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Intel Changes Course
Intel has changed its strategy when it comes to talking about its next generation technology. Back at IDF 2012, the company mentioned Haswell second generation 22nm CPUs and even explained some of its core technology, although it didn’t actually show any demos.
People got excited about Core i5 and Core i7 next generation Haswell parts that can ship with 10W TDP, but Intel hasn’t actually shown anything. When we asked a few people inside the company, they said that Intel isn’t planning on revealing too much, as they want to surprise the competition a bit more than they used to.
It’s quite clear that Haswell has every chance to beat AMD’s including 2013 Vishera successors. Intel obviously wants to see the market’s reaction to many ARM competitors, since some of them run Windows 8 RT just fine.
Intel Going High-Performance
Intel has been hinting that it is developing high-performance lower power server chips to speed up cloud services or data-intensive applications like analytic.
Apparently this will involve the integration of a converged fabric controller inside future server chips. This will make server communication faster while helping data centers operate at peak efficiency.
Raj Hazra, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group said that Fabric virtualises I/O and ties together storage and networking in data centres. If you add in an integrated controller you get a wider pipe to scale performance on cloud platforms. He said that the integrated fabric controller will appear in the company’s Xeon server chips in a few years as part of Intel’s cunning plan to bring the controller to the transistor layer.
Intel Increasing Supplier Audits
Intel has audited almost five times as many of its suppliers in 2011 than it did the previous year.
Chipzilla set itself a target of visiting 50 on-site, third-party audits of its suppliers during the last year. It had that target last year as well, but missed it by only carrying out 49 audits, while one had to be rescheduled.
In comparison Intel only carried out eight visits in 2010. The company also conducted 249 in-depth assessments and 289 self-assessments by suppliers.
But the findings were not that great. Intel found 426 priority and major findings, the highest class of non-compliance as defined by the company.
Most of the non-compliance related to management systems such as a lack of documentation and systems for CSR, inadequate communication with workers or suppliers and a lack of audits. But there were also 112 instances of labour abuse, which included working hours of more than 60 hours per week, and workers not being given at least one day off a week. There were also 28 issues relating to ethics, such as not having an anonymous reporting line for employees to raise issues or concerns through.
The report was interesting because it must have covered Foxconn, which has been the subject of criticism over its treatment of workers. During 2011, Intel carried out audits at three Foxconn facilities and found them about as bad as others in the region. Most of the breaches of rules were in the areas of labour conditions, safety systems, and management systems.
Is Moore’s Law Dead?
May 11, 2012 by admin
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Physicist Michio Kaku says that Moore’s law will be dead within about 10 years.
Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York told BigThink.com that we are already seeing a slowing down of Moore’s Law. He said that computing power simply cannot maintain this rapid, exponential rise using standard silicon technology.
Kaku said that the latest CPUs from Intel, which use a unique three-dimensional design, do continue roughly doubling processors. But he points out that the new design is nonetheless proof that the Law is winding down.
The two basic problems are heat and leakage and that is why the age of silicon will eventually come to a close.
By continuing to shrink the parts that go into processors, heat becomes concentrated. At a point in the near future, the heat generated will be so intense that the chip will melt. You can literally fry an egg on top of the chip, and the chip itself begins to disintegrate, he said.
NAND SSD Prices Slowly Falling
Prices for NAND SSDs have started to fall and the industry thinks that OEM contract rates are expected to cost less than a dollar per GB by beginning of April.
Thanks to HDD prices still more than double the rates prior to Thailand floods, the gap between mainstream SSD drives and traditional hard drives has narrowed. SSD is about five times as expensive as HDD but sales are now so high because more enthusiasts are buying SSD drives that the prices are expected to fall further.
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