Intel to build flash drives into servers
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Intel will speed servers by building in flash-memory drives beginning in 2008, Intel exec says: Less capacity, but faster communications.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices has released further details of its Torrenza project, which will one day allow server manufacturers to optimize servers for specific tasks by placing accelerator chips right on the motherboard. SinceÂ unveiling TorrenzaÂ in June, AMD has been working on the specifications of a new physical interface that chip manufacturers can use to develop custom accelerator chips that will plug into a server motherboard, alongside or in place of an AMD processor, said Doug O'Flaherty, AMD's divisional manager for acceleration strategy. That interface, the Torrenza Innovation Socket, will use the same 1207-pin Revision F socket that AMD is using for its latest generation of Opteron chips, and will communicate with the main processor using a HyperTransport connection, O'Flaherty said. HyperTransport is a specification for high-speed communications between chips or circuit boards, proposed by AMD and now managed by the HyperTransport Consortium. AMD also announced that the project had won the support of six server manufacturers: Cray, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. "We have exposed our road map in great detail to [equipment manufacturers]," O'Flaherty said. "We are expecting some of the first pieces of the platform in the latter half of 2007." Server manufacturers could use the interface to add chips to speed up the processing of XML (Extensible Markup Language) or floating-point calculations, or even to improve gaming performance with a physics accelerator, said Giuseppe Amato, AMD's technical director sales and marketing for Europe. Such accelerators are already available for some applications as add-in PCI Express cards, he said. Manufacturers of accelerator chips will be able to improve their performance further by moving them closer to the main processor and connecting them via the Torrenza Innovation Socket. "It's close to PCI Express. The physical layer changes, but the protocol is PCI Express," he said.
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Desperate Danbury IDF Intel's next-generation 'Eaglelake' chipset family, due for release next year, will feature a built-in data protection engine with the ability to encrypt all the files on your hard drive, the chip giant announced this week.â¦
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Superfast servers with Intel's new quad-core Xeon 5300 processor coming in January.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel Corp. on Tuesday provided a few more details about future plans for its enterprise server processors, but the company maintained its silence on its plans for an upcoming dual-core Xeon processor, which it has promised as the next major follow-up to the Nocona chip it launched in August.
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Upgrade to high-performance server will include AMD's dual-core chip.
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Flash memory maker next week to announce a product to help businesses manage and control the use of USB drives.
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Dell will provide an enterprise networked server infrastructure consisting of dual Intel Xeon and four-way Intel Itanium processor-based PowerEdge servers.
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New "Tulsa" chip for high-end x86 servers takes on Advanced Micro Devices with onboard cache memory.
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Intel will embed solid-state storage drives in its upcoming platform for ultramobile PCs, aiming to meet increased storage requirements for users on the go.The Z-P140 PATA solid-state storage drives (SSDs) will be provided as an optional module to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to embed on motherboards made for the Menlow platform. The platform, designed for ultramobile PCs, also includes the Silverthorne processor and Poulsbo chipset. Menlow-based devices will ship in the first half of 2008, product line manager Don Larson said Friday at an event in San Francisco.The tiny SSD chip, which weighs only 0.6 grams, will be available in capacities of 2G bytes and 4G bytes. The on-board storage capacity will be expandable up to 16G bytes with four SSDs connected to a standard PATA (parallel advanced technology attachment) interface that links the drives, Larson said. SSDs consume less power than hard drives because they have no moving parts, so they are ideal for mobile devices, Larson said.The storage capacity of the storage modules could grow to 64G bytes in two years, said Troy Winslow, marketing manager at Intel.Intel said it will display ultramobile PCs based on the Menlow architecture from vendors including Asus, BenQ and Lenovo at the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas in January. The Menlow platform, announced at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing in April, will be followed in 2009 by the Moorestown platform, which Intel detailed in September.Moorestown will be an SOC (system-on-chip) design that packs a CPU, graphics processor, video, and a memory controller into a single chip. It will be more power-efficient than Menlow devices, according to Intel.The company also previewed the next-generation Centrino platform, which will include a power-efficient Core 2 Duo processor manufactured using the 45-nm process, and Intel&#39;s GM965 Express chipset. The new mobile platform will deliver better processor performance and include new instruction sets to enhance the video-viewing experience on notebooks, Intel said.
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Intel is expected to detail Tukwila, its next generation of 64-bit Itanium processors that are used in enterprise servers.
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IBM plans to offer solid state drive technology from SanDisk Corp. as a data storage option for its Intel-based high-end blade server.
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Intel has doubled the capacity of phase-change memory, a likely replacement for flash.
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Intel is taking over the team of 300 designers who work on Itanium chips for use in HP servers. An official announcement from the companies is expected Thursday, according to a person familiar with the plans.
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Breaking the speed barrier of traditional flash memory, Intel and Micron Thursday announced a new flash memory architecture that increases the data transfer rates in consumer electronics by cutting the bottlenecks affecting conventional NAND flash memory.IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, has developed an 8Gb SLC (single-level cell) high-speed NAND chip which can reach read speeds up to 200MBps and write speeds of up to 100MBps, which could mean faster data transfer between devices like solid-state drives and video cards.&quot;With the popularity of digital video cameras and video-on-demand services, high speed NAND can enable a high-definition movie to be transferred five times faster than conventional NAND,&quot; said Kirstin Bordner, a spokeswoman for Micron.Conventional NAND flash memory from Micron and other players currently transfer data at read rates of 40MBps, with write rates of about 20MBps.The speed improvements resulted from changes made to the NAND architecture and improvements in the read-write circuitry, Bordner said.This chip&#39;s architecture achieves the speed defined in the ONFI (Open NAND Flash Interface) 2.0 specification, according to Micron. Micron was one of the founders of the ONFI Working Group in 2006, and other member companies include Hynix Semiconductor, Intel, Phison Electronics, Sony and STMicroelectronics.Micron is now sampling the high-speed NAND component, with mass production expected to commence in the second half of 2008, the company said.Products based on the ONFI 2.0 specification have been under development and were expected, said Joseph Unsworth, a principal analyst at Gartner.&quot;It wasn&#39;t anything that wasn&#39;t expected. We knew that it was coming out,&quot; Unsworth said.The technology could see an immediate future for use in video and high-end photography devices that require flash memory with quick transfer speeds and reliable data retention, Unsworth said. However, it will be priced at a premium and only multimedia enthusiasts looking for high-performance flash memory would be willing buyers, Unsworth said.As prices stabilize, it will reach mainstream devices like MP3 players and digital cameras, but that could be a long time away, he said.The new flash technology from Micron and Intel could also face competition from Samsung and Toshiba, the world&#39;s top flash vendors, who combined represent 60 percent of products supplied in the NAND flash market. The two companies last year signed an agreement to share specifications to develop faster and more robust NAND interfaces, Unsworth said.While both factions will ultimately deliver high-performance flash technology to consumers, they need to unite under one banner to ease the development of high-speed flash technology. The market is split in half, and it needs one standard voice to simplify the development of flash memory for manufacturers, Unsworth said.
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Intel will join with STMicroelectronics, a Swiss semiconductor maker, to form a new company to sell flash memory chips.
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The new NAND chip design will increase throughput up to 5X