Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more

Let bygones be bygones. That's what Advanced Micro Devices is hoping for with the roll-out of its first 45-nanometer processor Thursday.

(AMD also announced its upcoming 45-nanometer "Phenom II X4" desktop technology. See below.)

The No. 2 PC processor supplier will make the case that Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip--AMD's first quad-core processor--was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare but then faced prolonged delays. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market. (AMD lost more than five percentage points to Intel in … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices' first 45-nanometer chip, the Shanghai quad-core Opteron, has made its debut at resellers.

The officially unannounced Opteron 837X and 838X series processors are not cheap. Online reseller PC Connection lists the Opteron QC (quad-core) 8384 at $2,509. Another reseller, Buy.com lists the same processor at $2,240.

The 8384 is expected to run at 2.7GHz and draw 75 watts, relatively low power consumption for a quad-core server processor.

The 8385--same clock speed with a faster system bus--is offered for $2,509 at PC Connection.

Other processors listed include the 8382 (2.6GHz), 8380 (2.… Read more

Intel said it has acquired NetEffect, a company specializing in Ethernet products and technologies for server compute clusters.

The chipmaker purchased NetEffect's assets for $8 million, which include the company's Ethernet product portfolio, intellectual property, and technology.

NetEffect is a provider of solutions incorporating iWARP, an Ethernet alternative to InfiniBand. NetEffect's product portfolio includes 1-Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) adapters for servers and blade configurations as well as 10GbE Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

"NetEffect's role as a data communications solution provider...will enhance Intel's current Ethernet efforts," Tom Swinford, general manager, Intel … Read more

The largest hard-disk drive maker is going solid-state. Slowly.

Seagate will enter the market for solid-state drives in 2009, as it slowly embraces a technology that will, in some cases, replace its bread and butter: hard disks.

"Our history is based on rotating magnetic media. But as solid-state comes online, we're embracing this new media type," said Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development at the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company.

Seagate's first target market will be large enterprise customers. Consumer SSDs from Seagate will come later. The challenge is to convince large enterprise customers that … Read more

AMD said Monday it is set to roll out its next-generation "Shanghai" chip--minus the mistakes of the last generation.

The No. 2 processor maker wants to make one thing crystal clear: Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare only to be delayed a whopping eight months (or more, depending how the delay is calculated) due to production glitches and bugs. The chip was also hampered by speed (core clock frequency) limitations. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market.

"We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible. Learn from our mistakes and, as a company, never do that again," said Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business.

Shanghai--a quad-core product targeted at servers--will be AMD's first 45-nanometer processor. (Barcelona is 65-nanometer.) Typically, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the chip. Intel has been shipping 45-nanometer processors since last year and these processors now make up most of Intel's offerings.

AMD needs Shanghai to succeed. It is reeling from a string of losses and is on the verge of announcing a major restructuring. "To bring it back to profitability the execution of the server product line is absolutely critical," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. "That is really their only profit pool."… Read more

Small start-up Tilera still beats chip giants like Intel handily on core counts. Tilera updated its line of many-core processors Monday, adding a 36-core version to the mix.

Tilera, which made a splash last year when it introduced its first 64-core processor, announced a scaled-down 36-core Tile processor on Monday, in order to broaden its market reach.

The TilePro36 "is giving us a midrange product. This type of device would be used in a high-end video conferencing (system)," said Bob Doud, who is the director of marketing at Tilera. The TilePro36 chip is also targeted at applications such … Read more

As Intel officially unveiled its six-core "Dunnington" Xeon 7400 processor Monday, Unisys rolled out servers boasting up to 96 cores--with a catch.

As expected, Intel launched the Dunnington chip for high-end servers, the company's first six-core processor and last of its Penryn-class chips. Penryn will be followed by the Nehalem microarchitecture, due to appear initially as the Core i7 processor in the fourth quarter.

The Xeon 7400 boasts significantly better performance due to its 16MB cache memory and half-dozen cores.

The Xeon 7400 is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design. In … Read more

Intel is shipping new server processors that consume as little as 12.5 watts per core.

Cumulatively, the racks and racks of servers in large data centers can require power rivaling that consumed by entire city blocks. So, getting power consumption as low as possible while delivering adequate performance has become a delicate balancing act for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

New additions to the Xeon 5000 Series include the L5430 and X5270 processors, the fastest of which boasts a clock speed of 3.5GHz, Intel said.

The low-voltage L5430 uses only 50 watts of power or just 12.5 … Read more