Fully agree, after the number of moves I went through prior to moving in with my girlfriend, I had pared down quite a bit. All my “stuff” could fit into my car. Which is exactly as it should be. If it can fit in your car, then you truly own it, it is YOURS.
As we clear out the house in order to move west, we’re processing a vast accumulation of things. This morning I hauled another dozen boxes of books from the attic, nearly all of which we’ll donate to the library. Why did I haul them up there in the first place? We brought them from our previous house, fourteen years ago. I could have spared myself a bunch of trips up and down the stairs by taking them directly to the library back then. But in 2000 we were only in the dawn of the era of dematerialization. You couldn’t count on being able to find a book online, search inside it, have a used copy shipped to you in a couple of days for a couple of dollars.
Now I am both shocked and liberated to realize how few things matter to me. I joke that all I really…
We don’t see infrequent blips of CPU architecture releases from Intel, we get a regular, 2-year tick-tock cadence. It’s time for Intel’s NSG to be given the resources necessary to do the same. I long for the day when we don’t just see these SSD releases limited to the enterprise and corporate client segments, but spread across all markets – from mobile to consumer PC client and of course up to the enterprise as well.
Big news in the SSD/Flash memory world at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan. Intel has entered the fray with Samsung and SandForce issuing a fully NVMe compliant set of drives running on PCIe cards. Throughputs are amazing, but the prices are overly competitive. You can enter the market for as low as $600 for a 400GB PCIe card running as an NVMe compliant drive. On Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 you get native support for NVMe drives. This is going to get really interesting. Especially considering all the markets and levels of consumers within the market. On the budget side is the SATA Express interface which is an attempt to factor out some of the slowness inherent in SSDs attached to SATA bus interfaces. Then there’s M.2 which is the smaller form factor PCIe based drive interface being adopted by manufacturers making light and small form factor tablets and laptops. That is a big jump past SATA altogether and also has a speed bump associated with it as it communicates directly with the PCIe bus. Last and most impressive of all is the NVMe devices announced by Intel with yet a further speed bump as it’s addressing multiple data lanes on PCI Express. Some concern trolls in the gaming community are quick to point out the data lanes are being lost to I/O when they already are maxing them out with their 3D graphics boards.
The route forward it seems would be Intel motherboard designs with a PCIe 3 interface with the equivalent data lanes for two full speed 16x graphics cards, but using that extra 16x lane to devote to I/O instead or maybe a 1.5X arrangement with a fully 16X lane and 2 more 8X lanes to handle regular I/O plus a dedicated 8X NVMe interface? It’s going to require some reengineering and BIOS updating no doubt to get all the speed out of all the devices simultaneously. That’s why I would also like to remind readers of the Flash-DIMM phenomenon as well sitting out there on the edges in the high speed, high frequency trading houses in the NYC metro area. We haven’t seen nor heard much since the original product announcement from IBM for the X6-series servers and the options for Flash-DIMMs on that product line. Smart Memory Technology (the prime designer/manufacturer of Flash-DIMMs for SanDisk) has now been bought out by SanDisk. Again now word on that product line now. Same is true for the Lenovo takeover of IBM’s Intel server product line (of which the X6-series is the jewel in the crown). Mergers and acquisitions have veiled and blunted some of these revolutionary product announcements, but I hope eventually that Flash-DIMMs see the light of day and gain full BIOS support and eventually make it into the Desktop computer market. As good as NVMe is going forward, I think we need too a mix of Flash-DIMM to see the full speed of the multi-core X86 Intel chips.
Combining the Kinect 3D realtime mapping with Oculus Rift 3D Goggles. This is pretty darned amazing. This is going to have huge applications in the Augmented Reality world. Can you imagine? Just do a 3D scan of the space, let the Kinect do the mapping, then pull the whole model into the Oculus Rift environment, and then you can start marking up/overlaying whatever objects, info, data that you want within that model. The more time it takes Oculus Rift to be released and marketed, the more potential applications people seem to invent for it.
Even though the SATA Express isn’t meant to be a long term architectural improvement over simple SATA or just PCIe drive interfaces, it is a step to help get more speed out of existing flash based SSDs. The lower cost is what drive manufacturers are attempting to address and attract chronic upgraders to adopt the new bus bridging technology. It’s not quite got the same design or longer term speed gains in the newer M.2 SATA spec, so be forewarned SATA Express may fall by the wayside. This is especially true if people understand the tech specs better and see through the marketing language aimed at the home brew computer DIY types. Those folks are very cost sensitive and unwilling to purchase based on specs alone, much less long term viability of a particular drive interface technology.
So if you are somewhat baffled why SSDs seem to max out at ~500MB/s read and write speeds, rest assured SATA Express might help. It’s cheap enough, but just be extra careful that both your drive and motherboard fully support the new interface at the BIOS level. That way you’ll see the speed gains you thought you would get by trading up. Longer term you might actually want to take a closer look at the most recent versions of the NVMe interface (PCI 3.0 with up to 8 PCI lanes being used simultaneously). NVMe is likely to be the longer term winner for SSD based interfaces. But the costs to date put it in the Data Center class purchasing area, not necessarily in the Desktop class. However Intel is releasing product with NVMe interfaces later this year with prices possibly as low ~$700 but the premium per Gigabyte of storage is still pretty high. Always use your best judgement and look at how long you plan on using the computer as is. If you know you’re going to be swapping at regular intervals, I say fine choose SATA Express today. Likely you will jump at the right time for the next best I/O drive interface as they hit the market. However if you’re thinking you’re going to stand and hold onto the current desktop as long as possible, take a long hard look at M.2 and the NVMe products coming out shortly.
If you are a LMS administrator, I want to personally thank you. I know that it is a job that rarely gets the recognition it deserves. I know that it is the first place someone goes when something goes wrong and yet, rarely appreciated when something goes right.
I feel your pain, I really do.
That said, you shouldn’t feel alone. Forget the anguish, because at this very instance someone out there is starting their first day as a LMS administrator. They may have been hired because of previous experience.
They may have been moved into the role from another role at the company. Heck, they may be doing another role and been told you have to do this, because of downsizing.
Regardless, they are entering the position either having the knowledge to succeed quickly or having nearly no knowledge and expecting the same.
Cavium will try to drive ARM SoCs into mainstream servers, challenging Intel’s Xeon x86 with a family of 28 nm devices using up to 48 2.5 GHz custom 64-bit ARM cores
Another entry into the massively multi-core low power server race. Since the fading of other competitors like Calxeda, SeaMicro there hasn’t been a lot of announcements or shipping products that promised to be the low-power vendor of choice. Each time an inventor or entrepreneur stepped up with a lower power or more core device, Intel would kind of blunt the advantage by doing a benchmark and claiming shutting cores off saves more power than using an inherently low power design. The race today as designed by Intel is race to sleep and that’s the benchmark by which they are measuring their own progress in the low power massively multi-core cpu market. However now Cavium is stepping up with an ARM based cpu with 48 cores. So let’s find out what we can about this new chip from this EE Times article.
It appears the manufacturing partner for this new product is Gigabyte who are creating a 2-socket motherboard for the 48-core ARM based CPU. The 48-core cpu is ARMv.8 based and addresses 64bits, so large amounts of RAM can be used with this architecture (a failing of past products from previous manufacturers attempting ARM based servers). Cavium has network processors in the market already using MIPS based CPUs and this new architecture using ARM based chips tries to leverage a lot of their expertise in the network processor market. Architecturally the motherboard interfaces and protocols are still in place, with only a cpu swap being the most noticeable difference. To Cavium is primarily known as a network processor manufacturer, but this move could push them into large scale data cloud type applications, with a tight binding to network operations supplied by their existing network processor products. Dates are still a little hazy, with the end of the calendar year being the most likely time a product has been developed, tested, manufactured and shipped.
I’m so happy to see the pressure being kept up in this one niche of computing. I still think ARM-based CPUs with massive amounts of cores being a new growth area. Similarly the move to 64bits takes away one of the last impediments most buyers pointed out when folks like Calxeda tried to market their wares into the data centers. Bit by bit, each attempt by each startup and each design outfit gets a little closer to a competitive product that might yet go up against the mighty Intel Xeon multi-core cpu.
“a little bit”? Howzabout a lotta bit. Like this is the solution looking for a problem. Same too, the self-driving car. Dean Kamen invented, developed and marketed the Segway as a revolution in human mobility and transportation. Google is touting the self-driving car as a revolution in human mobility and transportation. Google Glass is being touted as a revolution in mobile computing even as the mobile phone is still evolving. I don’t think the understand just what it is they DO here. They sell advertising and mine BIG DATA. That’s ’bout it.
Audrey Watters Media Predicts 2011 (Photo credit: @Photo.)
We can reclaim the Web and more broadly ed-tech for teaching and learning. But we must reclaim control of the data, content, and knowledge we create. We are not resources to be mined. Learners do not enter our schools and in our libraries to become products for the textbook industry and the testing industry and the technology industry and the ed-tech industry to profit from.
Really philosophical article about what it is Higher Ed is trying to do here. It’s not just about student portfolios, it’s Everything. It is the books you check out the seminars you attend, the videos you watched the notes you took all the artifacts of learning. And currently they are all squirreled away and stashed inside data silos like Learning Management Systems.
The original World Wide Web was like the Wild, Wild West, an open frontier without visible limit. Cloud services and commercial offerings has fenced in the frontier in a series of waves of fashion. Whether it was AOL, Tripod.com, Geocities, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook the web grew in the form of gated communities and cul-de-sacs for “members only”. True the democracy of it all was membership was open and free, practically anyone could join, all you had to do was hand over the control, the keys to YOUR data. That was the bargain, by giving up your privacy, you gained all the rewards of socializing with long lost friends and acquaintances. From that little spark the surveillance and “data mining” operation hit full speed.
Reclaiming ownership of all this data, especially the component that is generated in one’s lifetime of learning is a worthy cause. Audrey Watters references Jon Udell in an example of the kind of data we would want to own and limit access to our whole lives. From the article:
“Udell then imagines what it might mean to collect all of one’s important data from grade school, high school, college and work — to have the ability to turn this into a portfolio — for posterity, for personal reflection, and for professional display on the Web.“
Indeed, and at the same time though this data may live on the Internet somewhere access is restricted to those whom we give explicit permission to access it. That’s in part a project unto itself, this mesh of data could be text, or other data objects that might need to be translated, converted to future readable formats so it doesn’t grow old and obsolete in an abandoned file format. All of this stuff could be give a very fine level of access control to individuals you have approved to read parts or pieces or maybe even give wholesale access to. You would make that decision and maybe just share the absolute minimum necessary. So instead of seeing a portfolio of your whole educational career, you just give out the relevant links and just those links. That’s what Jon Udell is pursuing now through the Thali Project. Thali is a much more generalized way to share data from many devices but presented in a holistic, rationalized manner to whomever you define as a trusted peer. It’s not just about educational portfolios, it’s about sharing your data. But first and foremost you have to own the data or attempt to reclaim it from the wilds and wilderness of the social media enterprise, the educational enterprise, all these folks who want to own your data while giving you free services in return.
Audrey uses the metaphor, “Data is the new oil” and that at the heart is the problem. Given the free oil, those who invested in holding onto and storing the oil are loathe to give it up. And like credit reporting agencies with their duplicate and sometime incorrect datasets, those folks will give access to that unknown quantity to the highest bidder for whatever reason. Whether its campaign staffers, private detectives, vengeful spouses, doesn’t matter as they own the data and set the rules as to how it is shared. However in the future when we’ve all reclaimed ownership of our piece of the oil field, THEN we’ll have something. And when it comes to the digital equivalent of the old manila folder, we too will truly own our education.
Mini PCI-Express Connector on Inspiron 11z Motherboard, Front (Photo credit: DandyDanny)
I don’t think there is any other way to say this other than to state that the XP941 is without a doubt the fastest consumer SSD in the market. It set records in almost all of our benchmarks and beat SATA 6Gbps drives by a substantial margin. It’s not only faster than the SATA 6Gbps drives but it surpasses all other PCIe drives we have tested in the past, including OCZ’s Z-Drive R4 with eight controllers in RAID 0. Given that we are dealing with a single PCIe 2.0 x4 controller, that is just awesome.
Listen well as you pine away for your very own SSD SATA drive. One day you will get that new thing. But what you really, really want is the new, NEW thing. And that my friends is quite simply the PCIe SSD. True the enterprise level purchasers have had a host of manufacturers and models to choose from in this form factor. But the desktop market cannot afford Fusion-io products at ~15K per card fully configured. That’s a whole different market there. RevoDrive has had a wider range of products that go from heights of Fusion-io down to the top end Gamer market with the RevoDrive R-series PCIe drives. But those have always been SATA drives piggy-backed onto a multi-lane PCIe card (4x or 8x depending on how many controllers were installed onboard the card). Here now the evolutionary step of dumping SATA in favor of a more native PCIe to NAND memory controller is slowly taking place. Apple has adopted it for the top end Mac Pro revision (the price and limited availability has made it hard to publicize this architectural choice). It has also been adopted in the laptops available since Summer 2013 that Apple produces (and I have the MacBook Air to prove it). Speedy, yes it is. But how do I get this on my home computer?
Anandtech was able to score an aftermarket card through a 3rd party in Australia along with a PCIe adapter card for that very Samsung PCIe drive. So where there is a will, there is a way. From that purchase of both the drive and adapter, this review of the Samsung PCIe drive has come about. And all one can say looking through all the benchmarks is we have not seen anything yet. Drive speeds which have been the bottle-neck in desktop and mobile computing since the dawn of the Personal Computer are slowly lifting. And not by a little but by a lot. This is going to herald a new age in personal computers that is as close to former Intel Chairman, Andy Grove’s 10X Effect. Samsung’s PCIe native SSD is that kind of disruptive, perspective altering product that will put all manufacturers on notice and force a sea change in design and manufacture.
As end users of the technology SSD’s with SATA interfaces have already had a big time impact on our laptops and desktops. But what I’ve been writing about and trying to find signs of ever since the first introduction of SSD drives is the logical path through the legacy interfaces. Whether it was ATA/BIOS or the bridge chips that glue the motherboard to the CPU, a number of “old” architecture items are still hanging around on the computers of today. Intel’s adoption of UEFI has been a big step forward in shedding the legacy bottleneck components. Beyond that native on CPU controllers for PCIe are a good step forward as well. Lastly the sockets and bridging chips on the motherboard are the neighborhood improvements that again help speed things up. The last mile however is the dumping of the “disk” interace, the ATA/SATA spec as a pre-requisite for reading data off of a spinning magnetic hard drive. We need to improve that last mile to the NAND memory chips and then we’re going to see the full benefit of products like the Samsung PCIe drive. And that day is nearly upon us with the most recent motherboard/chipset revision from Intel. We may need another revision to get exactly what we want, but the roadmap is there and all the manufacturers had better get on it. As Samsung’s driving this revolution,…NOW.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 