706
Keeping the pace of innovation that has has led to massive gains in computing power will require not only continued improvements in semiconductor process technology but also better integration of system components and improvements in micro-architectural efficiency, power management, memory integration and software, according to Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD.
In a keynote address at the IEEE International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) here this week, Su called on the industry to come together to chart a path toward satisfying the huge demand for more computing power to continually improve user experiences and help to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.
“The next level of computing power, especially for consumers, is really around immersive computing and the idea that we all have many, many devices connected to us,” Su said in a keynote address at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).