Next year’s server wars may be cancelled

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News, Opinions

soldiers-2The major battle in the server space planned for next year may be only a minor skirmish with the usual suspects winning.

Intel needs to see off the expected competition from ARM and is going to chuck a lot more cash in the area to keep its position as market leader. What we are seeing from the Intel Developer Forum is that its answer will be a a new Xeon D family of chips.

Xeon D chips will be the first server chips based on the Broadwell architecture, and will go into dense servers starting next year. But these are not your normal server chips, they are effectively systems on a chip which means that they will be deliberately targeting anything “low level and power efficient” that ARM is expected to come up with.

It means that Intel does not think that its Xeon E3 and Atom chips code-named Avoton will be up to the task of taking on ARM. The Xeon D chip will be faster, but more power hungry than Avoton, which is based on an architecture called Silvermont used in mobile chips.

But Intel thinks that the Xeon D will provide more performance-per-watt, which punters will find attractive.

Intel does have some other advantages in any coming server war. Intel’s chips already go into more than 90 percent of servers, and server makers like Dell have said that the chances for success of ARM servers are diminishing due to product delays. Intel also has a head-start on software development over ARM.

ARM’s server chips are based on the ARMv8 architecture, and have integrated networking, storage and I/O controllers. Its key weapon against Intel is still lower power consumption, something Chipzilla is fast catching up on.

A variety of companies had indicated interest in making server processors based on blueprints from ARM,  but so far ARM 64-bit server processors have not been made available commercially.

Chip makers like Applied Micro and Advanced Micro Devices have delayed shipment of ARM-based chips.

Dell is offering prototype ARM servers for benchmarking and application development. Hewlett-Packard announced plans to use ARM processors in its Moonshot “dense” server, which uses x86 chips, but hasn’t announced a definitive release date for the ARM edition.

The other player in any coming war AMD is also expanding its low-power server processor lines,  which could also will hurt adoption of ARM servers.

The other big hurdle for ARM is the fact that most firms already have software and hardware based around x86. To adopt ARM-based servers, companies will not only have to invest in new servers and components, but also port applications to the architecture.

This could make a switch to ARM very expensive in terms of capital and final cost of ownership. Then there are some licensing issues surrounding the adoption of ARM servers, as companies will have to pay more for software per core used in them, Norrod said.

ARM is also finding its allies thin on the ground. ARM server pioneer Calxeda folded operations and earlier this year Nvidia scrapped server chip plans. Samsung has also abandoned ARM server chip development.

Qualcomm releases Snapdragon 210

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

qualcomm-snapdragonQualcomm has released its new Snapdragon 210  chip which should mean more LTE smartphones running high-quality video.

Sticking two fingers up at its rival MediaTek, Qualcomm has built a 28-nm chip for the entry-level market. It has based around a 1.1 GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU, Adreno 300-series GPU, supports up to 8 megapixel cameras, and has a resolution of up to 720p.  Not huge but you are trying to watch a movie on a screen the size of a beer mat.

It supports HD Video with high efficiency video coding support and supports the usual USB, Bluetooth, single-stream 802.11n WiFi, and NFC standards.

Qualcomm claims this is the first LTE-Advanced chipset to target the sub-US$100 phone category.

It is clear that Qualcomm wants to be the first of the starting blocks with this sort of technology.  The world is slowly moving to LTE but most of it is happy with its 3G phones.

 

Apple eclipses Intel

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News, Opinions

Intel-IDF-'14-Copy-SizeAs far as we can see, Apple’s announcement of its iWatch put chip giant Intel in the shade yesterday.

Yesterday  was supposed to be Intel’s day, but as it doesn’t really have very much to say about anything except wearable technology, it didn’t really stand a chance.

We’ve noticed that Apple has received accolades from what our own Nick Farrell calls the Tame Apple Press. He defines TAP as uncritical media outlets – magazines to you and me – both journalistic people and publishers that swallow marketing pap and regurgitate it as if Apple, or Intel for that matter,  was capable of telling any kind of truth.

Let me tell you, from past experience, Apple chooses very carefully the journalists it invites to its launches. As, for a matter of fact, does Intel.

It was, I think in 1990, that Apple announced something or other in London and dragged along the late Douglas Adams to give a witty presentation that wowed us all. However, I noticed that after the event had finished, Adams was talking to the Apple spinner about his reward – quite a lot of Apple DRAM.

Intel tries to play a similar game but is really cackhanded about it. It’s not really very good at marketing. Back in the old days it decided to set its legal department in my direction, and in other directions too. Then, under the captainship of Andy Grove, Intel was a bully and we all know that bullies need standing up to.

The corporate spin departments of these computing multinationals believe they can manipulate, bully, or even exclude journalists from the scene.  Just in the last 25 years I’ve been personally told by the likes of Microsoft, HP and Intel that “I’d never work in this industry again”.

Intel has turned into Mr Nasty yet again,in the 21st century,  but the truth is that it has had little or nothing to say for at least the last six years.  Apple doesn’t seem to have much to say either unless you’re one of the famous fanbois that really must have something strapped to your wrist.

The truth is that commodisation of the IT industry has weaved its wicked way – Apple won’t even release its famous iWatch until next year. Intel getting into wearables is risible. And Microsoft is struggling to even give the impression that it has a stratagem.

The second decade of the 21st century just goes to show that these monsters of the late 20th century are just straw dogs, and the way ahead is way different from they think. Here’s what an Intel spinner had to say about yours truly, in relation to Mark Hachman:

“From: Francisco, Daniel J Sent: 24 March 1999 23:35 Subject: RE: more from Mike Magee on Compaq Merced Since we’re giving our two cents:) It’s really a juggling act. We’ve had some luck (ie, Mark Hachman, EBN, and PC World editors) with tough love approach, telling them they’ll get more access to us if they are more objective and less sensational/negative in their articles. The trick is actually not giving them the “special” access after we go down that path. In the case of Magee, his reporting doesn’t indicate that he values the exec access and the efforts to build a stronger relationship. Hachman was the same way when we started working with him. There is no value for the special access until it stops and is given to someone else. Then they realize the benefits of “working with us.” Hachman’s writing has come full circle. And following this last IDF and his ridiculous coverage, I’d be hard-pressed to lobby for Magee to come to future IDFs, especially on Intel’s dollar. Dan”

Dancing Dan Francisco – he’s a nice chap but still a corporate spinner after his INTC corporation experiences. Idiots.

MP hits out at Welsh blog site

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

hocThe Tory MP for Aberconwy, Guto Bebb, has hit out at a local anonymous blog site in an attempt to prevent trolling and malicious gossip.

Bebb asked Michael Penning, the policing minister, in an adjournment debate what the Home Office attitude was to sites such as “Thoughts of Oscar”, which he said “is probably best described as a small town poison pen letter blog”.

He alleged that over year the site had harassed, abused, libelled and targeted individuals, businesses, council officials and local councillors anonymously.

He said that he had attempted to ignore the blog, but earlier this year he alleged “the site published a number of libels against me” so he took the matter to the North Wales police. A number of his constituents had approached him to say that they had been attacked by the site but they had been told by North Wales police that nothing could be done and the police could take no action.

Two constituents who ran local businesses used a private detective to trace individuals associated with the blog.

The policing minister, Michael Penning, said harassment and trolling is an offence and there are many pieces of legislation to deal with it.

He said he didn’t know how the North Wales police interpreted in north Wales but prosecutions have taken the place in the rest of the country. You can find the full debate here.

Broadcom intros combo chip

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

broadcom_logoSemiconductor firm Broadcom has completed work on integrating global navigation satellite system and a sensor hub combination chip on the same die.

The company said the chip will be used to create apps for health, fitness and so called “life logging”, by providing software with an always on background location. Life logging means a mobile device knows where you are and the chip will manage functions to maximise battery life.

The integrated global navigation chip will provide a direct connection to wi-fi technology and so will improve battery power and context awareness.

The chip, the BCM4773 allows information from wi-fi, Bluetooth Smart, GPS and MEMS (micro electro-mechanical systems) to be calculated on one SoC (system on a chip) instead of having to use the application processor.  The design, claims Broadcom, will reduce the printed circuit board area by 34 percent and can offer up to 80 percent power savings.

Broadcom says the chip will support five different satellite systems including GPS, GLONASS, SBAS, QZSS and BeiDou.  The chip is already in production.

Microsoft improves its Azure offerings

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSoftware company Microsoft said it has added features to its “cloud-first” media services.

The features incude HD quality live streaming, protection capabilities and a service to simply indexing audio and video content.

In addition, Microsoft has added four industry partners to its Azure Media Services including Telestream’s Wirecast, NewTek TriCaster, Cires21 and JW Player.

Microsoft said it is indtroducing faster encoding speeds and more cost effective billing.  The better Azure Media Encoder is billed on output GBs while it used to be based on both input and output GBs – that means cost savings, the company claims.

The Azure Media Indexer is a content extraction service to index media libraries so they can be searched by keywords, phrases or clips and also create transcripts of audio files.

Researchers exploit UHF spectrum

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

Knightly, Anand and GuerraBoffins at Rice University said they have discovered how to effectively use the unused UHF TV spectrum, creating streams of data over wireless hotspots that could operate for miles.

Edward Knightly, professor at the Rice department of electrical and computer engineering, said: “The holy grail of wireless communications is to go both fast and far.  Usually you can have or the other but not both.  Wireless local area networks today can serve data very fast, but one brick wall and they’re done. UHF can travel far, but it hasn’t had the high capacity of wi-fi.”

The researchers will show a multiuser and multiantenna transmission scheme for UHF at a conference in Hawaii today.

The UHF spectrum became available after the move to digital TV. UHF signals travel for miles and would be useful to provide broadband capabilities for remote communities.

Lead researcher Narendra Anand said: “When comparing UHF and wi-fi, there’s usually a tradeoff of capacity for range or vice versa. Imagine that the wi-fi access point in your home or office sends data down a 100-lane highway, but’s only one mile long.  For UHF, the highway is 100 miles long but only three or four lanes wide, and you cannot add any lanes.”

He said that efficiently using the lanes of UHF involves a multiantenna transmission technique that allows access by many people using the same channel simultaneously.

Pictured here from left to right are researchers Edward Knightly, Narendra Anand and Ryan Guerra.

Scientists crystallise light

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

Princeton University crystallised lightPrinceton University scientists have locked together photos and created crystallised light.

The reason for the scientists doing this somewhat unusual thing is because they’re aiming at developing room temperature superconductors.

Hakan Tureci, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, said: “We are interested in exploring – and ultimately controlling and directing – the flow of energy at the atomic level. The goal is to better understand current materials and processes and to evaluate materials that we cannot yet create.”

The research could also lead to more efficient computers.  Current computers use classical mechanics. But, said the researchers: “The world of atoms and photons obeys the rules of quantum mechanics, which include a number of strange and very counterintuitive features. “

Building a quantum computer would allow many problems to be solved that can’t be using the mechanical model.  Building a quantum computer is, however, very difficult, the researchers said.

Tureci pointed out that sometimes light acts like a wave and other times a particle – a photon. “Here we set up a situation where light effectively behaves like a particle in the sense that two photons can interact very strongly,” he said. “In one mode of operation light sloshes back and forth like a liquid, in the other it freezes.”

Microsoft about to buy Minecraft outfit

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

showposter_1354981054Software giant Microsoft is close to inking a deal to buy Mojang the Swedish company behind the  “Minecraft” video game.

It is believed that Microsoft will have to write a $2 billion cheque for the company and everything could be announced as early as this week.

“Minecraft” is a game where players build structures with blocks to protect against nocturnal monsters which is a little like what Microsoft has been doing, without much success, in the mobile market.

The deal will add to Microsoft’s Xbox video game business, at a time when the competition in the video game console market is heating up.

Acquiring Minecraft gives Vole control of an online world that has become a blockbuster despite breaking a lot of the rules. Minecraft’s blocky graphics are crude it also is sold the old-fashioned way — by charging people to buy a copy.

The price varies depending on what kind of device people use to play the game, ranging from $7 on mobile phones to $27 for computer versions. A version of Minecraft for Microsoft’s Xbox, which has been a top seller for the console, costs $20.

The business is already lucrative. Mojang’s revenue was about $360 million last year, up 38 percent from the year before.

Mojang was co-founded by Markus Persson, who has said in the past that he did not want to sell the company or take money from outside investors.

Redmond has shipped five million Xbox One units to retailers worldwide since the launch. In the same month Sony   sold more than 7 million PlayStation 4 units and was struggling to keep up with consumer demand, so it must be hoping that Minecraft will drive more traffic to its console.

 

iWatch will not save Apple or kill the Swiss

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

POPE-SWISSGUARD/WOMENThe Tame Apple Press was somewhat muted this morning as to whether the iWatch will provide the sort of technology which proves that Jobs’ Mob “still has it”.

Sure there were the usual free press releases in which the Tame Apple Press outdid itself.  Our favourite was Bloomberg which actually claimed that the Swiss economy would collapse now that Apple had put out its watch . Given that the Swiss economy is a little more dependent on Nazi and Mafia gold and its watchmaking industry was gutted by the advent of the digital watch, we doubt it will lose much sleep over Apple’s efforts in the industry.

However saner heads rushed to point out that the whole Apple spin on its new toy was completely off base.

As Tech Crunch eloquently put it “if Switzerland is fucked than the iWatch is too.”    It makes the point that the Swiss watch industry is not Apple’s target market. The real niche here is the  wearables space which is so limited that no one will admit how many wearables have sold so far.  It has been estimated that it could be as high as 90 million, but the Federation Of The Swiss Watch Industry said that it sold 28.1 million timepieces last year for a total of $23 billion. That’s an average of $836 a watch.

But it has known for ages that the wristwatch is a dying object. More than 60 percent of 18-34 year olds get the time from their phones and watches are rare in the wild and when you see them they are worn for a reason. The most expensive watches go to collectors, whose rationality is suspect, and the very rich. The mid-range watches go to folks who appreciate the artistry of a fine mechanical timepiece and the riff-raff will get the cheap gear. In this situation, the iWatch would count as cheap gear.

What Apple has forgotten with its iWatch is that people do not buy watches to tell the time.  They are either a fashion statement or a tradition. At the low end you buy a Swatch because you like the styling and the slightly wicked, slightly retro feeling of insolence that comes with wearing a watch with hands.  These are not mind-sets that want their watch to do anything and this is exactly why so far the wearables have only managed any interest in the sports diagnostic industry.

Normally this would not be a problem for Apple. After all Jobs convinced the world, that everyone needed a tablet when Microsoft and HP could not do so for years. To our mind, the tablet is still a product without an actual killer app, but Apple convinced the world they all needed one.

However, in this instance they are wrong. A tablet at least was technology which could work but hadn’t. A watch is retro-technology which has bolted-on new functionality which it is not really designed to do. As my wife pointed out the watch screen is too small to see or use and is counter to the same desire of consumers for phablets or things which are bigger and can be easily integrated with.

Given this, even the Wall Street Journal has its doubts as to whether Apple will be saved by its iWatch. Media outfits which are not members of the Tame Apple Press are still reluctant to declare the idea a lemon because Apple has managed to market its way out of trouble before and they look like idiots. But the Journal points out that the potential of the Apple Watch is “tough to gauge”. The device won’t hit the market until early next year, and a $349 starting price is at a bit of a premium to rival offerings.

The market for smartwatches is nascent and none of Apple’s rivals has yet cracked the code for delivering a product with the right mix of style and functionality, the Journal pointed out.

Unlike previous Apple products that forged new product categories, the watch is essentially an upsell of the company’s existing customers and only customers with an iPhone 5 or newer will be able to use it.  Although it is unthinkable that any true Apple fanboy would not have the latest iPhone, there are still a fair few of the devices out there.

The Journal also points out that it would take more than 55 million units of the Apple Watch selling at $349 to equal just 10 per cent  of the $197.4 billion Wall Street expects for Apple’s fiscal 2015 revenue.  In short, even if it does well, it will not be a game changer for Apple.

As cooler heads start to look at the announcement, it seems that Apple is leaning on the launch of its iPhone 6 and the iWatch is just a somewhat silly distraction. But that does mean that truly Apple has run out of game changing ideas that will continue its growth.

In time it will be the launch of the iWatch which will mark the slow slid of Apple into mediocrity. It is also worthwhile pointing out that the Swiss have not been defeated in battle since the Middle Ages and that is despite being armed with small but useful folding knives and pikes.

Western Digital fills drives with helium

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News, Products

helium-ballong-flygWestern Digital’s HGST subsidiary has added 8TB and 10TB hard drives to its HelioSeal product line.

These drives are hermetically seals in helium in order to reduce internal drive friction and power use and make your drives sound like Mickey Mouse.

HGST announced its first helium-filled hard drive, the 6TB He6 model in December.  It did rather well and broke all previous records for hard drive areal density.

HGST said that by 2017, it plans to end production of air-filled hard drives for use in corporate data centres and just use helium-filled products.

Along with the thinner gas’s ability to reduce power use, the helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today’s 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.  Sealing air out of the drive also keeps humidity and other contaminates from getting in.

The announcement follows Seagate’s two weeks ago which announced its highest capacity enterprise hard drive would be an 8TB model that bypassed helium for air.

Seagate uses a technology called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to increase the capacity of its drives beyond 4TB. Seagate has said SMR holds the promise of creating 20TB drives by 2020.

HGST’s new 3.5-in 8TB drive uses PMR technology. Both drives use a 12Gbps SAS interface, but by using helium instead of air, HGST said it was able to stack seven platters and reduce power usage at idle by 23 per cent and watts per terabyte of capacity by 44 per cent over its 6TB drive.

NHS doctors try to extract Ellison’s backbone

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

skeletonsThe NHS has purged the Oracle backbone from a national patient database system and recommended a course of Open Sauc NoSQL running on an open-source stack instead.

Dubbed Spine2, the new Ellison free backbone has gone live on x86 hardware.  Spine is the NHS’s main secure patient database and messaging platform.  It is a bit of serious technology logging the non-clinical information on 80 million Brits.

It also runs a messaging hub between 20,000 applications that include the Electronic Prescription Service and Summary Care Records.

The first version of Spine had run on Oracle under an out-sourced contract managed by telecoms giant BT, but the Health and Social Care Information Center (HSCIC) – the NHS organisation running the system thought that open source and NoSQL will be easier to live with.

Oracle’s relational database has been replaced with a NoSQL distributed system called Riak, from Basho.

Other open-source elements are Redis, Nginx, Tornado and RabitMQ while Splunk has been used for logging and reporting.

The Spine2 contract was awarded under the Cabinet Office’s G-Cloud framework, which encourages government types to buy from small providers like Basho.

It seems to have been much cheaper too some of that is not having to pay an Oracle license, or a maintenance fee, but some of it was also managed by consolidating the hardware.

Riak is up to two times cheaper than Oracle while the infrastructure will cost five per cent that of the old setup.

What is also odd is that HSCIC has saved money by bringing Spine2 back in house with on-going development. This is bad news for BT, but could be the start of a backlash against open sourcing.

 

US telcos claim that 10Gps is “too fast” for broadband

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

the-tortoise-and-the-hareShowing that they are at the cutting edge of technology profits, the US telcos have told regulators that 10Gps is too fast for broadband.

They have asked the Federal Communications Commission not to change its definition of broadband from 4Mbps to 10Mbps.  We guess anything faster than 4Mbps requires a man on a horse with a red flag ridding in front of it.

According to AT&T, internet users get by just fine at the lower speeds and have no need for broadband that fast.

“Consumer behaviour strongly reinforces the conclusion that a 10Mbps service exceeds what many Americans need today to enable basic, high-quality transmissions,” AT&T wrote.

Verizon and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), agreed.

“The Commission should not change the baseline broadband speed threshold from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream because a 4/1 Mbps connection is still sufficient to perform the primary functions identified in section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act]—high-quality voice, video, and data,” the NCTA wrote.

More than 47 percent of Comcast subscribers get at least 50Mbps, the company says.

The FCC has periodically raised the minimum standard for Internet service to be considered “broadband.” This affects how the commission measures industry progress in deploying sufficient Internet service to Americans, particularly in rural areas.

There are signs that the Telcos might have a job convincing FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler who thinks that  10Mbps is too low and that a 25Mbps connection is fast becoming ‘table stakes’ in 21st century communications,” he said.

If the definition is kept at 4Mbps, statistics on broadband deployment and competition make the telcos look brilliant and they don’t actually have to upgrade their aging infrastructure.

Scientists develop malware tool

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

Malware, Wikimedia CommonsA team of researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) claims to have developed a tool to analyse numbers of apps to trace the origin and family of malware.

Guillermo Suarez de Tangil, a researcher at the computer science department at the university, said malware can be in smartphones and even in washing machines.

“The amount of malware is constantly increasing and it is becoming more intelligent for that reason,” he said.  “Security analysts and market administrators are overwhelmed and cannot afford exhaustive checking for each app.”

The tool is called Dendroid and will track down the family and nature of the malware.  “Developers generally reuse components of other malwares, and that precisely is what allows us to construct this genetic map,” he said.

He said antivirus software used in smartphones use detection engines based on signatures and its effectiveness is questionable, largely because smartphone resources are limited compared to a PC.

Smartphones to aid Parkinson’s victims

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

smartphones-genericA team of software developers at Aston University have designed tech that will help doctors diagnose Parkinson’s disease.

According to the BBC, it is hard for doctors to be sure of a diagnosis without being able to monitor their speech and movements over a period of time.

But because smartphones have motion detectors, GPS capabilities as well as a microphone, it’s possible to provide additional data for doctors once a patient has left a surgery.

Apparently, changes in people’s voices can be an early symptom of the disease and in a recent study 17,000 individuals provided voice samples over the phone. And motion sensors can be used to measure the way a person moves.

Aston University, in cooperation with the University of Rochester NY are looking for 2,500 people to download the app to their smartphones and perform different tests.

You can find more at the BBC, here.