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The film Predators opened in theaters over the weekend, and as was the case with several other flicks proceed by Robert Rodriquez — Shorts, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, Planet Terror, Sin City — it was AMD hardware t…
AMD on Wednesday unveiled its Opteron 4000 Series processors, and the first server platform designed from the ground up for the cloud, the No. 2 chip maker said.
"Until now, customers wanting to build a dense and power-efficient cloud or hyperscal…
You’ve probably never heard of SeaMicro before, but if the company was looking to make waves in the media, job well done. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you manage to cram 512 Intel Atom processors into a 10U rack mount space.
We’re talking…
Panasonic this week introduced several upgrades to its existing Toughbook 19 rugged convertible tablet PC, including the addition of an Intel Core i5 540UM processor clocked at 1.2GHz (with Turbo Boost up to 2.0GHz).
Other features include 2GB of DDR3 memory (expandable to 8GB), a 10.4-inch LED backlit touchscreen display, 160GB SATA hard drive (optional 128GB SSD), 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, two USB 2.0 ports, SD card slot, and other ho-hum specs.
The real selling point here is the rugged design. According to Panasonic, the Toughbook 19 exceeds the MIL-STD-810G certification and can withstand a six-foot drop. The hard drive is shock-mounted and the magnesium alloy case has been certified for all kinds of nasty conditions, such as sand storms and heavy rain.
The Toughbook 19 is available now starting at $3,400 street.
Image Credit: Panasonic
Following recent high-end x86 chip launches by both AMD and Intel, Microsoft announced plans to phase out Itanium support in the company’s server software.
Microsoft’s move underscores how far the x86 architecture has come, which seemingly renders Itanium obsolete in some cases. Dan Reger, senior technical product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server division, said as much in a blog post announcing the change.
"Why the change? The natural evolution of the x86640bit (‘x64′) architecture has led to the creation of processors and servers which deliver the scalability and reliability needed for today’s ‘mission-critical’ workloads," Reger said. "Just this week, both Intel and AMD have released new high core-count processors, and servers with 8 or more x64 processors have now been announced by a full dozen server manufacturers. Such servers contain 64 to 96 processor cores, with more on the horizon."
Reger said that Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of Windows Server to support Itanium, while SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 also mark the end of the road for Itanium.
The change won’t happen overnight, however, as Microsoft will continue so support Itanium customers until July 10, 2018.
Intel’s empire wasn’t built in a day, nor does it look like it’s in any danger of falling. AMD does continue to chip away, however, and managed to gain some ground in the market share disparity between the two chip makers.
According to iSuppli, AMD in the fourth quarter of 2009 grabbed a 12.1 percent chunk of worldwide microprocessor revenues , picking up 1.6 percentage points from its position in the same quarter in 2008, and 0.28 percent over its position in Q3 of 2009.
Intel, meanwhile, dropped a percentage point from 2008, but still holds a dominating 80.6 share of the market. The No. 1 chip maker did gain slightly over the previous quarter, rising 0.1 of a point from 80.5 percent.
"For the full year of 2009, the market share situation was somewhat more balanced with AMD and Intel picking up two-tenths and three-tenths of a percent of share, respectively, in 2009 compared to 2008," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for computer platforms at iSuppli. "This is an interesting development because PC average selling prices (ASPs) dropped significantly during the course of 2009 – especially for notebooks. So, the fact that AMD and Intel virtually maintained their market share at the annual level shows that neither supplier was overly punished by the dropping ASPs. It also indicates that neither was able to capitalize on the situation very effectively."
All other chip makers accounted for 7.3 percent of combined shipments.
Digital Storm may have just built the baddest workstation on the block, or at least in the home consumer market. Tapping into Intel’s latest and greatest, Digital Storm’s new DAVINCI workstation crunches workloads with Intel’s Core i7 980X Extreme Edition chip doing much of the heavy lifting.
Helping it go is an Nvidia PNY Quadro FX 1800 graphics card with 768MB of dedicated RAM. Other baseline specs include 12GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard, a 1000W power supply, and Windows 7 Professional.
"The philosophy behind DAVINCI is simple: engineer a workstation that completely maximizes application performance so that creative professionals can accelerate their productivity," commented Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm’s Director of Product Development. "Thanks to NVIDIA’s and Intel’s most powerful components to date, our DAVINCI workstations will be fully optimized for the forthcoming release of Adobe’s Creative Suite 5."
Digital Storm says it subjects each DAVINCI system to a rigorous 72-hour stress test prior to shipping. Should something break anyway, the rigs come backed with a 4-year warranty.
As equipped above, pricing starts at $4,995, which represents the company’s mid-range (Professional) DAVINCI. There’s also a Performance model that starts out at $2,952 (Intel Core i7 930, Quadro FX 580, 750W PSU) and an Enthusiast model that runs $5,778 (dual Intel Xeon E5530 chips, Intel Workstation board, Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 graphics, 1000W PSU).
Image Credit: MSI
Intel on Tuesday launched its Xeon 5600 processor series, calling it the "most secure data center processor" ever. They’re also pretty powerful, having been built on Intel’s 32nm Gulftown architecture. Already several enterprise vendors have touted the new chips.
"The performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series is so compelling that it’s absolutely justifiable immediately in terms of ROI, to simply replace Legacy service, a whole rack of servers, or whatever it happens to be with a single platform. We did it ourselves for our own IT workloads and reduced 264 servers to 16 and in the process got high availability and agility as a result," said Simon Crosby, CTO, Data Center & Cloud, Citrix Systems.
The new chips — which range in power from a 1.86GHz quad-core to a 3.33GHz six-core and 3.46GHz quad-core — add a couple of new security features, including Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT). The result, says Intel, is faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments.
According to Intel, a two-socket server using the new low-voltage Xeon L5640 will deliver the same performance as a server using the previous generation’s champ, the Xeon X5570.
Much more here.
Image Credit: Intel