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WD And Sandisk Join Forces
Western Digital and Sandisk have teamed up to create Western Digital’s first hybrid storage device that uses Sandisk’s iSSD and Western Digital’s Caviar Black hard drive.
Western Digital, which has dabbled in solid state disks (SSDs) for the enterprise market, has stayed away from hybrid drives that use relatively small SSDs to act as cache for hard drives. Now the firm has teamed with Sandisk to create its WD Black Solid State Hybrid drives with 500GB capacity.
Western Digital is pitching its hybrid drives at laptop makers, offering units with 5mm, 7mm and 9.5mm heights. The firm said Sandisk’s iSSD uses 19nm NAND flash and claimed it is the world’s “smallest and most advanced semiconductor manufacturing process”, a claim that Intel might question.
Kevin Conley, SVP and GM of client storage solutions at Sandisk said, “By combining SanDisk’s unparalleled flash memory expertise and technology with the hard drive know-how of Western Digital, WD Black SSHDs [solid state hard drives] offer outstanding hard drive-like capacity, and the slim form factor and the level of performance that you will only get with flash memory solutions.”
Seagate was first to introduce hybrid drives with its Momentus XT range, which offers an impressive performance boost over mechanical hard drives for certain workloads. The problem for Western Digital and Seagate is that hybrid drives are merely a stop-gap rather than a long term strategy, with SSD prices falling rapidly due to competition in the SSD industry as opposed to the hard drive industry, where Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba have a comfortable ride.
Will Oracle Retire MySQL?
The founder of MySQL Michael Widenius “Monty” claims that Oracle is killing off his MySQL database and he is recommending that people move to his new project MariaDB. In an interview with Muktware Widenius said his MariaDB, which is also open source, its on track to replacing MySQL at WikiMedia and other major organizations and companies.
He said MySQL was widely popular long before MySQL was bought by Sun because it was free and had good support. There was a rule that anyone should get MySQL up and running in 15 minutes. Widenius was concerned about MySQL’s sale to Oracle and has been watching as the popularity of MySQL has been declining. He said that Oracle was making a number of mistakes. Firstly new ‘enterprise’ extensions in MySQL were closed source, the bugs database is not public, and the MySQL public repositories are not anymore actively updated.
Widenius said that security problems were not communicated nor addressed quickly and instead of fixing bugs, Oracle is removing features. It is not all bad. Some of the new code is surprisingly good by Oracle, but unfortunately the quality varies and a notable part needs to be rewritten before we can include it in things like MariaDB. Widenius said that it’s impossible for the community to work with the MySQL developers at Oracle as it doesn’t accept patches, does not have a public roadmap and there was no way to discuss with MySQL developers how to implement things or how the current code works.
Basically Oracle has made the project less open and the beast has tanked, while at the same time more open versions of the code, such as MariaDB are rising in popularity.
Will Intel Buy AMD?
A few years ago it would have been impossible for Intel to acquire AMD, simply due to regulatory constraints put in place by the FTC and the European Union. Intel had more than a 60 percent of the PC and notebook market, so picking up AMD, a company that has some 20 percent of the market, would make Intel a real monopoly.
In the last two years the iPad, smartphones and ARM based tablets have changed the landscape, eating up Intel’s revenue and market share. It is true that most people, especially professionals and the business crowd, use x86 processors, but this is rapidly changing as home users are happy with emailing, browsing and playing some games on their iPad or other tablets. This puts Intel in a world trouble, as the PC market nosedived by 14 percent last quarter, due to a lack of interest for new devices and upgrade.
Tablets are becoming couch browsing devices, people use their smartphones to read news on the go and sometimes at home. More and more users don’t even touch their notebooks or desktops at home. With ARM staying the dominant instruction set in the phone and tablet space, Intel is facing a serious issue as Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia are all making money on ARM chips.
With this in mind, this would be the main reason for Intel to pick up AMD. AMD would not cost them that much, as Intel still has billions in bank, but with AMD, Intel would gain great graphics, something that the company has been struggling to crack for many years. It would make Intel slightly more competitive, but it would not solve all of its problems.
ARM manufacturers also face challenges, they need to produce more powerful chips and deliver a better user experience in order to win more notebooks and detachable devices, but this is going well with non-Apple based tablets. Apple uses ARM, so in the tablet world ARM is winning this fight, but Qualcomm and Nvidia as two independent chip manufactures could do a much better job at getting popular design wins. The Snapdragon S800 and Tegra 4 will get these two companies a step closer, while Apple will continue making good chips for iPads and iPhones. Let’s not forget about Samsung, as it makes many chips for its phones and tablets.
AMD gained 14 percent on May 1st, and an additional 5.9 percent yesterday, getting its stocks up to $3.41. Back on April 30th, AMD stock was trading at $2.68. In last three days of trading AMD gained 27.24 percent or $0.73 per share, which is a huge leap for a company with a 52-week low of just $1.81.
Did Apple Trick Sharp?
Sharp is really regretting its dependence on Apple as its main customer.
While it made sense at the time to be extremely pleased when Apple sucked up most of its capacity with screens for its iPhone and iPad, now the tide has turned the outfit is reporting a bigger than forecast loss. Sharp is now suffering from low output at its factories and forced to write off excess capacity.
The company had a $5.1 billion net loss for the year which is much worse than it predicted. At the start of the year, Sharp was forced to curtail production of 9.7-inch screens for Apple’s iPad. That has stepped up the urgency for Sharp to find new customers and uses for its leading-technology displays and may make it harder for the company to convince investors and lenders it remains a viable company.
Sharp will officially announce its results for latest business year on May 14. To make matters worse the company is also taking a charge to put aside cash for possible fines from a display price-fixing investigation in Europe, the sources said. Sharp in October received a $4.4 billion bailout from banks including Mizuho Financial Group and Mitsubishi Financial Group in return for mortgaging nearly all its factories and offices in Japan and pledging to cut 10,000 jobs.
AMD Touts Its Memory Architecture
May 9, 2013 by admin
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AMD has said the memory architecture in its heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) will move management of CPU and GPU memory coherency from the developer’s hands down to the hardware.
While AMD has been churning out accelerated processing units (APUs) for the best part of two years now, the firm’s HSA is the technology that will really enable developers to make use of the GPU. The firm revealed some details of the memory architecture that will form one of the key parts of HSA and said that data coherency will be handled by the hardware rather than software developers.
AMD’s HSA chips, the first of which will be Kaveri, will allow both the CPU and GPU to access system memory directly. The firm said that this will eliminate the need to copy data to the GPU, an operation that adds significant latency and can wipe out any gains in performance from GPU parallel processing.
According to AMD, the memory architecture that it calls HUMA – heterogeneous unified memory access, a play on unified memory access – will handle concurrency between the CPU and GPU at the silicon level. AMD corporate fellow Phil Rogers said that developers should not have to worry about whether the CPU or GPU is accessing a particular memory address, and similarly he claimed that operating system vendors prefer that memory concurrency be handled at the silicon level.
Rogers also talked up the ability of the GPU to take page faults and that HUMA will allow GPUs to use memory pointers, in the same way that CPUs dereference pointers to access memory. He said that the CPU will be able to pass a memory pointer to the GPU, in the same way that a programmer may pass a pointer between threads running on a CPU.
AMD has said that its first HSA-compliant chip codenamed Kaveri will tip up later this year. While AMD’s decision to give GPUs access to DDR3 memory will mean lower bandwidth than GPGPU accelerators that make use of GDDR5 memory, the ability to address hundreds of gigabytes of RAM will interest a great many developers. AMD hopes that they will pick up the Kaveri chip to see just what is possible.
Intel’s Haswell Arriving In June
Intel has announced that it will launch its next generation Haswell processors at Computex.
Intel showed running Haswell silicon to journalists last month at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in a bid to talk up the upcoming chip’s GPU. Last Friday the firm announced what some already knew and many had already guessed, that it will launch Haswell at Computex in June.
Intel published a blog post on 26 April saying that the fourth generation Core processor known as Haswell would arrive in 3,337,200,000,000,000 nanoseconds, which worked out to just under 39 days. The countdown figure matched perfectly with the start of Computex on 4 June, and confirmed what an Intel insider said that the chip would be launched at Computex.
The fact that Intel is using Computex to launch its next generation chip is not surprising, given that there are few big IT shows during the summer and launching the chip later will not give the firm’s system builder and OEM partners enough time to gear up marketing for the lucrative back to school and holiday buying seasons.
While Intel’s Haswell launch is a big event for the firm, it isn’t the most important. Rather, the firm is expected to launch updated low-power Atom chips that it hopes will help it compete in the tablet market, a market that is growing, as opposed to the PC market that Haswell addresses.
Intel’s decision to launch at Computex means that the late spring computer industry show should be awash with updated notebook and desktop PCs, as well as the firm’s preferred ultrabook branded laptops.
Qualcomm Sticks With Windows RT
Tim McDonough, Vice President, Marketing at Qualcomm, was Qualcomm´s commitment to Windows RT. Ever since Microsoft announced Windows RT, ARM supporters had high hopes and Windows RT has yet to live up to some.
Tim confirmed Qualcomm´s commitment to Windows RT and future releases, saying “we are here for the long run”. He describes the partnership as the beginning of a long journey and of course Qualcomm is going to continue rolling out chips that will run great with Windows RT.
Qualcomm mentioned that Samsung ATIV and Dell XPS 10, both of which use Qualcomm’s S4 dual-core APQ8060A chips, run really nice. Tim told us that he is a real fan of both devices and that he is currently using one of them.
We also learned that Snapdragon 600, the one used in the HTC One and some versions of Samsung’s Galaxy S4, is 40 per cent faster than the S4 Pro, adding that Adreno 320 graphics core is significantly faster than the Adreno 225 used in the S4 APQ8060A chip. Another number we got is that the Adreno 330 is up to four times faster than the 225, which is a huge leap forward. Let’s not forget that Snapdragon 800, which is up to 75 per cent faster than Snapdragon S4 Pro, is also coming in mid-year, second half of 2013. The 800 will be Qualcomm’s first chip with Adreno 330 graphics.
One can easily conclude that there should be some Snapdragon 600 and 800 Windows RT convertible tablets at some point in the future. To stay on the safe side, Qualcomm just confirmed that new and exciting things are coming in the next months and quarter and they are Windows based.
We have to notice that most people in the tablet world get really excited talking about convertible tablets in all shapes and sizes, as the physical keyboard is definitely an accessory you want to have.
Xerox Moving Into IT Services
Printer and copier maker Xerox Corp forecast current-quarter earnings below estimates as it quickens efforts to transform itself into a technology services provider.
Xerox, whose shares were little changed at midday, also offers services such as managing toll systems and healthcare programs to counter sluggish growth in its printers and copiers business, which accounts for about 40 percent of its revenue.
Services is now the larger part of the company’s business and lower margins in IT and business process outsourcing is dragging overall margins.
The company said it expects second-quarter revenue from its document technology business, which includes printers and copiers, to decline in the mid-single digits. Revenue fell 9 percent to $2.14 billion in the business in the first quarter.
Based in Norwalk, Connecticut, Xerox moved into business services with its purchase of Affiliated Computer Services Inc (ACS) for $5.5 billion in 2009 – the company’s biggest deal in its 106-year history.
Xerox said it plans to quicken the pace of a restructuring plan kicked off in the last quarter of 2012 and included a 2-cent restructuring charge in its second-quarter forecast.
Xerox said it expects flattish revenue for the full year, compared with previous expectations of up to a 2 percent growth, it said on a conference call with analysts.
The company said it was on track to reach its target of adjusted EPS of $1.09 to $1.15 for the full year and to generate operating cash flow of $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion.
“Europe remains weak. US remains stable, but weak. We have not seen a pickup in the US,” Xerox CEO Ursula Burns said on a conference call with analysts.
“We did see a slowdown, a bit of a slowdown, in some developing market economies. But our business model is fairly resilient in the developing markets,” she said.
nVidia Wins With Tegra 4
Nvidia’s first Tegra 4 design win is here, apparently, and it doesn’t appear very impressive at all. Tegra 4 is late to the party, so it is a bit short on design wins, to put it mildly.
Now a new ZTE smartphone has been spotted by Chinese bloggers and it seems to be based on Nvidia’s first A15 chip. The ZTE 988 is a phablet, with a 5.7-inch 720p screen. It has 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel camera and a 6.9mm thin body. It weighs just 110g, which is pretty surprising. The spec is rather underwhelming, especially in the display department.
However, a grain of salt is advised. It is still unclear whether the phone features a Tegra 4 or a Qualcomm chipset. Also, it is rather baffling to see a 720p screen on a Tegra 4 phablet, it just seems like overkill.
Citrix Goes To The Cloud
Citrix System’s GoToWebcast has become generally available in North America and Europe, offering users a cloud-based webcasting tool for up to 5,000 participants.
The subscription-based GoToWebcast allows users to broadcast unlimited audio and video presentations to live and on-demand audiences that can access them using mobile devices such as Apple’s iPhones and iPads, or Android-based smartphones and tablets.
To simplify administration, GoToWebcast has a five-step wizard that walks users through setting up their event. Users are first asked to schedule the event, including deciding audience size and if the web cast should be available on-demand or live with an archive. Users are then asked to select registration alternatives, multimedia options, choose what content to upload and finally decide on security and email settings.
In addition to audio and video, users can upload presentation documents, chat with attendees, conduct polls and link to social media channels. Citrix didn’t announce any pricing for the new service, only saying that users pay a fixed monthly fee.
The company also released a beta version of GoToWebinar with HDFaces for the 500- and 1,000-attendee plans. HDFaces is a video conferencing technology that lets up to six presenters lead interactive Q&A sessions, host panel discussions, or do demonstrations in high-definition.
The announcement comes after the recently announced availability of HDFaces for up to 100 participants in GoToWebinar and GoToTraining sessions, as Citrix adds high-definition video across its GoTo portfolio.