sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with intel + semiconductors

After more than two years of pushing its scientific computing efforts, Nvidia’s graphics processors will be offered as an option in the newest line of Cray desktop supercomputers. The chipmaker plans to announce next week that its Tesla chips can be used in the $25,000 Cray desktop supercomputer, according to Nvidia spokesperson Andrew Humber. He said Nvidia has been in talks with Cray ever since the chipmaker announced its Tesla line of graphics processors in 2007, but that this is the first deal the two companies have inked.

The Cray CX1 computer launched today, with specs that include either 32 or 64 Intel cores and 4 terabytes of internal storage. The new machine, which runs a new version of Microsoft Windows, is a testament to both the demand for and the democratization of computing power. Indeed, people who earlier might have turned to grids or supercomputers for their problems are building powerful desktops with accelerator chips, while less scientifically minded folks, such as traders or product designers, who want to render things in 3-D are seeking more processing power.

Cray’s CX1 is the smallest supercomputer the venerable firm has ever built, but its downmarket shift is a response to both the needs of the market and the presence of accelerator chips trying to muscle in on its scientific computing turf in the high and low end. Chips such as IBM’s cell processor or GPUs from AMD or Nvidia are being dolled up with programming tools to take on scientific computing. The multiple cores in the Cell chip and GPUs are designed to parallelize tasks and execute them faster than a general purpose CPU, like the x86 processors offered by Intel.

At the desktop level, Nvidia has been touting stories such as the €4,000 (about $5,700 today) “supercomputer” built by scientists at the University of Antwerp creating 3-D images of internal organs that uses GPUs. With the CX1, Cray is acknowledging that trend and trying to ride it.

The effort to broaden its market comes as Cray sees it dominance in the supercomputing world waning. The top supercomputer in the world runs on a combined x86 and Cell processors. In the most recent list of the Top 500 supercomputers, Cray only made 16 of the machines for a 3.2 percent share of the fastest computers in the world. That’s quite a decline from when the Top 500 organization started tracking the data 15 years ago and Cray made 205 systems on the list. So Cray is thinking small to expand its market as the market demands more computing power.

Last week, Intel offered up a sneak peak of its Larrabee graphics processor, due out in 2009 or 2010 and guaranteed to raise the competitive pressure on graphics chip makers Nvidia and AMD. Unlike its existing integrated graphics chips, Larrabee will be a standalone processor, but don’t expect that it will be a success.

As computing has required faster chips, Intel and other chip makers have added more cores, a tactic that GPU makers have used for years in order to increase parallel processing. GPUs from Nvidia contain as many as 240 cores while those from AMD, which that company acquired when it purchased ATI Technologies in 2006, have hundreds. So they’re faster.

But they’re also harder to program, something Nvidia is trying to solve with more flexible chips and a new programming tool called CUDA. But most enterprise and consumer software runs on x86 chips and needs adaptations to take advantage of GPUs. Intel’s Larrabee chip has multiple cores, but is not a GPU. Intel claims this offers people the performance gains and ability to render graphics much like a GPU does, but that Larrabee’s x86 architecture allows for easier programming.

It’s nearly impossible to judge a chip until you’ve seen it in action and tracked whether OEMs want to put it in their devices, but my bet is that Intel won’t be able to compromise with a many-cored CPU and believe it will beat a GPU at its own game. Nvidia and AMD are hoping as much, especially Nvidia, which has the dominant GPU market share — right behind Intel’s integrated chips — and wages an almost constant battle again Intel’s PR on this front. As Nvidia’s small but fierce marketing team faces off against Intel’s Goliath, grab some popcorn, because it’ll be a graphics showdown worth watching.

Confession: Back when AMD was pitching its Opteron chipset, I convinced my husband to buy shares in the company on the belief that its plans to build a backwards compatible 64-bit processor was so obviously better than Intel’s efforts with Itanium that the market would eventually see it. The market did, and AMD shares went up a bit, but we soon sold them after my company changed its policy regarding stock ownership.

I say this so you guys know that I once believed in AMD. I live in Austin, where the company at one time employed more workers than in its Sunnyvale headquarters. Where Hector Ruiz, who stepped down today from the president and CEO position, lives. But I look at the sad wreck that was once a scrappy upstart irritating Intel and I don’t know what to say. I can start with the facts.

Ruiz will remain as executive chairman of the company and Dirk Meyer, the former COO and president, will become the CEO and president. Ruiz had already named Meyer as his successor, but Ruiz had also said he would stay through 2008. But AMD had seven quarters of losses and wrote down $878 million last week (for a total loss this quarter of $1.2 billion).

Meanwhile, Meyer will preside over the sale of some of AMD’s consumer assets, as announced in the company’s fourth-quarter conference call on Thursday. These assets should include some of the non-core assets related to mobile and digital television AMD purchased as part of its ATI acquisition in 2006. Those are the facts.

Looking at those facts, and the string of things that have gone wrong, from delays with its Barcelona chip to the loss of its CTO earlier this year, and you have to wonder if Meyer, or anyone inside the company should really be the one to take over. Ruiz and Meyer are both known more for their engineering talents than their business ones, which may be one of the reasons AMD held onto non-core divisions for so long. I suppose I should stop caring. After all, it’s been years since I held stock in AMD, and it gets old rooting for the underdog.

You wouldn’t think that next year’s DreamWorks movie, “Aliens vs. Monsters” and the search for more crude would be connected, but they are — in that they both take advantage of parallel programming for multicore chips. And when it comes to multicore chips, big bucks are on the line as the chip firm or software company that figures out how to write code to take advantage of them stands to make boatloads of money.

DreamWorks signed a deal with Intel this week aimed at parallelizing some of its code running on multicore chips to enable 3-D imaging for the 2009 animated movie. It’s not the first company to work with Intel to get more out of the multiple cores now embedded in servers, but it’s a nice example of how Intel is pushing its multicore efforts beyond simply throwing a bunch of chips at a computing bottleneck.

Like other chip firms, Intel knows that to keep compute power on the rise (and customers happy) it has to not only make the hardware more powerful with multicore chips, but also teach programmers how to use them. Otherwise, multicore chips don’t reach their full potential. James Reinders, director of marketing for Intel’s developer products division, pointed out that much of the work Intel was doing with regard to multicore, including investing in software research, selling tools to make parallel programming less cumbersome and participating in standards bodies, was done to deliver more computing power — something that can no longer be done efficiently by increasing clock speeds or adding even more cores.

“Every generation of hardware offers new capabilities, and we have rewritten our software to take advantage of it over time,” Reinders said. “Multicore will inspire us to do the same thing, but it won’t be overnight.”

It’s possible that the chip companies will be the vanguards of a new style of programming, much like programmers had to learn how to program for the web, graphical user interfaces or even e-commerce applications. Paula Richards, director of IBM’s Cell systems business thinks so. The Cell processor, designed for the Playstation 3, contains nine cores and also performs better if you adapt the code to take advantage of it.

So far IBM has focused on selling the Cell processor into financial firms, hospitals, and oil companies like Spain’s Reposal Repsol, which it inked a deal with last week. Richards said IBM doesn’t just dump that hardware and run — it spends time working with clients in each vertical to build software development kits the customer can use to get the most out of the processor. Those kits work with Intel and AMD multicore chips as well, although Richards says a user won’t see the same level of improvement they would using Cell processors.

“We knew multicore was a major inflection point in the industry,” Richards told me. “Everybody realized this and the company that addresses the [ease of programming] for this technology will win.” In some ways it’s not only about making it easy, it’s about attracting the hearts and minds of developers to a certain way of coding. That’s why IBM is offering SDKs to students who want to write parallel code on their PlayStations and Intel is pushing an undergraduate curriculum for parallel programming. This is a hardware battle fought using software.

image courtesy of DreamWorks

The Federal Trade Commission, after two years of looking into allegations that Intel has behaved anticompetitively in the microprocessor market, has decided to act, announcing a formal probe. At issue is whether Intel offered PC makers rebates to use its chips instead of AMD’s. Intel issued a statement in response.

The company believes its business practices are well within U.S. law. The evidence that this industry is fiercely competitive and working is compelling. For example, prices for microprocessors declined by 42.4 percent from 2000 to end of 2007. When competitors perform and execute the market rewards them. When they falter and under-perform the market responds accordingly.

In Austin, the Intel fund at Dell was an open secret, although Dell eventually opened the door to AMD. While AMD may be tempted to applaud this and the $25.4 million fine imposed on Intel by South Korea, the FTC probe won’t lead to action anytime soon. The government moves slowly and the coming change in administration won’t help speed it up.

No one knows exactly how big the market for mobile Internet devices will be, but the major chip makers are betting it will be huge (it’s one of the reasons they’re making chips for mobile devices at 45 nanometers.) We’ve covered efforts by Intel, Qualcomm, and Via Technologies to get their chips into devices sized somewhere between a smartphone and a PC, but Texas Instruments wants to play, too.

TI formalized its MID effort, based on its own OMAP architecture, last month. It’s entering this market with its third generation of OMAP multimedia processors, which were designed four years ago specifically to fit into smartphones. The second-generation chips are currently in the Nokia 800 and 770; the third-generation chips that underlie the formal MID group will be in an undisclosed number of products by the end of the year.

TI’s chips will compete directly with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset and Intel’s Atom chips. Comparatively speaking, TI’s chips show a greater flexibility for the end products. The power-sipping (at 500 mW-750 mW) 800 GHz MHz processor is slower than both Qualcomm’s and Intel’s efforts and requires less power than Intel’s Atom processors, which can require up to 2.4 watts. Ramesh Iyer, a MID product strategy manager with TI, says the lower clock speed is a conscious decision to reduce the power consumption; combining several types of cores with TI software allows for a higher utilization of existing megahertz, he notes.

As products containing chips from competing vendors hit the market, my hunch is that TI’s might be the best when it comes to general purpose use and battery power, followed by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, which will also be battery-friendly and perhaps perform better than TI’s in general purpose use. Device specs for MIDs based on Intel’s Atom processor are larger, but the x86 architecture might win converts because it’s familiar and plenty of applications are designed for it. And that raises the very legit question of what role the operating system will play in how MIDs are used. I’ll get back to that in a few posts.

Yesterday I wrote about how Intel processors are dominant on the Interop show floor, proof that networking appliances are more inexpensive and powerful than ever before. We can add one more adjective to that description today — blindingly fast. In aggressive and dramatic fashion, Intel has entered the 10 gigabit Ethernet adapter market with a new line of dual-speed server adapters that use standard copper cabling and are priced under $1,000.

The new Intel 10 Gigabit AT Server Adapter will be available with the Dell PowerEdge product line, a popular commodity compute platform for server applications and networking appliances, and will operate at both 1 gigabit Ethernet and 10 gigabit Ethernet speeds. With this move Intel has effectively commoditized 10 gigabit Ethernet, which will undoubtedly drive the technology deep into enterprise IT networks.

While Intel is not the first to market with a 10 gigabit Ethernet adapter for the x86 ecosystem — Chelsio and Neterion have been shipping similar products with more functionality for some time now — the company’s aggressive pricing and influence on the supply chain will be significant. Intel in their announcement placed a shot across the bow at these competitive products, offering dual-port 10 gigabit Ethernet adapters priced under $800 aimed at the intra-rack and high-performance compute markets. That equates to commodity pricing of $40 per gigabit for these adapters.

While the pricing drives 10 gigabit Ethernet to a commodity, the performance of these new adapter cards is not yet documented. But I expect that, in typical Intel style, these adapters will perform admirably, if not best-in-class, as compared to the competition.

There is a well-documented historical trend of Intel producing networking adapters and then quickly integrating them onto their motherboards (and the motherboards of their suppliers as well). I would predict that we will see a 1 gigabit/10 gigabit Ethernet (1000/10000) adapter integrated on motherboards within 18 months (by 2010) and dual-port versions shortly afterwards (mid-year 2010) The days of high-end servers with 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports are numbered.

It will then more than likely be another two years post-2010 before we see an Intel announcement on an adapter card that runs 100 gigabit Ethernet. As I wrote last year, 100 gigabit Ethernet combined with multi-core Intel processors will be game-changing for the data center.

Intel’s Mash Maker application, which launches today, isn’t exactly a new idea; Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft’s Popfly are similar. But Mash Maker marks the first time Intel has launched a software effort with no hardware attached. Presumably you can run Mash Maker on a computer with an AMD inside without melting your motherboard.

I was super skeptical at first and frankly, still am. According to Robert Ennals, senior researcher at Intel Research Berkeley and the architect for Mash Maker, the goal of Intel Research is to make the computing experience better. He said Intel Research and Intel Capital are the only divisions at Intel who have the freedom to think outside the PC box, as it were. Fine, Intel launched Mash Maker to make the Internet a better place. Does it?

Jeff Klaus, marketing director for Intel Mash Maker, said it is more useful than Pipes or Popfly because it not only allows users to make mashups, but also allows those who have downloaded the Mash Maker client to see which previous Mash Maker mashups might improve their web surfing experience. This way users of Mash Maker can benefit even if they don’t know how to create mashups. As one of the biggest complaints I have about Pipes is the difficulty I have using it (yes, it’s a me-centric complaint), I have to think there are others who could benefit from this.

In the meantime, I’ll watch with interest as Intel moves outside of its chip-centric world. A few years ago it made the decision with its Intel Capital venture investing arm to look not just for companies that could eventually sell more Intel chips, but also those that might make for a good return. In 2007 it started investing in seed deals, especially consumer-facing startups, as part of that expanding mission.

As for selling more chips, programs such as Mash Maker may not directly influence buying decisions, but by making the computer easier to use, Intel makes them more important and thus, more necessary. And by associating its brand with a fun application, Intel is achieving brand recognition in a much more sophisticated way than its dancing bunny-suited guys back in the 90s.

As often as I reference Moore’s Law you’d think I’d know everything about Gordon Moore, the former co-founder, president and chairman of Intel who helped create the chip industry today. In a fit of wild extrapolation, he came up with the idea that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year, and later, based on his experience, he reasoned out the eponymous law that says transistors will double every 2 years. But an in-depth interview with Moore conducted by SEMI has taught me a thing or two about the man.

1. He can blow glass. I’ve done this folks, and it’s not easy. Or safe.
2. He once evaporated several thousand dollars worth of platinum inside a furnace.
3. He inhaled. Arsenic.
4. The man has no heroes, but he did like his math teacher.
5. And he believes that, in the chip industry, when the going gets tough, the tough speed new product development.

AMD has unleashed a line of desktop chips at a time when PC sales are slowing and even Intel is experiencing tighter margins (although, that’s because of memory prices). No matter how good AMD’s offerings are, it’s going to be hard for the company to gain traction in this market. Intel can afford to cut costs to drive sales into PCs, while AMD has a much harder time.

Despite the economic crunch, AMD has put forth a strong line of chips for the desktop with its Phenom series. It includes the X3 8000, the industry’s first triple-core chip for desktops, and the X4 line of souped-up quad-core chips for desktops designed to run really high-end graphics. The X4 9100e, a power-sipping quad-core x86 processor that only uses 65 watts, makes me hopeful that a computer built with it might run cool enough to sit in the living room as a media player without the constant whir of a fan.

Today AMD said it has 45 nanometer chips for desktops and servers running in development systems. That’s fantastic, but the chips won’t be in actual devices until the second half of the year, putting AMD’s most advanced chips at least six months behind Intels’s 45 nanometer chips.

Also, one of the touted benefits of 45nm is increased power efficiency, which makes them a good fit for mobile computing. Intel launched its 45nm chips first in a new laptop, but AMD won’t have 45 nm chips in laptops until 2009. By then Intel will be working on 32 nanometer chips, which leads me to wonder how long AMD can play this game.

• AP: Siemens Cuts 3,800 Jobs, Shift 3,000
• BusinessWeek: Motorola: Left to its Own Devices
• Reuters: Verizon Says Unlimited Pricing Plan to be Accretive
• ArsTechnica: Why Intel Bought Project Offset and the Offset Engine
• BroadbandReports: Verizon/Fairpoint Deal Approved to Move Forward
• LightReading: Qwest Not Satisfied with Sprint