AMD’s future is not in making the fastest processors. The company’s CEO has taken AMD on a transitional path that appears to be more disruptive than any other event in the company’s history, especially in light of the ongoing change in executive management. There is no interest at AMD to continue a processor war with Intel that has lasted decades, but only rewarded AMD with occasional superiority.

“That era is done,” Rory Read said in an interview and added, “There’s enough processing power on every laptop on the planet today.” Uh oh. Those quotes leave room for speculation that is significant enough to upset an entire loyal customer base of enthusiast users and may not have been the smartest choice of words.

It would be a bit premature to assume that AMD is not developing chips that are at least somewhat performance-competitive, but there is a clear shift in thinking that appears to be moving away from Intel being the focus to the building threat from ARM chip makers, including Nvidia. Instead of being focused on performance, AMD appears to be looking much more on cost and indirectly join a force that is building up against Intel – and especially against exclusionary marketing moves such as the Ultrabook pitch.

“I think we come in and steal the bacon around the whole thin-and-light movement and capture a significant portion of the opportunity there,” Read said.

Of course, he recognizes that AMD has to change as a whole and traditional weaknesses have to be addressed.

“It can be a very different AMD going forward, but we have a long way to go,” he said. “There’s been a passion for innovation but there needs to be a passion for delivery and a passion for the customers.”

That transformation may be done by 2015, according to Read. Given the executive changes we have seen in recent months, it is somewhat apparent that the old blood of AMD has been flushed out and replaced with a new way of thinking. Given the pace Read is driving AMD, the company may have already crossed a point of no return. It’s going to be a new era for AMD and it will be interesting to see if it will have a chance to play for the market lead.

SOURCE via Bloomberg

Five years in the making, Nvidia’s virtualized the GPU to bring you graphical power on your VDI. Cloud was a big topic at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, which wasn’t unexpected given the focus of GPUs in servers and enterprise applications.

At a keynote speech, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the fruit of the company’s five-year-long effort in creating the world’s first virtualized GPU, dubbed the VGX platform, which enables IT departments to deliver a virtualized desktop with the graphics and GPU computing performance of a PC or workstation to employees using any connected device.

While virtualized CPU computing is commonplace today, Nvidia VGX enables workers for the first time to access a GPU-accelerated desktop similar to a traditional local PC, which is hugely advantageous for 3D design and simulation tools – applications which had previously been too intensive for a virtualized desktop.

Nvidia also pitched the VGX platform as a solution for enterprise IT departments to address the complex challenges of “BYOD” – or bring your own device to work. It delivers a remote desktop to these devices, providing users the same access they have on their desktop terminal. At the same time, it helps reduce overall IT spend, improve data security and minimize data center complexity.

The Nvidia VGX hardware is designed for hosting large numbers of users in an energy-efficient way. The first of such VGX board packs four GPUs, 16 GB of memory, 4 GB of frame buffer, and fits into the industry-standard PCI Express interface in servers. Perhaps even better is that the VGX boards are designed to be passively cooled.

On the software side is the GPU Hypervisor, a software layer that integrates into commercial hypervisors, such as the Citrix XenServer, enabling virtualization of the GPU.

The VGX package also features Nvidia User Selectable Machines (USMs). This manageability option allows enterprises to configure the graphics capabilities delivered to individual users in the network based on their demands. Up to 100 users can be served from a single server powered by one VGX board, which Nvidia says will improve user density on a single server compared with traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions.

SOURCE via Tom’s Hardware

Typically, SSDs use flash as cache memory as opposed to the much faster DRAM, but Buffalo says that MRAM can bridge the gap between NAND flash and DRAM and provide a much better cache solution as a result.

Flash is used today as it has non-volatile properties and does not lose its content like DRAM when the power is cut off. MRAM, which is similar to DRAM structure, is also a non-volatile memory technology, but faster than flash. The technology has been in development for more than a decade. In the 2005 time frame, MRAM was believed to have an opportunity to succeed flash as a mass-market solid state memory technology, but has been held back by low density and, as a result, high cost.

In the Buffalo device, however, the SSD uses 4 GB of NAND flash storage and just 8 MB of MRAM cache, which makes the use of MRAM a much more compelling proposition. It’s not a consumer device either as the SSD will be targeted at extreme industrial applications and for integration in machinery that runs at up to 85 degrees Celsius. Buffalo states that the use of MRAM makes its SSD more reliable overall and reduces power consumption as well. However, we know that new technologies and expensive ideas tend to trickle down from the high-end if they make sense. It’s not entirely unreasonable to foresee an MRAM SSD for the consumer market at some point in the future.

SOURCE via Nikkei BP

Market research firm IHS predicts a fast increase in HDD storage densities and, as a result, a similarly strong increase in storage capacities. The faster pace will be driven by a need to record massive amounts of audio and video data and require a new technology that can break through the density barrier of the current perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

IHS believes that the average density of 744 Gb per square inch in 2011 will grow at an average of about 19 percent over the next few years and reach 1.8 Tb by 2016. 2012 will see a density of 780 Gb per square inch per platter, and then rise to 900 Gb per square inch next year, the market research firm forecasts.

The trend calls for a technology that will allow an increase of the number of bits that can be safely stored on a platter without interfering with each other. The density improvements of storage densities have been nothing short of amazing over the past 15 years. In 1997, Seagate acquired Quinta, a developer of heat-assisted magnetic recording technology that was believed to drive the then believed physical limited of about 100 Gb per square inch to about 250 Gb per square inch using its OAW (Optically Assisted Winchester) technology.

Manufacturing improvements and especially the transition from longitudinal recording to PMR delayed the introduction of the rather expensive production of heat-assisted magnetic recording drives and gave the industry an opportunity to approach 1 Tb per square inch. OAW, however, has been in development as HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology at Seagate and has already reached 1 Tb per square inch in a lab environment. If IHS is correct, we can expect the arrival of this technology in commercial drives by 2014.

You wait for one Thunderbolt-compatible motherboard and then two decide to arrive on the same day. Going alphabetically, ASUS’ P8Z77-V Premium is its first Intel-certified board to pack Thunderbolt and it’s followed immediately by the P8Z77-V Pro / Thunderbolt. The connection will hook up to multiple storage drives or any Thunderbolt-friendly display — it can be daisy-chained to up to six different devices. MSI’s Z77A-GD80 packs a similarly complicated naming convention, and like ASUS’ offerings, will arrive with Intel’s Z77 chipset ready to play nice with those new 22nm processors. Alongside storage and monitor support, MSI also throws in the extra nugget that it’ll connect to a graphics card, if you’re so inclined.

Look out, savvy graphics card buyer: just because it’s labelled ‘GeForce’ and starts with a ’6′ doesn’t necessarily mean it benefits from Nvidia’s premium 28nm Kepler architecture. We’ve already seen rebadged mobile chips with last-gen 40nm silicon, and now entry-level desktop cards are arriving on shelves that will stretch Fermi’s expiry date even further. There are no price tags as yet, but according to AnandTech the ‘new’ GeForce GT 610 is a repackaged GT 520 with 48 CUDA cores and an ever-so-polite 29-watt power draw. The GT 620 is a GT 530 with a 49-watt TDP and twice as many CUDA cores as the 610 — although a meager 64-bit memory bus will put a cap on any performance gains.

Finally, the GT 630 is a 65-watt GT 440 in all but name, with a 128-bit memory bus width allowing its 96 CUDA cores to be fully exploited. This latter card shouldn’t be confused with the OEM version of the GT 630, which does actually pack Kepler. Bewildering, right? We’ve quizzed Nvidia over its strange rebadging tradition and were told that the company simply numbers its products according to raw performance, rather than freshness or chip type — which sort of makes sense so long as you don’t dwell on it.

SOURCE via Anandtech

NVIDIA’s announced a pair of Tesla GPUs that’ll give some extra pep to your supercomputing tasks. The K10 and K20 units harness the power of Kepler to add more muscle to the company’s scientific and technical computing arm that supplies gear to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Tokyo’s Tsubame 2.0. Internal tests reveal that the hardware is around three times faster than the company’s Fermi GPUs — with the latter card expected to arrive at the end of the year. The company didn’t announce pricing, since its aiming them squarely at the big academic institutions, defense contractors and oil explorers — but if your surname is Buffet or Abramovitch, then they might sell you one at trade.

Workstations aren’t normally our focus, but when Dell shows off a new Precision system that lets four media pros share its graphics hardware at once, you can be sure the company has our attention. If your IT chief springs for a Precision R5500 with four Quadro 2000 cards, each of those cards can take advantage of a graphics pass-through in Citrix’s virtualization to render 3D models at speeds much more like what you’d get if the Quadro were sitting in your own PC. Before you have visions of four-player Modern Warfare parties after-hours at work, the inherent barriers of distance and the virtual machine itself will likely rule out any game sessions. We’d add that the Quadro, Xeon processor and the $2,742 minimum price make it an expensive proposition. That engineering simulation will finish a lot faster, though, giving you a bit more time to play back home.

SOURCE via Dell

It’s like Highlights for kids, but with a decidedly techno-centric spin. The company known more for what it’s put inside our gadgetry has just unveiled a new digital magazine, iQ, intended for the youthful, über-connected masses. Looking much like Flipboard in design and borrowing a live tile-ish approach, the internally-curated Intel webzine culls content from outside pubs and mixes it in with original and partner-contributed pieces to, as EIC Bryan Rhoads puts it, “tell… the bigger story of who we are as a brand.” Indeed, it may do just that via the circuitous route of social recommendations, given that each news box grows in prominence along with its viral importance. There’s no paid or free app to download, just a simple URL to link you to that dynamic “front page.” So, if you feel your angst-ridden teenagers are in need of an industry-specific educational focus, this might be one site to add to their bookmarks.

SOURCE via Intel

Intel is pushing out that delicious Ivy Bridge update to server chips and, interestingly, it’s not focusing purely on the high end to start. In total, 28 new Xeon CPUs were introduced today, including the E5-4600 and 2400 families targeted at four and two socket systems, respectively. Those tweaked mainstream processors aren’t the interesting part, though. We’re more intrigued by the updated E3 series, the low-end offerings that are aimed small businesses and light web-hosting duty. In particular the new E3-1220L v2 slashes power consumption to an impressive 17w by going with just two cores and only 3MB of cache. While that 3W advantage over its predecessor may not sound like much, it can make a huge difference in the microserver market and in high-density environments where cooling a room full of servers can become problematic. Even in its stripped down form the extremely low-power processor still supports Turbo Boost, Trusted Execution Technology and PCI-Express 3.0. Considering that last-gen’s Atom-based server chip pulled down 15W, we’d consider the 1220L v2 an impressive feat of engineering.

SOURCE via The Register