Elevology Blog

Advanced Micro Devices has had the sort of week that might make a computer chip company wonder if Murphy's Law was running the show instead of Moore's Law.

AMD CEO Lisa Su's spilling the beans about the month Microsoft plans to release Windows 10 was the most glaring misstep by the company. It was also by far the least worrisome, though we'd hate to have been the recipient of whatever choice words Redmond sent AMD's way over that goof.

Facebook this week unveiled a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) server solution based on Intel's new 14-nanometer Xeon D processors for "heavily parallelizable workloads" in the data center.

Facebook introduced its SoC microserver platform, code named Yosemite, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in San Jose, Calif., where the social network also announced open low-level motherboard management software for BMC processor-based systems called OpenBMC.

Intel on Monday introduced its 14-nanometer Xeon D family of microserver processors, bringing System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capabilities to the company's Xeon line of datacenter products for the first time.

The first Xeon D products are the quad-core Xeon Processor D-1520, priced at $199, and the eight-core Xeon Processor D-1540, priced at $581. Both new SoCs are available today. More than 50 new systems using Xeon D chips are currently being designed by Intel OEM partners, with about three-quarters of those developing network, storage, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems.

Eight years ago, author and business strategist Fred Reichheld published The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. In it, he detailed the meaning of "bad profits," or a company that is making money while its reputation goes down the tubes.

It happens for a number of reasons: Misleading prices, poor customer service, or bad products. Customers feel marginalized, misled, and mistreated. As Reichheld says, "bad profits are about extracting value from customers, not creating value."

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said Wednesday that the company intends to start building chips for servers using the processor architecture it has refined for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Mollenkopf, pictured, was speaking at an analyst event in New York. He said Qualcomm was "in a unique position" to take advantage of cutting-edge semiconductor fabrication processes in order to sell its products into the data center for the first time.

AMD will be developing an exascale node architecture using its own Heterogeneous System Architecture-based APUs.

SANTA CLARA—There's an old story about a distinguished thinker—in some tellings, it's Bertrand Russell, in others, it's William James—who is confronted by a little old lady after a lecture on the nature of the cosmos. The woman objects to the scientist's description of star systems and galaxies, proclaiming that in fact, the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle.

The scientist laughs and asks, "So what is the turtle resting on?" Another turtle, comes the confident reply. And what is that turtle standing on? "Oh, it's turtles all the way down," the little old lady says.

Microsoft's Tuesday's event was all about the enterprise; Redmond's meat-and-potatoes base. A first look at the Windows Technical Preview for Enterprise client and Windows Server Technical Preview show a host of cosmetic changes designed to appease business customers who were outraged over the UI of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, both of which were criticized as impractical in enterprise environments.

And has Microsoft taken heed! Windows 10 Enterprise client and Server are step backs to the mouse-and-keyboard user experience of Windows 7, but retain the many security, performance, and ease-of-management capabilities that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 delivered. In fact, the latest server OS has many under-the-hood enhancements that IT professionals have demanded.

SANTA CLARA—Applied Micro showed up at ARM TechCon with a new 64-bit ARM processor called HeliX, an embedded chip aimed at market segments like networking and communications, imaging, storage, and industrial systems.

"With the growth of I/O needs in switches etc., in storage with bigger Hadoop-type clusters, there's just pull here for 64-bit. Even for those apps that don't need the memory it's still nice having the tool set," said Applied Micro's Pat Patla.

Applied Micro and Hewlett-Packard have teamed up to release the first commercially available 64-bit ARMv8 server, the ProLiant m400 cartridge for HP's Moonshot server framework.

The new server is based on Applied Micro's X-Gene System-on-a-Chip (SoC) and runs Canonical's Ubuntu operating system. Designed for primarily for Web caching workloads, the ProLiant m400 provides power, cooling, and space savings compared with traditional rack servers to the tune of an "up to 35 percent reduction in total cost of ownership," according to HP.

Automating server tasks just got a lot easier for Mac and Linux users, thanks to Microsoft's decision to open source its PowerShell automation platform and scripting language for Windows and Windows Server.

PowerShell is a task-based, command-line scripting language built on the .NET Framework, which helps IT professionals control and automate the administration of servers. .NET itself completed a gradual open-source transition earlier this year, following Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin.

A single P100 delivers the performance of dozens of traditional CPU nodes.