IBM and Intel to open up blade specifications
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In an effort to encourage hardware vendors to build components for the blade platform they co-develop, Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. on Thursday will open up parts of the BladeCenter
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IBM expects to ship a new 32-processor server based on Intel's Xeon processors in the first half of next year and may begin selling its first high-density "blade" server based on Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD's) Opteron processor, a company executive said in an interview Tuesday.
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IBM, Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. on Monday unveiled some key details on the powerful new &quot;Cell&quot; processor the three are jointly producing to run next-generation computers, game consoles and TVs.
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IBM on Friday announced it has signed up 115 companies since early September to develop for its eServer BladeCenter open specification it co-authored with Intel.
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The computer maker envisions the blades being used to replace large numbers of stand-alone servers, among other functions.
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All together now Fujitsu has kicked off a major effort to see its 10Gbps networking gear make its way into blade servers from the likes of HP, IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems. More broadly, Fujitsu expects increased standardization in the blade market in the near future.â¦
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IBM , Singapore's Chartered  Semiconductor  and Samsung Electronics   will join forces to develop and manufacture chips using an  advanced processing technology, the companies said on  Wednesday.
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Intel's presentation at a conference next week appears set to confirm many rumored details of the chip's architecture and characteristics.
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To move the blade server market from the enterprise to small and midsize businesses, IBM on Friday unveiled a new BladeCenter chassis and new blade solutions for SMBs.
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Intel is expected to kick off its semi-annual developer forum Tuesday by demonstrating a new dual-core processor, something rival AMD showed off last week.
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Intel will offer a detailed look at a new processor next week during a presentation at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) that should set the stage for an unexpectedly&#160;close battle with Taiwan&#39;s Via Technologies.Intel&#39;s presentation will cover technical details of an unnamed low-power processor that is made using a 45-nanometer process and designed for mobile Internet devices, according to an abstract contained in the ISSCC program. That&#39;s the same general description used by Intel to describe its&#160;upcoming Silverthorne processor.Intel executives declined to confirm whether the ISSCC presentation covers Silverthorne but said the abstract provided an accurate description of the unspecified processor. If the chip described is indeed Silverthorne, the presentation appears set to confirm many rumored details of the chip&#39;s architecture and characteristics.Most importantly, Silverthorne is rumored to be an in-order processor, the same as the processor Intel will detail next week, according to the abstract.In layman&#39;s terms, this means the chip functions like a factory with a single assembly line and is capable of processing one operation at a time. An in-order processor must complete that operation before it can move on to another operation. This is a different chip architecture from that used in Intel&#39;s other processors but it&#39;s the same as Via Technologies&#39; low-power C7 chip, which has proved popular among the portable device makers that are Silverthorne&#39;s target market.The processor that Intel will discuss next week is also a dual-issue processor, just as Silverthorne is rumored to be. This feature -- which Intel is likely to emphasize at ISSCC -- allows two instructions to be issued at a time and should give Silverthorne a performance advantage over the C7, which can issue only one instruction at a time.If these rumored characteristics of Silverthorne are confirmed next week, the stage will be set for an unexpectedly close contest between Intel and&#160;Via&#39;s upcoming low-power Isaiah processors, which are also designed for small, portable computers.Tiny by comparison to Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Via has nevertheless managed to carve out a comfortable niche selling the inexpensive, low-power C7. Beset by a dying third-party chipset business, Via hopes to become a mainstream processor supplier with its upcoming Isaiah processors, which the company unveiled last week.Unlike the C7 and Silverthorne, Isaiah uses a superscalar, out-of-order processor architecture. This architecture, which is used in high-end chips from Intel and AMD, generally offers better performance than an in-order design and is akin to a factory equipped with multiple assembly lines capable of processing different operations at the time.The performance of Isaiah is further enhanced by being superscalar, or having the ability to process multiple instructions during every clock cycle.Centaur, the Via subsidiary that handles processor design for the company, is confident that Isaiah will outperform Silverthorne, even though an accurate comparison of both chips won&#39;t be possible until the two processors can be benchmarked and assessed by independent observers.Nevertheless, Isaiah looks good on paper. Via chips based on the new architecture will offer 1MB of L2 cache and support a front-side bus running at speeds up to 1.3GHz. By comparison, the chip that Intel will reveal next week has 512KB of cache and a 533MHz front-side bus.But the ISSCC abstract raises as many questions as it appears to answer. For example, it doesn&#39;t specify how many cores the new Intel chip will use and gives no indication for how fast these cores will run.Silverthorne, and arelated processor called Diamondville, are widely expected to be available in single-core and dual-core versions. They are also expected to run at roughly the same clock speeds as the Isaiah chips, will be available in versions running from 400MHz up to 2GHz.&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - IBM announced an upgraded version of itsÂ blade server based on the Cell processorÂ on Wednesday, adding memory and data throughput for better performance on high-end applications, such as graphics and finance. IBM also shaved the size of the server so users can fit 14 of the new IBM BladeCenter QS21s into each chassis, compared to seven units of its predecessor, the QS20. The new version can also function in a diverse blade environment, working alongside computers based on the x86 or PowerPC chip architecture to assign workloads to the most efficient platform, said Paula Richards, product line manager for Cell systems at IBM. "We're seeing many applications where users want to actually marry a quad-core Intel or AMD blade with a Cell blade, so they can use the standard blade for basic workloads, then push their mission-critical, exotic applications off to the Cell platform," Richards said. IBM will begin selling the QS21 in October to users in industries that need to run visual computing tasks, such as 3D rendering, and time-critical jobs like compression and encryption.Â The system relies on the Cell Broadband Engine processor, created for Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 3 gaming system by the consortium of IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The QS21 features two 3.2 GHz Cell processors, dual Gigabit Ethernet networking, and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.1 OS. At its maximum density in high-performance computing clusters, the system can run as fast as 6.4 TFLOPS (tera floating point operations per second) in a BladeCenter H chassis, or 25.8 TFLOPS in a 42U rack. "We're not trying to be a general purpose platform here. If you want to run your monthly statements or ERP, that's not what this is about," said Richards. "This is for time-critical, highly intense workloads like financial applications, digital video surveillance, medical imaging, or even digital media and entertainment. Jobs where time is money." The product will supplement IBM's lineup of blade servers, which also includes products running on IBM's PowerPC chips, Intel's Xeon or Core 2 Duo chips, andÂ AMD's Opteron processor. By upgrading the performance of the Cell version of the BladeCenter, IBM will be able to reach more corners of the highly specialized field of high-performance computing, one analyst said. Users buy the Xeon and Opteron BladeCenters for general purpose computing, the PowerPC BladeCenter for jobs in a Unix environment, and the Cell BladeCenter for compute-intensive applications like signal processing and image analysis, including designs from Mercury Computer Systems, a military and aerospace industry contractor, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64. "They all do different things, so this is a technology update instead of a big change in positioning," Brookwood said. In concert with the QS21, IBM announced version 3.0 of its SDK for Multicore Acceleration, designed to streamline the process of application development for the new platform. IBM will launch the SDK for Multicore Acceleration on October 19, and launch the QS21 on October 26.
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Ziff Davis - In an effort to seed the market for future designs, the companies plan to provide the specifications for the BladeCenter switching framework, the blade adapter framework and the design of the blade itself.
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Intel Corp. , the world's largest  semiconductor maker, said on Thursday it plans to start  shipping new processors for desktop and laptop computers in  August.
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SEPTEMBER 02, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - In an effort to encourage hardware vendors to build components for the blade platform they co-developed, Intel Corp.
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InfoWorld - Intel has developed a white-box blade server based on standardized components, instead of specialized parts usually used to produce such systems.
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IBM will soon begin shipping upgraded models of its HS20 and JS20 blade servers, including a new SCSI (small computer system interface) option for the HS20 that will double the number of SCSI blades that users can fit into a single chassis, the company