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Facebook Goes DRAM
Facebook has come up with a data cache which runs on flash memory instead of DRAM. Dubbed McDipper it saves money while still delivering higher performance than disk.
The system is a Facebook-built implementation of the popular memcached key-value store the only difference is that runs on flash memory rather than pricier DRAM. Memcached is the open-source key-value store that caches frequently accessed data in memory so applications can access and serve it faster than if it were stored on hard disks.
Facebook runs thousands of memcached servers to power its various applications. The only downside is that it is expensive. McDipper can handle working sets that had very large footprints but moderate to low request rates. It provides up to 20 times the capacity per server and still supports tens of thousands of operations per second.
According to Gigaom, Facebook has deployed McDipper for a handful of these workloads. This has reduced the total number of deployed servers in some pools by as much as 90 per cent while still delivering more than 90 per cent of get responses with sub-millisecond latencies.
Is Apple Hiding Billions?
February 4, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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According to Apple’s Q4 corporate filings, the company channeled $11 billion into tax havens in a single quarter. The Sunday Times claims the company is sheltering a total of $94 billion in tax havens. However, Apple’s activities are completely legal and the IRS can’t do anything about it.
But Apple’s tax avoidance strategy is not limited to the US. The company is avoided an estimated £550 million in tax in Britain back in 2011. A different analysis suggests a £550 million tax bill. Let’s not forget Kate Middleton is about to have a baby, and babies tend to cost money, so shame on you Apple.
American politicians, from both sides of the political spectrum, like to have their photos taken next to anything Apple. The company is often viewed as an American success story, as it managed to reinvent itself and come back from the brink to become the world’s second most valuable company.
AP Goes With Twitter
January 14, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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The Associated Press began using its official Twitter account as an advertising platform on Monday, as the news organization looks for new ways to generate revenue.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd was the first sponsor on the @ap account for breaking news, which is followed by 1.5 million Twitter users. The South Korean electronics maker’s initial “SPONSORED TWEET” promoted its events at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
AP did not disclose financial details of the arrangement.
Twitter, which sells ads directly to make money from the social media’s monthly base of 200 million users, will not receive any proceeds from the AP-Samsung deal.
The AP called the initiative part of a new business strategy and stressed that sponsored tweets will clearly be labeled to differentiate them from news tweets.
The ads provide AP a new income source as news organizations from newspapers to television face severe revenue declines in the face of high production costs.
While the AP was founded in 1846 by U.S. newspapers as a breaking news conduit, only 22 percent of its revenue comes from member fees. Photo licensing, advertising on its news application AP Mobile and YouTube channel are other revenue streams.
Will Foxcomm Invade The US?
Foxconn Technology Group is weighing whether or not to expand its existing manufacturing operations in the U.S., in a move that could be linked with Apple’s plan to bring back Mac manufacturing to the country.
Foxconn made the statement last Friday after Apple CEO Tim Cook said in interviews with NBC and Businessweek that Apple would manufacture one of its Mac lines in the U.S. by the end of next year.
“So we’ll literally invest over $100 million,” Cook said. “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”
Analysts said Foxconn could be involved. The Taiwan-based firm is a major supplier for Apple, helping to build its iPhone and iPad. But much of that manufacturing is done in China, where Foxconn employs 1.2 million workers and labor costs are lower.
Without elaborating, Foxconn said it was considering the expansion in order to meet the needs of it customers, and to “leverage the high-value engineering talent” available in the U.S. market.
It’s unclear what kind of manufacturing operations the company already has in the U.S. An expansion in the nation, however, would face challenges, said Amy Teng, an analyst with research firm Gartner.
“From the financial perspective, I don’t see any advantage in why they (Foxconn) would assemble there, unless this is part of Apple’s plan,” she said. Labor costs in the U.S. are higher and it will be harder for the company to recruit U.S. workers for menial factory jobs, when compared to China.
Hitachi Bringing New Xeon Servers To Market
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Hitachi Data Systems announced that it will expand its family of blade and rack server products for the enterprise market. The forthcoming Hitachi Compute Systems will be based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family.
Roberto Basilio, vice president, Infrastructure Platforms Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems said that by leveraging the new Intel Xeon processor E5 family, upcoming Hitachi Compute Systems will feature faster performance, higher density and greater energy efficiency. The servers are being designed for converged data centres. They come pre-configured and optimised for leading applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010, SAP HANA and solutions with VMware.
He said that the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family provides exceptional energy efficiency, increased security, flexible performance and the opportunity for streamlining customer’s data centres. The current range of Hitachi Compute Systems consists of two blade server product lines, Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and Hitachi Compute Blade 320, both of which are intended for high performance, high availability applications. The portfolio also includes a family of rack-optimised servers, Hitachi Compute Rack, that are the foundation for dedicated, packaged solutions such as the company’s award-winning object store, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).
Google Had Developed Own Currency
March 5, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Google once contemplated the idea of issuing its own currency, to be called Google Bucks, company Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said on stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,Spain on Tuesday.
At the end of his keynote speech, Schmidt hit on a wide array of topics in response to audience questions. “We’ve had various proposals to have our own currency we were going to call Google Bucks,” Schmidt said.
The idea was to implement a “peer-to-peer money” system. However, Google discovered that the concept is illegal in most areas, he said. Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering with such proposals.
“Ultimately we decided we didn’t want to get into that because of these issues,” Schmidt said.
He also hinted that Google might be preparing for a battle in China once its acquisition of Motorola is complete.
“Google’s been willing to take on China pretty well,” he said in response to a question about whether Google expected to continue to ignore theft of Motorola intellectual property in China, as Motorola has been doing. The acquisition hasn’t closed yet, Schmidt noted. “We’ve taken a pretty strong position on IP. We are well aware of the issues and we are considering your question,” he said.
Google is still waiting for some government approvals of its proposed acquisition of Motorola.
Is Intel Ready For The USB 3.0 Standard?
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The USB Implementers Forum has ruled that the Ivy Bridge 7 Series Chipset and other Intel chipsets have achieved USB 3.0 certification. USB 3.0 delivers up to 10 times the data transfer rate of USB 2.0, as well as improved power efficiency. Intel’s Ivy Bridge will ship in Windows PCs in the April and will be the first to have USB 3.0 as a standard feature for the first time. USB 3.0 has been seen on laptops and desktops from AMD or NEC.
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Yahoo Wins Major Lawsuit
December 17, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Yahoo has achieved a big victory against spammers, a legal victory that also includes a default judgment of $610 million.
In the lawsuit, filed in May 2008, Yahoo targeted a variety of individuals and companies, accusing them of trying to defraud people via a spam campaign that falsely informed email recipients that they had won prizes in a non-existent Yahoo-sponsored lottery.
Yahoo alleged that the defendants’ goal was to trick email recipients into providing them with personal and financial information that could be used to commit fraud by raiding victims’ bank accounts, using their credit cards and applying for loans on their behalf.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Yahoo’s allegations are “uncontroverted” and said the company is entitled to $27 million in statutory damages for trademark infringement and $583 million in statutory damages for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
It’s not clear whether Yahoo will be able to collect the money. A default judgment is rendered when defendants in a case fail to plead or defend an action, as happened in this case, in which the defendants never responded to Yahoo’s complaint.
Intel Gives Details On Their Xeon E5 Processors
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Intel finally gave more details at the supercomputing conference SC2011 about its upcoming Xeon E5 processors and been showing off its Knights Corner many integrated core (MIC) solution.
We don’t expect to see the new Xeons until the first half of 2012, but Intel has has been shipping the new chips to “a small number of cloud and HPC customers” since September. The E5 family has the same core as the 3960X which Intel launched this week. So far though Intel does not seem to be keen to ramp up any mass production. Some of this might have something to do with problems in production which were rumoured earlier this year. However early benchmarks indicate that it could be a winner.
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AMD Ships One Million Llano Processors
It appears that AMD has successfully managed to ship one million Llano chips in the second quarter, which is weeks ahead of the official launch.
AMD released the news during its earnings conference call. Where interim CEO Thomas Seifert said demand for Llano was strong. “We expect Llano ramp to outpace the Brazos ramp,” he noted.
If you look back at AMD’s Brazos launch, they managed to ship around one million units ahead of its scheduled launch, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Conversely, introducing Llano will be a bit more challenging, because AMD is planning to offer many varieties of mobile and desktop SKUs; including affordable dual- and triple-core processors. Therefore, Llano is expected to outpace Brazos very soon. AMD also made mention in their earnings call that total APU shipments for the quarter hit seven million. That said, so 6 million of them were Brazos processors.
It is believed that AMD Llano chip will take 50 percent of their total CPU shipments by the end of the year. In the first quarter of 2012, the Llano is expected to garner over 60 percent of their shipments.