Azul opens 768-core diner with Vega 2
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Humble and willing to talk about it Java crusher Azul Systems has birthed a second generation of hardware and proven that it's a start-up capable of learning lessons.â¦
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Evesham tempts us with Intel's 'Santa Rosa' notebook technology Review Evesham has moved fast to pack its Zieo N500-HD laptop with a long list of 'Santa Rosa' Centrino Duo features. The 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 processor runs on the new 800MHz frontside bus and the chipset is a combination of 965 northbridge and ICH8M. Ordinarily, a new southbridge adds a handful of new features such as extra USB ports, but Centrino Duo is heavily skewed towards power management and longer battery life.â¦
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Barcelona is finally here. Four years since its last major chip upgrade, AMD is introducing the quad-core Operton server processor, which the company has described as &quot;the most advanced x86 processor&quot; ever made.
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Barcelona: 'It could have been a contender' Exclusive Intel looks set to blunt AMD's August Barcelona processor release by handing customers a 2.0GHz version of its four-core Clovertown, The Register has learned.â¦
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Sun Microsystems today took aim at two core pieces of its server strategy, announcing a new generation of UltraSPARC processors and a key software win for Solaris x86.
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How's about 32 DIMMs? Sun Microsystems today announced a pair of new four-core Xeon-based boxes that give customers just about the most performance and choice out of any low-end servers from a Tier 1 vendor. The fresh X4450, for example, packs four of Intel's 7300 series Xeon chips into a 2U system. All of the other major vendors require at least 4U for their four-socket units. The system also has a mouth-watering 32 DIMM slots with support for up to 128GB of memory. That should be enough to run your virtualization software.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) isÂ getting ready to launch Barcelona, its first quad-core server chip. A successful Barcelona launch, expected to happen during the third quarter, is critical for AMD, which has seen itsÂ share of the server market batteredÂ in recent quarters by Intel. Those market-share losses came with a heavy price, dragging AMD's finances into the red. In April, the company announcedÂ a $611 million loss, largely attributed to tougher competition and aÂ price war with Intel. To stem these losses, AMD has cut discretionary spending but executives are counting on Barcelona to restore its financial health and turn the tables on its archrival. Kevin Knox, the vice president of AMD's commercial business, recently sat down with IDG News Service to discuss preparations for Barcelona's upcoming launch. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation. IDGNS: Where do things currently stand with Barcelona? Kevin Knox: We're still on target for a mid-year launch with Barcelona. We're actually pretty excited about the product, particularly with respect to some of the features that we're going to enable. When we started out with Barcelona it had a certain feature set. From the time we started out, from the design perspective, the aspects we're going to address, things like virtualization and power, have become more important to the industry. We think its going to have a bigger impact than we originally anticipated. IDGNS: Is Barcelona going to reverse AMD's recent losses in server market share? Knox: I firmly believe it will. A lot of that has to do with this not being just a speed upgrade. If it was just a speed upgrade, it's a lot more challenging at any point in time to get an advantage and maintain that advantage. Barcelona is not just a quad-core chip, it's more than quad core. We've made fundamental, significant changes to the architecture as part of the chip. We looked at the overall design, at the cache and the pipelines, so it's a lot more than just taking two dual-core chips and saying it's quad core. It's a true, native quad-core design with enhancements at the processor level. IDGNS: How do you view comparisons between Barcelona and Intel's quad-core server chips? Knox: If you look at the two products, they're very different products. If you go back many years, when we designed Opteron, Opteron was designed for multi-chip, multi-core environments. When we went from single core to dual core, it wasn't a big thing for us. When we went from dual core to quad core, the reason this has taken a little longer is we made some enhancements to the core, not because going to four cores was the major challenge. What we've focused on is doing enhancements to the core and doing virtualization. This is probably a larger and more important launch than you've seen in the past. There's a lot riding on the ecosystem, the ISVs, and hardware vendors, to make sure we have all the pieces in a line so when we do launch we can have pretty quick uptake. IDGNS: How much work has been done to seed the market for Barcelona? Has AMD shipped sample systems to major customers so they can test their applications? Knox: Yes, we're starting to get some samples to customers as seeds. You definitely need to have seed programs. They're critical. People want to kick the tires, especially with something as significant as the move from dual core to quad core, and the enhancements we've made. We're going to have a larger seed program than we've ever had before on the server side. Part of that's because there's some new stuff, and part of that's because it's a pretty competitive market right now. Frankly, there are some accounts you have to seed. Whenever new technology comes out, you've got to let the Wall Street guys try it out. And it's not just the end-user community. There's a whole ISV aspect to it, as well. They've got to get ready. You've got to get the hardware manufacturers in Taiwan ready. IDGNS: What does the launch of Barcelona mean? When the launch happens next quarter, will the chips be widely available in large quantities? Knox: That's what we're going through now. Our plan is not to have a paper launch. We want to do a launch with a product. IDGNS: With large numbers of Barcelona servers available for sale? Knox: Right. And given what's been going on in the market, it's extremely critical that people understand that. We have had a number of launches in the past, I'll point to Intel's Clovertown launch as an example. They launched Clovertown and I think it was less than 10 percent of their product mix two quarters later. That says to me it wasn't really a quick ramp, product wasn't readily available. Our goal here is to get Barcelona out, and get it into the market as quickly as possible.
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October unveiling alongside AMD dualie Athlon 64 FX
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AMD has been demonstrating the industryâs first x86 dual-core processor at its Austin facilities on an HP ProLiant DL585 server powered by four dual-core Opteron processors manufactured on 90nm SOI process technology, the company announced today.
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All funded up with somewhere to go In an apparent response to our story yesterday, Azul Systems today announced the completion of a $40m funding round. The Java server appliance start-up stressed that "top tier" investors participated in the funding, including Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, ComVentures, Credit Suisse, JVax Investment Group, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners. "All existing investors in the company participated in the financing."â¦
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(InfoWorld) - AMD on Monday is giving the public an advanced look at how its pending quad-core chip will improve performance and save energy. AMD, playing catch-up to rival Intel, whoseÂ quad-core XeonÂ product launched in 2006, will discuss features of its quad-core product, code-named Barcelona, at the International Solid States Circuits Conference in San Francisco, a forum for engineers in solid state circuitry and system-on-a-chip processor design. AMD says it will present details at the conference of how Barcelona, due to be released in mid-2007, improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition and over its own dual-core processor, the Opteron, which it introduced in 2003. Barcelona will feature "Enhanced PowerNow" technology, which will dynamically adjust core frequencies as workloads change in order to power down cores when not needed to save energy, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for Opteron. Under the PowerNow technology already deployed in the dual-core Opteron, the OS delivers the needed power to the busiest core, but if the other core is not as busy, it will still receive the voltage demanded of the busiest core, Kerby said. But with Enhanced PowerNow, while the busiest core will receive the power it needs, the OS will reduce the frequency and voltage of the remaining cores because they aren't as busy. "We still see power savings with our current PowerNow technology, but it's going to get better with Barcelona because we're going to be able to dynamically and independently adjust the core frequencies of each individual core," he said. Also in Barcelona, the OS will directly communicate with the CPU instead of first going through the CPU driver, a more efficient approach, he said. "With Barcelona, there is no CPU driver middleman. The OS can tell the processor directly, 'Hey this is how much work I'm doing,' and the Barcelona core will determine when the best time is to make that change. It's not doing it blindly," he said. Barcelona also separates the power management of the cores from that of the memory controller, which is embedded in AMD-designed processors. That way, frequency and voltage can be reduced to the cores when they are not busy and increased to the memory controller when it is busy, and vice versa. AMD claims an 80 percent reduction in memory controller power usage with this design change. Barcelona will also feature enhanced clock-gating, which means core logic circuits can be turned on or off to save power. Like settings on a coffee grinder, the chip can do "coarse" or "fine" clock gating, shutting down increasingly finer sections of core logic as needed. AMD claims that Barcelona can deliver a 40 percent improvement in performance over "the competition." While not mentioning Intel's Xeon specifically, AMD has long pointed out that its quad-core chip will be four cores designed on the same piece of silicon, while Intel's design is two dual-core processors packaged together.
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Sivar writes &quot;Ace&#39;s Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the &quot;Slowaris&quot; moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System).
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Both GPUs built on TSMC's 110nm process, reportedly
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AMD is releasing nine versions of its new Quad-Core Opteron server chip, code-named Barcelona.
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(InfoWorld) - Server makers are showing their first systems based on Advanced Micro Devices'Â upcoming quad-core Opteron chip, known as Barcelona. Barcelona servers from Supermicro Computer, Tyan Computer, and Uniwide TechnologiesÂ are on show at Taipei's annual Computex exhibition, which started Tuesday. The appearance of the chips, which are scheduled to ship later this year, signals they are getting closer to the market. Detailed specifications of the chips and servers on display were not immediately available. AMD is counting on Barcelona to boost its sales, and market share, in the face ofÂ heated competition from rival Intel. Barcelona, which is manufactured using a 65-nanometer process, contains four processor cores on a single piece of silicon. By comparison, Intel's quad-core chips use two pieces of silicon, each containing two cores, strapped together inside a single package. AMD claims its design gives Barcelona a significant boost in performance -- as much as 50 percent to 80 percent -- over its current Opteron chips. Uniwide and Supermicro are showing Barcelona systems that take advantage of a power-saving feature of the chip. Called Dual Dynamic Power Management, this allows the processor cores and on-chip memory controller to draw power separately, which AMD said allows better performance and power management. AMD also promised an easy upgrade path for existing Opteron customers. Motherboards that support current Opteron chips can be upgraded for the quad-core chips by updating the BIOS. Dual-core chips can then be swapped for quad-core Barcelona processors, which use the same chipsets and processor sockets. Tyan and Asustek ComputerÂ are among the companies making upgradeable motherboards.
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InfoWorld - Azul Systems Inc. is doubling the capacity of its &quot;computing appliance,&quot; a device that uses multiple multicore processors and is a departure from the typical server-based approach to large scale computing.
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Nvidia is supplying graphics drivers for Solaris-based workstations that use x86 chips such as Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron.