Intel puts another foot into 10GbE

Interop 2008 With a sweep of the Interop 2008 Las Vegas show floor, it's clear that vendors are confident that 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology is moving beyond the early adoption phase and into more storage networks and data centers.

Intel is among the big vendors at the conference embracing the transition, today announcing a stepping-stone server adapter that provides 10Gb throughput over standard copper cables. That means you can go bloody fast without having to install expensive fiber optic cabling.

Intel's new dual-speed 10GBASE-T adapter supports both 1GbE and 10GbE throughput for data migration operations. The 10 Gigabit AT Server Adapter works over short-range connections, with a 100m (328 feet) network transmission over CAT 6a cable, and 55m (180 feet) over CAT 6 cable.

Dell is to offer the device with its PowerEdge product line.

The server adapter will ship by the end of June, priced at $1,000, which is cheap as these things go.

The card should land in the same month as Intel's 10Gb AF DA Dual Port server adapter, announced last April

Dual-core Atoms not launching for a while?

We've been hearing talk about dual-core versions of Intel's new Atom processors for some time now, and we even saw specifications leak out last month. Supposedly, Intel has a 1.87GHz, 300-series dual-core Atom up its sleeve. The chip will be able to run as many as four threads at the same time, thanks to simultaneous multi-threading.

Sub-notebooks or low-end desktops boasting that particular chip might not come out anytime soon, though. Fuad Abazovic over at Fudzilla says he talked with folks who plan to produce Atom-based mobile and desktop systems, and he was told that dual-core Atoms won't show up until at least the fourth quarter of this year. Those chips are said to have power envelopes of only 8W, though, so they could theoretically slip into sub-notebooks.

This report comes in the wake of another that quoted Asus CEO Jerry Shen as saying Atom chips won't be widely available until the third quarter. Intel has also owned up to the fact that Atom demand is higher than expected, although the company hasn't mentioned shortages.

Deal of the week: Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9300

Intel's most affordable 45nm Core 2 Quad processor took a while to show up at online retailers, but it seems to be widely available now, and at lower prices. Today, we see Mwave is offering the CPU for only $279. The processor is in stock, and it comes retail-boxed with a three-year warranty and a stock cooler.

Those who've read our review of the Core 2 Quad Q9300 will know the chip runs at 2.5GHz with a 1333MHz front-side bus and a total of 6MB of L2 cache. Thanks largely to its 45nm Penryn underpinnings, the Q9300's thermal envelope is also a very reasonable 95W (reasonable as far as quad-core chips go, anyway).

Unlike its predecessor—the Core 2 Quad Q6600—we found that the Q9300 managed to keep up overall with higher-clocked dual-core models, yielding an excellent balance between good single-threaded performance and great mutli-threaded performance. We were able to overclock ours to a cool 3.26GHz with a voltage bump of only 0.025V, as well, which isn't half bad for a quad-core CPU.

Intel Steals AMD's Supercomputer Shopper

Cray and Intel announced today that they have established an R&D deal for research on next generation supercomputers. Cray Inc is one of the best supercomputer and high-performance computing manufacturer and mainly has been using AMD processors in its machines. Cray and Intel will be researching on the use of Larabee accelerators in supercomputers.

Larabee is Intel's next-generation GPGPU initiative, which is the cunning plan to use graphic cards to do other computing tasks than just showing graphics. GPU are known to have high-floating point processing capabilities and the industry has decided its time to use it for some math. AMD's ATI acquisition was on similar grounds and AMD today manufactures AMD Stream Processors that do the same thing. Nvidia with its CUDA is also doing a same thing.

AMD must be pretty sad that it hasn't been able to pull something similar with its Stream Processors. AMD Opteron has been pretty popular among supercomputer manufacturers due to scalability brought through HyperTransport architecture. Cray shares seem to have risen due to some excitement with AMD's chip availability, but I suspect its more to do with the Intel partnership.

Stream Processing are going to be the future of high-performance computing. Even on desktops, it'll be either be processors doing GPU work or GPU doing processors work sometime in the future.

AMD Phenoms hit compatibility glitch

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS. Beleaguered chipster AMD, fresh from the upset of losing a five-year old exclusive deal with supercomputer maker Cray yesterday, is facing problems getting its 9750 and 9850 125W Phenom parts to work with the 780G chipset. The result is that some manufacturers are having trouble making the quad core parts work in their mobos.

The problem isn't AMD's fault of course, according to err, AMD, which says there are no problems using the 125W parts with the 790 chipset but that manufacturers are trying to build systems on the cheap by using 780G mobos.

"What people have done, mistakenly, is paired a 780G motherboard with the higher frequency Phenom - the 125-watt Phenom," Jake Whitman, an AMD spokesperson, told CNET. "Not all motherboard manufacturers have tweaked their boards to support a 125-watt TDP. We've never made claims that 780G motherboards are enthusiast-class motherboards." µ

CNET

AMD reveals open source client management tool

AMD TODAY GAVE OUT details about open source tools it hopes will quicken the take-up of the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF's) desktop and mobile architecture for system hardware (Dash) standard.

This is the microprocessor maker’s latest move to promote and push for open standards through the creation of a Dash software development kit (SDK), which it produced in coordination with IT management software supplier Raritan.

The company says that it hopes the new tools will bring down the price of desktop and notebook client management, by reducing the amount of time which has to be dedicated to development, and making interoperability a priority.

AMD has long claimed that its strategy is to take the open standards approach, saying that it is committed to standards that allow for choice in the market.

Intel, AMD’s rival, also made a commitment to comply with the DMTF’s Dash 1.0 draft interoperability specification to open standards, with its Vpro updates last August. µ

Intel boosts Atom production to avoid supply squeeze

Early demand for an Intel chip that’s being designed for small laptops and desktops is so much higher than anticipated, the company has been forced to ramp up pre-release production.

The new chip, code-named Diamondville, won’t be officially released until June but Intel has already been inundated with demands for early shipments, said company spokesman Bill Calder. He added that several PC makers plan to announce in June that they’re working on Diamondville-based products. Many of the products announced in June should ship in the third and fourth quarters of this year, Calder added.

“We had anticipated a certain amount of growth and ramp up,” Calder told Computerworld. “It’s better than anticipated. We’re adjusting and increasing output. We are meeting and will meet anticipated demand.”

Diamondville is part of Intel’s new 45 nanometer line of Atom chips. The company officially unveiled the low-power, newly architected Atom processor family at its Developer Forum in Shanghai on April 2. At the time, Intel unveiled five new processors, codenamed Silverthorne, which are aimed at the embedded and mobile Internet device markets.

The Diamondville chips are aimed at a different market and are slated to be formally announced next month.

A future version of Intel’s low-powered laptop—the Classmate PC—is slated to run an Atom processor. The small laptop, aimed at the education market, is part of the company’s so-called “netbook” category of computers, which consists of inexpensive, portable machines with small screens.

Dan Olds, an analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group, said he’s not surprised that there’s so much demand for chips that will run small form factor PCs.

“There’s a strong and growing market for ultra-portable systems,” said Olds. “Travel warriors and others have a desire for a small system. Heavy work will be done on other machines. A small laptop would be easy to take with you. You’ll use it mainly for Internet access. It makes even more sense when you consider how much stuff you can do with web services.”

Calder said he doesn’t foresee Intel having trouble increasing the production of the chips to meet the unanticipated demand. He noted that the Atom chips are so small that 2,500 can fit on a single wafer. That means a decent boost in wafer production could dramatically affect the number of Atom processors produced.

“This is good for Intel,” said Olds. “Not enough production is a problem they can deal with. Not enough demand is a different and worse problem.”

This story is excerpted from Computerworld

New 3.06GHz iMac features special-run Intel chip

The 45nm, 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor inside Apple's newly updated $2,199 iMac may very well not show up in other systems. Electronista says Intel has confirmed that, once again, it has produced a custom CPU for Apple's latest creation.

The iMac line normally uses regular mobile Core 2 Duos, but the 3.06GHz chip in the latest 24" system is a special, otherwise-unannounced model with a 55W thermal envelope. Today's fastest official mobile Core 2—the Core 2 Extreme X9000—runs at 2.8GHz and has a 44W thermal envelope. Intel allegedly plans a 3.06GHz mobile Core 2 Extreme X9100 for its Centrino 2 platform, but that chip will also have a 44W envelope, and it presumably won't come out until June. Electronista says the new iMacs' motherboards are still based on current Santa Rosa technology.

This isn't the first time Intel has given Apple special treatment. As Electronista points out, the Mac Pro was the first workstation to play host to a 3GHz quad-core Xeon last year, and the MacBook Air includes a special Core 2 Duo chip that uses the same, smaller package as future Centrino 2 chips, but with 65nm silicon.

Atom chips to be in tight supply until summer

Intel may have launched its Atom low-cost, low-power processor a couple of months ago, but systems based on the chips may not become widely available until some time this summer. That's the gist of a report by DailyTech that cites statements from both Asus and Intel.

According to an Intel spokesman quoted by the site, Intel is seeing "better-than-anticipated" demand for Atom CPUs. The spokesman didn't quote any numbers, but in a separate interview, Asus CEO Jerry Shen chimed in by saying he doesn't believe Atom supply will catch up with demand until the third quarter of this year. In reference to his firm's popular Eee PC sub-notebook, Shen added, "Unlike our competitors, we use both Intel Atom processors and Intel Celeron M processors, so this will give us a stronger advantage in guaranteeing shipments."

Shen may have a point regarding the competition. So far, most of the "Eee killers" we've heard about from other companies—such as ECS, MSI, and potentially Acer and Dell—harness Atom processors. Meanwhile, Atom-based Eee PCs should roll out next month, but current models all feature Celeron M chips.

AMD to intro 45nm quad-core Phenom this quarter

AMD appears to be staggering its 45nm quad-core desktop processor release schedule. It's preparing to release one this quarter, but the next two won't ship until toward the end of the year - before January 2009, is what the chip maker's said to be telling mobo makers.

First up, there's the successor to the current Phenom X4 9750, a 125W beast that will be superseded later this quarter by a 45nm version of the chip. The new 9750 will only consume 95W. So say said industry sources, cited by a variety of Chinese-language websites.

The current 9750 is clocked at 2.4GHz, and contains 2MB of L2 cache and and 2MB of L3 cache. Its successor is said to contain 6MB of L3 and be clocked in the 2.4-2.7GHz range, which suggests to us it'll have a model number somewhat higher than 9750.

Later in the year, we'll see a 45nm, 95W successor to the 125W 9850, again with three times the L3 cache of the current version. To the new 9850, we can also add a 45nm version of the as-yet-unlaunched 9950, the moles maintain.

AMD's desktop roadmap also calls for the Q3 launch of the tri-core 2.2GHz Phenom X3 8550, filling the empty space between the current 8450 and 8650. Expect to see the arrival of the low-power 8450e, 9150e and 9350e in Q3 too.

These are 65nm parts - 45nm low-power quad-cores, codenamed 'Propus', will apparently debut some time in H1 2009...