Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, speaking during the San Diego semiconductor companys annual analyst day in New York, said Qualcomm is currently working with Microsoft to ensure that the upcoming Windows 8 operating system will run on its ARM-based Snapdragon SoCs.
Windows 8 is a’comin’ down the street. And I bet you’ll see it sooner rather than later. Maybe as early as June on some products. The reason of course is the Tablet Market is sucking all the air out of the room and Microsoft needs a win to keep the mindshare favorable to it’s view of the consumer computer market. Part of that drive is fostering a new level of cooperation with System on chip manufacturers who until now have been devoted to the mobile phone, smart phone market. Now everyone wants a great big Microsoft hope to conquer the Apple iPad in the tablet market. And this may be their only hope to accomplish that in the coming year.
Forrester Research just 2 days ago however predicted the Windows 8 Tablet dead on arrival:
Image via CrunchBase
IDG News Service – Interest in tablets with Microsoft’s Windows 8 is plummeting, Forrester Research said in a study released on Tuesday.
Key to making a mark in the tablet computing market is content, content, content. Performance and specs alone will not create a Windows 8 Tablet market in what is an Apple dominated tablet marketplace, as the article says. It also appears previous players in the failed PC Tablet market will make a valiant second attempt this time using Windows 8 (I’m thinking Fujitsu, HP and Dell according to this article).
Image via Wikipedia: Tile64 mesh network processor from Tilera
Image via CrunchBase
So Intel gets an interview with a Conde-Nast writer for a sub-blog of Wired.com. I doubt too many purchasers or data center architects consult Cloudline@Wired.com. But all the same, I saw through many thinly veiled bits of handwaving and old saws from Intel saying, “Yes, this exists but we’re already addressing it with our exiting product lines,. . .” So, I wrote in a comment to this very article. Especially regarding a throw-away line mentioning the ‘future’ of the data center and the direction the Data Center and Cloud Computing market was headed. However the moderator never published the comment. In effect, I raised the Question: Whither Tilera? And the Quanta SM-2 server based on the Tilera Chip?
Aren’t they exactly what is described by the author John Stokes as a network of cores on a chip? And given the scale of Tilera’s own product plans going into the future and the fact they are not just concentrating on Network gear but actual Compute Clouds too, I’d say both Stokes and Walcyzk are asking the wrong questions and directing our attention in the wrong direction. This is not a PR battle but a flat out technology battle. You cannot win this with words and white papers but in fact it requires benchmarks and deployments and Case Histories. Technical merit and superior technology will differentiate the players in the Cloud in a Box race. And this hasn’t been the case in the past as Intel has battled AMD in the desktop consumer market. In the data center Intel Fear Uncertainty and Doubt is the only weapon they have.
And I’ll quote directly from John Stokes’s article here describing EXACTLY the kind of product that Tilera has been shipping already:
“Instead of Xeon with virtualization, I could easily see a many-core Atom or ARM cluster-on-a-chip emerging as the best way to tackle batch-oriented Big Data workloads. Until then, though, it’s clear that Intel isn’t going to roll over and let ARM just take over one of the hottest emerging markets for compute power.”
The key phrase here is cluster on a chip, in essence exactly what Tilera has strived to achieve with its Tilera64 based architecture. To review from previous blog entries of this website following the announcements and timelines published by Tilera:
The ARM RISC processor is getting true 64-bit processing and memory addressing – removing the last practical barrier to seeing an army of ARM chips take a run at the desktops and servers that give Intel and AMD their moolah.
The downside to this announcement is the timeline ARM lays out for the first generation chips to use the new Vers. 8 architecture. Due to limited demand, as ARM defines it, chips will not be shipping until 2013 or as late as 2014. However according to this Register article the existing IT Data center infrastructure will not adopt ANY ARM-based chips until they are designed as a 64-bit clean architecture. Sounds like a potential for a chicken and egg scenario except ARM will get that Egg out the door on schedule with TMSC as it’s test chip partner. Some other details that come from the article include that the top end ARM-15 chip just announced already addresses more than 32-bits of Memory through a workaround that allows enterprising programmers to address as many as 40bits of memory if they need it. The best argument made for the real market need of 64-bit Memory addressing is for programmers currently on different chip architectures who might want to port their apps to ARM. THEY are are the real target market for the Vers. 8 architecture, and will have a much easier time porting over to another chip architecture that has the same level of memory addressing capability (64-bits all around).
As for companies like Calxeda who are adopting the ARM-15 architecture and the current ARM-8 Cortex chips (both of which fall under the previous gen. vers. 7 architecture), 32-bits of memory (4Gbytes in total) is enough to get by depending on the application being run. Highly parallel apps or simple things like single threaded webservers will perform well under these circumstances, according to The Register. And I am inclined to believe this based on current practices of Data Center giants like Facebook and Google (virtualization is sacrificed for massively parallel architectures). Also given the plans folks like Calxeda have for hardware interconnects, the ability off all those low power 32-bit chips all communicating with one another holds a lot of promise too. I’m still curious to see if Calxeda can come up with a unique product utilizing the 64-bit ARM vers. 8 architecture when the chip finally is taped out and test chips are shipped out my TMSC.
Calxeda is producing 4-core, 32-bit, ARM-based system-on-chip SOC designs, developed from ARMs Cortex A9. It says it can deliver a server node with a thermal envelope of less than 5 watts. In the summer it was designing an interconnect to link thousands of these things together. A 2U rack enclosure could hold 120 server nodes: thats 480 cores.
The first attempt at making an OEM compute node from Calxeda
HP signing on as a OEM for Calxeda designed equipment is going to push ARM based massively parallel server designs into a lot more data centers. Add to this the announcement of the new ARM-15 cpu and it’s timeline for addressing 64-bit memory and you have a battle royale going up against Intel. Currently the Intel Xeon is the preferred choice for applications requiring large amounts of DRAM to hold whole databases and Memcached webpages for lightning quick fetches. On the other end of the scale is the low per watt 4 core ARM chips dissipating a mere 5 watts. Intel is trying to drive down the Thermal Design Point for their chips even resorting to 64bit Atom chips to keep the Memory Addressing advantage. But the timeline for decreasing the Thermal Design Point doesn’t quite match up to the ARM x64 timeline. So I suspect ARM will have the advantage as will Calxeda for quite some time to come.
While I had hoped the recen ARM-15 announcement was also going to usher in a fully 64-bit capable cpu, it will at least be able to fake larger size memory access. The datapath I remember being quoted was 40-bits wide and that can be further extended using software. And it doesn’t seem to have discouraged HP at all who are testing the Calxeda designed prototype EnergyCore evaluation board. This is all new territory for both Calxeda and HP so a fully engineered and designed prototype is absolutely necessary to get this project off the ground. My hope is HP can do a large scale test and figure out some of the software configuration optimization that needs to occur to gain an advantage in power savings, density and speed over an Intel Atom server (like SeaMicro).
The number of U.S. government requests for data on Google users for use in criminal investigations rose 29 percent in the last six months, according to data released by the search giant Monday.
Not good news in imho. The reason being is the mission creep and abuses that come with absolute power in the form of a National Security Letter. The other part of the equation is Google’s business model runs opposite to the idea of protecting people’s information. If you disagree, I ask that you read this blog post from Christopher Soghoian, where he details just what exactly it is Google does when it keeps all your data unencrypted in its data centers. In order to sell AdWords and serve advertisements to you, Google needs to keep everything open and unencrypted. At the same time they aren’t too casual in their stewardship of your data, but they do respond to law enforcement requests for customer data. To quote Seghoian at the end of his blog entry:
“The end result is that law enforcement agencies can, and regularly do request user data from the company — requests that would lead to nothing if the company put user security and privacy first.”
And that indeed is the moral of the story. Which leaves everyone asking what’s the alternative? Earlier in the same story the blame is placed square on the end-user for not protecting themselves. Encryption tools for email and personal documents have been around for a long time. And often there are commercial products available to help accomplish some level of privacy even for so-called Cloud hosted data. But the friction point is always going to be the level of familiarity, ease of use and cost of the product before it is as widely used and adopted as Webmail has been since the advent of desktop email clients like Eudora.
So if you really have concerns, take action, don’t wait for Google to act to defend your rights. Encrypt your email, your documents and make Google one bit less culpable for any law enforcement requests that may or may not include your personal data.
The test chip will be fabbed at TSMC on its next-generation 20nm process, a full node reduction ~50% transistor scaling over its 28nm process. With the first 28nm ARM based products due out from TSMC in 2012, this 20nm tape-out announcement is an important milestone but were still around two years away from productization.
Image by Route79 via Flickr (Now that's scary isn't it! Boo!)
Happy Halloween! And like most years there are some tricks up ARM’s sleeve announced this past week along with some partnerships that should make things trickier for the Engineers trying to equip ever more energy efficient and dense Data Centers the world over.
It’s been announced, the ARM15 is coming to market some time in the future. Albeit a ways off yet. And it’s going to be using a really narrow design rule to insure it’s as low power as it possibly can be. I know manufacturers of the massively parallel compute cloud in a box will be seeking out this chip as soon as samples can arrive. The 64bit version of ARM15 is the real potential jewel in the crown for Calxeda who is attempting to balance low power and 64bit performance in the same design.
I can’t wait to see the first benchmarks of these chips apart from the benchmarks from the first shipping product Calxeda can get out with the ARM15 x64. Also note just this week Hewlett-Packard has signed on to sell designs by Calxeda in forth coming servers targeted at Energy Efficient Data Center build-outs. So more news to come regarding that partnership and you can read it right here @ Carpetbomberz.com
Qualcomm remains the only active player in the smartphone/tablet space that uses its architecture license to put out custom designs. The benefit to a custom design is typically better power and performance characteristics compared to the more easily synthesizable designs you get directly from ARM. The downside is development time and costs go up tremendously.
I’m very curious to see how the different ARM based processors fair against one anther in each successive generation. Especially the move to ARM-15 (x64) none of which will see a quick implementation on a handheld mobile device. ARM-15 is a long ways off yet, but it appears in spite of the next big thing in ARM designed cores, there’s a ton of incremental improvements and evolutionary progress being made on current generation ARM cores. ARM-8 and ARM-9 have a lot of life in them for the foreseeable future including die shrinks that allow either faster clock speeds or constant clock speeds and lower power drain and lower Thermal Design Point (TDP).
Apple’s also going steadily towards the die shrink in order to cement current gains made in it’s A5 chip design too. Taiwan Manfucturing Semi-Conductor (TMSC) is the biggest partner in this direction and is attempting to run the next iteration of Apple mobile processors on its state of the art 22 nanometer design rule process.
The FeTRAMs are similar to state-of-the-art ferroelectric random access memories, FeRAMs, which are in commercial use but represent a relatively small part of the overall semiconductor market. Both use ferroelectric material to store information in a nonvolatile fashion, but unlike FeRAMS, the new technology allows for nondestructive readout, meaning information can be read without losing it.
I’m always pleasantly surprised to read that work is still being done on alternate materials for Random Access Memory (RAM). I was following closely developments in the category of ferroelectric RAM by folks like Samsung and HP. Very few of these products promised enough return on investment to be developed into products. And some notable efforts by big manufacturers were abandoned altogether.
If this research effort can be licensed to a big chip manufacturer and not turned into a form of patent trolling ammunition I would feel the effort was not wasted. I think too often most recently these patented technologies are not used as a means of advancing the art of computer technology. Instead they are a portfolio to a litigator seeking rent on the patented technology.
Due to the frequency of abandoned projects in the alternative DRAM technology category, I’m hoping the compatibility of this chip’s manufacturing process with existing chip making technology will be a big step forward. A paradigm shifting technology like magnetic RAM might just push us to the next big mountain top of power conservation, performance and capability that the CPU enjoyed from 1969 to roughly 2005 when chip speeds began to plateau.
In the enterprise segment where 1U and 2U servers are common, PCI Express SSDs are very attractive. You may not always have a ton of 2.5″ drive bays but theres usually at least one high-bandwidth PCIe slot unused. The RevoDrive family of PCIe SSDs were targeted at the high-end desktop or workstation market, but for an enterprise-specific solution OCZ has its Z-Drive line.
Anandtech is breaking new ground covering some Enterprise level segments of the Solid State Disk industry. While I doubt he’ll be doing ratings of Violin and Texas Memory Systems gear very soon, the OCZ low end Enterprise PCIe cards is still beginning to approach that target. We’re talking $10,000 USD and up for anyone who wants to participate. Which puts it in the middle to high end of Fusion-io and barely touches the lower end of Violin and TMS not to mention Virident. Given that, it is still wild to see what kind of architecture and performance optimization one gets for the money they pay. SandForce rules the day at OCZ for anything requiring the top speeds for write performance. It’s also interesting to find out about the SandForce 25xx series use of super-capacitors to hold enough reserve power to flush the write caches on a power outage. It’s expensive, but moves the product up a few notches in the Enterprise level reliability scale.
Amazon EC2 and other cloud services are expanding the market for high-performance computing. Without access to a national lab or a supercomputer in your own data center, cloud computing lets businesses spin up temporary clusters at will and stop paying for them as soon as the computing needs are met.
If you own your Data Center, you might be a little nervous right now as even a Data Center can be outsourced on an as needed basis. Especially if you are doing scientific computing you should consider the fixed costs of acquiring and maintaining those sunk, capital costs after the cluster is up and running. This story provides one great example of what I think the Cloud Computer could one day become. Rent-a-Center style data centers and compute clusters seem like an incredible value especially for a University but even more so for a business that may not need a to keep a real live data center under their control. Examples abound as even online services like Drop Box lease their compute cycles from the likes of Amazon Web Services and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). And if migrating an application into a Data Center along with the data set to be analyzed can be sped up sufficiently and the cost kept down, who knows what might be possible.
Opportunity costs are many when it comes to having access to a sufficiently large number of nodes in a compute cluster. Mostly with modeling applications, you get to run a simulation at finer time slices, at higher resolution possibly gaining a better understanding of how close your algorithms match the real world. This isn’t just for business but for science as well and I think being saddled with a typical Data Center installation and it’s infrastructure and depreciation costs along with staffing make it seem less attractive if the big Data Center providers are willing to sell part of their compute cycles at a reasonable rate. The best part is you can shop around too. In the bad old days of batch computing and the glassed in data center, before desktops and mini-computers people were dying to get access to the machine and run their jobs. Now the surplus of computing cycles is so great for the big players, they help subsidize the costs of build-outs and redundancies by letting people bid of the spare compute cycles they have just lying around generating heat. It’s a whole new era of compute cycle auctions and I for one am dying to see more stories like this in the future.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 