News and Analysis Results
Intel rolls eyes at flaccid PC biz, cuts $1bn off expected sales
Well, it looks like the Intel Developer Forum might be a bit more subdued next week than usual, with the chipmaker cutting its revenue projections for the third quarter, which ends this month. In a statement announced before Wall Street opened this morning, Chipzilla warned investors that its sales in the third quarter would be …
NEC, Egenera tag team on cloudy infrastructure freakage
Japanese server maker NEC has teamed up with automation and management software company Egenera of Boxborough, Massachusetts, to make the latter's PAN Manager physical and virtual server control freak the preferred – though by no means exclusive – tool for managing the former's SigmaBlade blade servers. NEC …
US energy lab's pump-happy petaflopper goes green
The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has hooked up with HP, Intel, and partners to design a new hybrid supercomputer and an energy-efficient data center wrapper for it that will – among other green gains – use the exhaust heat from the supercomputer to heat adjacent offices. After …
IBM's z12 mainframe engine makes each clock count
When you charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per core for an engine that is designed to run full-out all day doing online transaction processing and all night running single-threaded big batch jobs, you have no choice but to believe in higher clock speeds and doing anything and everything to boost that single-thread …
Intel teaches Xeon Phi x86 coprocessor snappy new tricks
It took fifteen years for Intel to shrink the computing power of the teraflops-busting ASCI Red massively parallel Pentium II supercomputer down to something that fits inside of a PCI-Express coprocessor card – and the Xeon Phi coprocessor is only the first step in a long journey with coprocessor sidekicks riding posse …
Supercomputing takes a slight pause in Q2
With all of the relatively cheap computing power available today, and with the expanding focus from traditional supercomputers to clusters that can run simulations or big data workloads, you'd think that the HPC market would be growing like gangbusters. Not so. That's the latest news from the box counters at IDC. But …
Fujitsu to embiggen iron bigtime with Sparc64-X
While Fujitsu has made some very respectable Sparc64 chips aimed at the supercomputing market, it has been a long time since the Japanese chip and server maker has put out a new Sparc64 processor that went into general purpose servers. That changes in a big way with the forthcoming Sparc64-X processor, which will be used in …
Oracle hurls Sparc T5 gladiators into big-iron arena
Oracle's Sparc processor server biz may be bleeding revenue, but the company is still working on very innovative chips. Its Sparc T series, and the Sparc T5 systems that will launch later this year (very likely at the OpenWorld trade show at the end of September) suggest the company is growing its multithreaded processors in …
A second opinion on sucky second quarter server sales
Global server sales remained in the doldrums during the year's second quarter, says new data from Gartner whose bean counters have found revenues off 2.9 per cent to $12.86bn against a slight 1.4 per cent shipment rise to 2.37 million boxes shipped out to customers between April and June. The x86 server continues to dominate …
IBM to double-stuff sockets with power-packed Power7+
Power Systems users, start your engines. Or, more precisely, start your budgeting cycle so you can get ready for Big Blue's impending Power7+ RISC processors to run your AIX, Linux on Power, and IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) workloads. At the Hot Chips conference this week in Silicon Gulch, Scott Taylor – one of the …
Ethernet switch sales sizzle
The server market may have stalled a bit as Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Fujitsu work through various stages of processor transitions, but the Ethernet switch market is going gangbusters. According to the box counters at IDC, the worldwide market for Layer 2 and 3 switching gear that adheres to the Ethernet protocol accounted …
Applied Micro's X-Gene server chip ARMed to the teeth
An opportunity to define the future of server processing comes along once every decade or so, and Applied Micro Circuit, a company known for its networking chips and PowerPC-based embedded controllers, wants to move up into the big leagues to take on Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and the handful of remaining etchers of RISC …
Look out, world! SUSE Linux's OpenStack control-freak is loose
Commercial Linux distributor SUSE Linux is moving up into the clouds with a commercially supported release of its OpenStack cloud control-freak. SUSE Cloud, as the OpenStack distro is called, has been in preview since last October, and that particular preview build was based on the "Diablo" OpenStack 2011.3 running …
AMD to double up cores with Jaguars
For those of us hoping that Advanced Micro Devices would get into the low-powered server racket with some earnestness, it looks like the forthcoming processors based on the "Jaguar" cores will fit the bill quite nicely. The Jaguars are the kickers to the current "Bobcat" family of x86 processors used in …
Worldwide server sales head south as shipments put on ice
The server market took a bit of a breather again in the second quarter ended in June, say the box counters at IDC. It's not a surprise, with a number of Unix vendors getting ready to launch new boxes, IBM not yet shipping its new System zEC12 mainframes announced this week, and Hewlett-Packard's Integrity Itanium servers …
AMD CTO spills 'Steamroller' core specs
Mark Papermaster, CTO at Advanced Micro Devices, gave the keynote address at the Hot Chips 24 conference in Cupertino today. Papermaster's mission was ostensibly to talk about heterogeneous computing, a drum that the chip peddler has been banging on since last fall. But the real news was that Papermaster divulged some of the …
IBM embiggens iron with System zEnterprise EC12 mainframe
The systems business is largely dominated by x86-based machinery these days, but Big Blue's mainframe unit is hanging in there after five decades and is still a bit of a mint. You put in $1bn every two years for hardware development, as IBM has done with the new System zEnterprise EC12, and you take out $7bn in ridiculously …
VMware: Our monster will eat servers, belch clouds, excrete profit
The scribbled Monster VM logo that server virtualization and cloudy wannabe VMware started using last year as a joke may be the most appropriate and honest emblem that any IT vendor has pulled from its cosmic ether. Because VMware and its papa EMC want to do nothing less than gobble all of the hardware in your data center and …
VMware rolls up an integrated cloudy control freak
VMware wants to make it simpler for its customers to make the jump from virtualized servers running its ESXi hypervisor to full-on clouds complete with all of the automation, disaster recovery, and other control freakage. And to that end, in conjunction with the launch of the new ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and add-on vSphere management …
VMware kills vRAM memory tax with vSphere 5.1 server virt
The most important new feature of the new ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and its related vSphere 5.1 tools that made their debut at the VMworld virtualization extravaganza today is not a feed or speed, but the fact that VMware has dropped the much-hated vRAM memory tax that came out last year with vSphere 5.0. With the vRAM memory tax, …