If motherboard and server maker Super Micro is some kind of leading indicator - and a good argument could be made that it is - then the server and PC rackets may indeed be on the mend.
In the company's second quarter of fiscal 2010 ended December 31, Super Micro reported sales of $182m, up a stunning 41.5 per cent from the year-ago quarter. Thanks to tighter cost controls - a little less on research and development, and a bit more for sales, marketing, and other costs - Super Micro was able to boost net income by 42.2 per cent to $7.6m.
Thanks in large part to the rebounding server business, where Super Micro sells a dizzying array of motherboards for the latest chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Super Micro has been able to increase its cash and equivalents pile by 17.1 per cent to $82.7m; it also has $6.2m in long-term investments.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/02/super_micro_q2_f22010_numbers/
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Intel Ships Next-generation Itanium Chip
Intel on Tuesday said it has started shipping its new Itanium processor codenamed Tukwila, after multiple delays and development problems stalled its release for years.
Itanium chips are 64-bit processors designed to run fault-tolerant servers that require high uptime. The chip's official launch is set for the first quarter of this year, Intel said in a blog entry.
Tukwila is Intel's fastest Itanium processor yet, the company said. It adds numerous performance and architectural enhancements to boost system performance, Intel said in the blog.
"Tukwila more than doubles the performance of its predecessor and adds a range of new scalability, reliability, and virtualization features," Intel wrote. The chip includes a quad-core design and will be an upgrade of the current Itanium 9100 series of chips, codenamed Montecito, which were introduced in 2006.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/188381/intel_ships_nextgeneration_itanium_chip.html
Itanium chips are 64-bit processors designed to run fault-tolerant servers that require high uptime. The chip's official launch is set for the first quarter of this year, Intel said in a blog entry.
Tukwila is Intel's fastest Itanium processor yet, the company said. It adds numerous performance and architectural enhancements to boost system performance, Intel said in the blog.
"Tukwila more than doubles the performance of its predecessor and adds a range of new scalability, reliability, and virtualization features," Intel wrote. The chip includes a quad-core design and will be an upgrade of the current Itanium 9100 series of chips, codenamed Montecito, which were introduced in 2006.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/188381/intel_ships_nextgeneration_itanium_chip.html
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Brits choose Altix UV supers to fight cancer
The Altix UV massively parallel supers might not be shipping until the third quarter of this year, but Silicon Graphics is lining up customers who want to get the box early. The latest customer to ink a deal for an Altix UV is the United Kingdom's Institute of Cancer Research.
Because Intel has yet to launch the "Beckton" eight-core Nehalem-EX processors that are the compute engines in the Altix UV machines, the details are a bit sketchy on exactly what ICR is buying, and the organization did not divulge what systems it currently has in place in Reading, where ICR does research and simulations to come up with new treatments for a variety of cancers.
ICR was founded in 1909 and is a college in the University of London. It is partnered with the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. According to ICR's 2009-2015 strategic planning report, the researchers laboring at the facility were the first to figure out that DNA damage causes cancer and figured out the link between smoking and lung cancer. ICR has drilled down deeper into the cell genetics to find out what genes are associated with which cancers, leading to earlier detection, and it has synthesized chemotherapy drugs and tweaked radiotherapy techniques so they are less toxic and more effective.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/sgi_altix_uv_icr/
Because Intel has yet to launch the "Beckton" eight-core Nehalem-EX processors that are the compute engines in the Altix UV machines, the details are a bit sketchy on exactly what ICR is buying, and the organization did not divulge what systems it currently has in place in Reading, where ICR does research and simulations to come up with new treatments for a variety of cancers.
ICR was founded in 1909 and is a college in the University of London. It is partnered with the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. According to ICR's 2009-2015 strategic planning report, the researchers laboring at the facility were the first to figure out that DNA damage causes cancer and figured out the link between smoking and lung cancer. ICR has drilled down deeper into the cell genetics to find out what genes are associated with which cancers, leading to earlier detection, and it has synthesized chemotherapy drugs and tweaked radiotherapy techniques so they are less toxic and more effective.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/sgi_altix_uv_icr/
Monday, January 18, 2010
Intel Expects More Enterprise Dollars in 2010
Despite a super-positive fourth-quarter earnings call, Intel wasn't very pleased with enterprise spending in 2009, instead noting that consumers drove the company's revenue up.
"It was not a robust year in the enterprise," said Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel.
Otellini also expects that to change in 2010 while Intel does its part in helping push the corporate market. Not only will Intel release its eight-core Nehalem EX Xeon processor for servers with four or more sockets, but the chip maker also plans to replace every chip in its server portfolio with 32nm Westmere parts, and do so within the next 90 days, Otellini said.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/maximum_it/intel_expects_more_enterprise_dollars_2010
"It was not a robust year in the enterprise," said Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel.
Otellini also expects that to change in 2010 while Intel does its part in helping push the corporate market. Not only will Intel release its eight-core Nehalem EX Xeon processor for servers with four or more sockets, but the chip maker also plans to replace every chip in its server portfolio with 32nm Westmere parts, and do so within the next 90 days, Otellini said.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/maximum_it/intel_expects_more_enterprise_dollars_2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Intel to release Westmere server chips in three months
Intel plans to release next-generation Xeon server processors based on the Westmere microarchitecture in the next three months, the company said on Thursday.
Intel plans to refresh its line of Xeon server chips as it ramps up chip production to the 32-nanometer process, said Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, during a financial earnings call. Intel last week released the first Westmere chips for desktops and laptops, and Xeon server chips are next in line, Otellini said.
The last refresh for server chips was in March last year, when the company announced a range of Xeon 5500 series and 3500 series chips based on the Nehalem architecture. The chips were made using the 45-nm process.
The highly anticipated eight-core Nehalem-EX server chip will also be released in the first half, an Intel spokesman said on Thursday. Nehalem-EX will be Intel's fastest server chip to date, Otellini said during the call. The chip will be manufactured using the 45-nm process.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/92819/intel-release-westmere-server-chips-three-months
Intel plans to refresh its line of Xeon server chips as it ramps up chip production to the 32-nanometer process, said Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, during a financial earnings call. Intel last week released the first Westmere chips for desktops and laptops, and Xeon server chips are next in line, Otellini said.
The last refresh for server chips was in March last year, when the company announced a range of Xeon 5500 series and 3500 series chips based on the Nehalem architecture. The chips were made using the 45-nm process.
The highly anticipated eight-core Nehalem-EX server chip will also be released in the first half, an Intel spokesman said on Thursday. Nehalem-EX will be Intel's fastest server chip to date, Otellini said during the call. The chip will be manufactured using the 45-nm process.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/92819/intel-release-westmere-server-chips-three-months
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Intel Sees Strong Q4, Fueled by New Products, Consumer Demand
Otellini also said Intel was planning to refresh its entire line of server portfolio with 32-nm processors, and noted the improvements in performance and energy efficiency in the company’s upcoming eight-core “Nehalem EX” processor for servers with four or more sockets.
“Nehalem EX represents the biggest increase in performance in the history of the Xeon brand,” he said.
Otellini said he expects enterprises will see some of the pressure being taken off their budgets, and that unlike in 2009, they will have good reason to refresh their hardware, whether it’s servers or PCs. Still, neither he nor Smith would venture any predictions for corporate spending in 2010.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Intel-Sees-Strong-Q4-Fueled-by-New-Products-Consumer-Demand-535284/
“Nehalem EX represents the biggest increase in performance in the history of the Xeon brand,” he said.
Otellini said he expects enterprises will see some of the pressure being taken off their budgets, and that unlike in 2009, they will have good reason to refresh their hardware, whether it’s servers or PCs. Still, neither he nor Smith would venture any predictions for corporate spending in 2010.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Intel-Sees-Strong-Q4-Fueled-by-New-Products-Consumer-Demand-535284/
Saturday, January 9, 2010
AMD's Server Roadmap Plots a Course for HPC
Our recent coverage of AMD's Financial Analyst Day outlined the chipmaker's overall server strategy for the next couple of years, but left a lot to the imagination with regard to how all this might play out in the high performance computing space. The presentation for the analysts barely acknowledged the HPC market, instead emphasizing AMD's main thrusts in the mainstream server and client segments. In a more recent conversation with John Fruehe, AMD's director of product marketing for the server and embedded group, we were able to get a better idea of how the company sees its HPC prospects for 2010 and beyond.
One might wonder how much AMD -- or Intel, for that matter -- thinks about the HPC market these days. Despite a better growth rate than the mainstream server market, HPC still only represents between 2 to 10 percent of server chip revenue, depending on who you talk to. In the commodity chip business, that's too small a segment to inspire separate processor designs, but too big to ignore. "The beauty of HPC," says Fruehe, "is that you have an opportunity to sell large numbers of processors in a single shot." According to him, that is reason enough to stay in the game.
And in any case, many mainstream enterprise applications require essentially the same performance characteristics as HPC workloads: large numbers of fast cores and high memory bandwidth. The soon-to-be-released 45nm Magny-Cours Opteron sports 8 or 12 cores and four memory channels. That design, says Fruehe, is well-suited to HPC workloads, and he believes it will help them capture more of the server market in 2010. Magny-Cours' current competition is the quad-core Nehalem EP, which has three memory channels, and the 8-core Nehalem EX that can support up to eight sockets. The idea is that Magny-Cours will outrun Nehalem EP on memory bandwidth and out-compete Nehalem EX on price and power consumption.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/AMDs-Server-Roadmap-Plots-a-Course-for-HPC-80909942.html
One might wonder how much AMD -- or Intel, for that matter -- thinks about the HPC market these days. Despite a better growth rate than the mainstream server market, HPC still only represents between 2 to 10 percent of server chip revenue, depending on who you talk to. In the commodity chip business, that's too small a segment to inspire separate processor designs, but too big to ignore. "The beauty of HPC," says Fruehe, "is that you have an opportunity to sell large numbers of processors in a single shot." According to him, that is reason enough to stay in the game.
And in any case, many mainstream enterprise applications require essentially the same performance characteristics as HPC workloads: large numbers of fast cores and high memory bandwidth. The soon-to-be-released 45nm Magny-Cours Opteron sports 8 or 12 cores and four memory channels. That design, says Fruehe, is well-suited to HPC workloads, and he believes it will help them capture more of the server market in 2010. Magny-Cours' current competition is the quad-core Nehalem EP, which has three memory channels, and the 8-core Nehalem EX that can support up to eight sockets. The idea is that Magny-Cours will outrun Nehalem EP on memory bandwidth and out-compete Nehalem EX on price and power consumption.
Read Full Article Here:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/AMDs-Server-Roadmap-Plots-a-Course-for-HPC-80909942.html
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