Apple

The town of Maiden, N.C., really wants Apple to build its data center there.

In addition to the state's promise of an estimated tax break of $46 million over the next 10 years, Maiden and Catawba County are promising Apple a further $20.7 million if the company brings the data center to the town, according to an Associated Press report. The additional tax breaks would also run over the 10 years of the Apple contract.

Scott Millar, president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corp., said the county expects to collect $9.3 million in taxes over the 10 years, according to the AP.

North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue signed a bill approving the tax break in early June. The state said the Apple server farm would have about 50 full-time employees, and one of the regulations that Apple would have to follow is that the average wage in the facility exceed the wage standard in the county where it's located.

The tax incentives for Apple were not without opponents. House Minority Leader Rep. Paul Stam was clearly upset with the incentives.

"They're playing us," Stam said in late May. "And they're going to keep playing us as long as you agree to be played. They'll either come or they won't come, but whether they come I can virtually assure you it will not depend upon whether you pass this bill."

Stam wasn't only referring to Apple. In 2007, Google signed a deal with North Carolina worth $600 million to open a server farm in the state for a promised $260 million worth of incentives over 30 years.

After weeks of speculation, Apple on Wednesday confirmed its plans to build a server farm facility in North Carolina. Gov. Bev Perdue officially welcomed Apple to North Carolina after signing a bill giving the company a state tax credit worth $46 million.

"We're looking forward to building a new data center in North Carolina, and we appreciate the efforts of Gov. Perdue and state lawmakers who helped make it possible," Apple representative Susan Lundgren told CNET. "Our teams are getting started right away to acquire a site for the data center, and we plan to begin construction soon."

Changes in the tax laws were not without opponents. Last week when the House voted in favor of the tax credit by a vote of 80-34, House Minority Leader Rep. Paul Stam was clearly upset with the incentives.

"They're playing us," Stam said. "And they're going to keep playing us as long as you agree to be played. They'll either come or they won't come, but whether they come I can virtually assure you it will not depend upon whether you pass this bill."

North Carolina said the Apple server farm will have about 50 full-time employees. One of the regulations that Apple has to follow is that the average wage in the facility exceed the wage standard in the county where it's located.

Overall, when all job types (like maintenance) are factored in, the state expects the Apple facility to create up to 250 jobs. The Department of Commerce estimates that with a $1 billion investment, more than 3,000 jobs could be created in the regional economy.

"North Carolina continues to be a prime location for growing and expanding global technology companies," said Perdue in a prepared release. "We welcome Apple to North Carolina and look forward to working with the company as it begins providing a significant economic boost to local communities and the state."

The site has not been finalized yet, but Catawba and Cleveland counties are said to be potential sites for the facility.

Lawmakers in North Carolina on Wednesday voted in favor of proposed changes to the state's tax laws, clearing the way for large investments from companies like Apple.

The House passed the bill 80-34, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer. While it was a healthy majority, some lawmakers protested vehemently about being forced to offer huge tax incentives to big businesses.

The bill, modified by the House, is set to go back to the state Senate on Thursday for a vote.

As reported on Tuesday, North Carolina is hoping to lure Apple by offering the company $46 million in tax breaks. In return, Apple would invest $1 billion to build a server farm in one of the state's poorest areas--Catawba and Cleveland counties are said to be potential sites for investment.

The Associated Press reported that House Minority Leader Rep. Paul Stam (R-Wake) was particularly upset with the proposed incentives. "They're playing us," Stam said. "And they're going to keep playing us as long as you agree to be played. They'll either come or they won't come, but whether they come I can virtually assure you it will not depend upon whether you pass this bill."

This isn't the first time North Carolina has offered tax breaks to large companies. In 2007, Google signed a deal worth $600 million to open a server farm in the state for a promised $260 million worth of incentives over 30 years.

Update at 8:25 a.m. PDT: Further attribution has been added.

North Carolina officials are pushing to change state tax law in hopes of attracting new companies, specifically Apple, according to an Associated Press report.

The state is pursuing a $1 billion investment from Apple over a nine-year period to build a server farm, the AP said, citing an anonymous state official. However, the law must be changed to give state officials the ability to attract Apple through tax breaks and other incentives.

The tax breaks offered to Apple would be worth an estimated $46 million over the life of the deal, the AP reported. But Apple must jump a few hurdles itself. The company would have to meet its $1 billion investment target in order to get the tax breaks, the AP said. Apple would also have to locate the server farm in an area of the state with high unemployment--Catawba and Cleveland counties are said to be potential sites for investment.

Offering tax incentives is not a new practice for any state government, but North Carolina does have experience in attracting high-tech companies. Google signed a deal in 2007 worth $600 million to open a server farm in the state for a promised $260 million worth of incentives over 30 years, the AP reported.

The proposed tax changes that could potentially bring Apple to North Carolina are scheduled for a vote Tuesday.

AMD has dramatically revised its future road map for server processors, adding a new six-core processor and pushing out the arrival of a next-generation core well into the next decade.

Now that the company finally has the Barcelona mess in its rearview mirror, AMD has taken a hard look at its server plans. The chipmaker will extend the life of its current processor core technology through 2010, and has added a six-core processor code-named Istanbul for the second half of 2009.

A four-core and eight-core design code-named Montreal, on the road map as recently as last December (click for PDF, slide 21), has disappeared entirely. It will be replaced by six-core and 12-core designs known as "Sao Paolo" and "Magny-Cours" (Formula 1 race venues, I'm told), which are scheduled to arrive in the first half of 2010 and are based on the same underlying processor core technology as Barcelona, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and head of AMD's server division. That means those chips will not use the "Bulldozer" core first introduced by AMD in July 2007.

Istanbul, Sao Paolo, and Magny-Cours are the new chips on AMD's roadmap, replacing a previous plan code-named Montreal.

(Credit: AMD)

The changes seem designed to ensure AMD delivers on its promises. Barcelona was a crisis on two fronts: the technical execution problems that delayed the chip by almost a year, and the worry among AMD's customers and investors that the company was in over its head in its transition into a stable, trusted enterprise computing supplier.

After all, before Opteron arrived, AMD had virtually no track record in the server market. Opteron changed that, making AMD a well-known quantity inside the server rooms of the Fortune 500 and a supplier to every major server vendor on the planet.

But the Barcelona debacle had to have changed the way AMD's customers viewed the company, and the feedback appears to have been simple: Just make contact. Don't swing for the fences.

Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours will require a new chipset to accomodate the switch to faster DDR3 memory and will be built using AMD's 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. Istanbul will drop into servers built for Barcelona or Shanghai, the 45-nanometer version of Barcelona scheduled for later this year, making for an easier transition for customers using Barcelona. Montreal was scheduled to introduce a new chipset into AMD's lineup in 2009, but that won't arrive now until 2010.

Istanbul is a clear response to Intel's Dunnington processor, a six-core server chip also scheduled for the second half of this year. But Istanbul won't be out until the second half of 2009, long after Intel's Nehalem generation of processors has begun to ship.

The chip will buy AMD time, however, to concentrate on its new plan for 2010. Bulldozer was that plan as recently as July 2007, but plans for chips based on the Bulldozer core--a powerful, modular core designed as part of the Fusion project--vanished from AMD's road map in December.

As recently as April, AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer was telling financial analysts that samples of Bulldozer were still on the schedule for 2009. But he neglected to mention how AMD intends to use it, because AMD isn't confident enough in its plans for the Bulldozer cores to share them with the public, Allen said.

Instead, AMD decided to push forward with the Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours products and reuse the existing core design used in Barcelona and planned for Shanghai and Istanbul. Upping the core count planned for that timeframe from 4 and 8 to 6 and 12 will deliver a nice performance boost, Allen said.

Server customers with heavily parallelized workloads will opt for Magny-Cours, while Sao Paolo will be the choice of customers that just need a few threads worth of performance to run at faster speeds. Clock speeds have yet to be determined, but the 6-core Sao Paolo will run faster than the 12-core Magny-Cours, Allen said.

Tearing up your road map is never a good sign, but at least it's a signal that AMD is taking a pragmatic approach to the next several years. The company is in serious trouble, having lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several quarters and will probably need to break even in the second half of the year to save the job of CEO Hector Ruiz.

The question now is whether or not any further road map revisions are in store for AMD's PC processor lineup. For some time, AMD had planned to introduce its "accelerated computing" initative, formerly known as the Fusion project, in 2009 in its notebook lineup.

For now, that plan appears unchanged, but with the departure of Fusion planner CTO Phil Hester and a 10 percent layoff going into effect over the next several months, something might have to give.

Given that the point of Windows Home Server is to allow you to store your media files, a bug in the storage process that could result in corrupted files is bound to get attention.

Microsoft has issued a support document for the 13 or so (just kidding) people using Windows Home Server, the company's latest product for those attempting to build the digital home of the future. Apparently there's a flaw in the way Windows Home Server works with certain Microsoft applications, such as Windows Vista Photo Gallery, that could result in corrupted files if you use those applications to save files to the server. A list of the specific applications can be found in the support document.

HP's MediaSmart Server, which runs Microsoft's Windows Home Server.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

My colleague Ed Bott at ZDNet.com looked into exactly what would have to happen for the files to go bad, and it sounds like there is a convoluted series of steps that would have to be followed to produce the error. Still, as Ed points out, any bug that deletes data is a very, very serious issue.

The main culprit seems to be if you're putting Windows Home Server under a heavy load, and I doubt many of the people running the software have reached that point yet. I can see a day where a simple, easy-to-use home server will be vital in helping people organize (and back up) their vast collection of digital movies, TV shows, photos, and music--not to mention those precious home movies of the kids opening Baby's First QPhone or whatever becomes the hot-selling gadget of 2017.

But that day is not here yet for an overwhelming majority of people, as we've learned this week from Apple and Wal-Mart. The market for movie downloads--arguably the largest files people would want to store--is far from mature.

The planned launch of Intel's Penryn processors on Monday is the first blow in a one-two punch that might stagger AMD heading into 2008.

Just a few months after the launch of AMD's quad-core Barcelona chips, Intel is hitting back with Penryn, now known as the Xeon 5400 family of processors. A total of 15 server chips are set to launch Monday as well as a new Core 2 Extreme desktop processor, with Penryn chips for mainstream desktops and notebooks scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year.

Penryn is essentially a shrink of the Core architecture that brought Intel out of the woods in 2006. But these are also the company's first chips to use Intel's 45-nanometer manufacturing technology, and they will usher in the first change to the basic properties of the transistor since the 1960s.

For the first time, Intel plans to use a metal gate and a new material for the oxide layer around the gate in its transistor designs. This fundamental part of the transistor provides the foundation for computing as the part that determines whether a transistor is off or on, a "0" or a "1."

"We needed the scaling and power/performance, and it would be very hard to do it on the previous technology," said Dadi Perlmutter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobility Group.

Intel and other chipmakers were running into problems making the gates smaller and smaller. The gates were getting down to the point where the gate dielectric--an insulating layer that sits between the gate and the rest of the transistor--was only a few atoms thick. The chipmaking industry has figured out lots of amazing things, but it hasn't figured out how to split an atom without causing a bit of an energy problem.

The new materials allowed Intel to build thicker gates with the same switching properties as the older ones, which helps control current leakage and also buys the industry a few more generations of scaling. IBM and AMD plan to release chips based on similar technology in 2008.

And the combination of the new transistors and some design tweaks appears to have been enough to give Intel a performance lead with the Penryn generation of chips. The company said some of its partners set world records for scores on well-known benchmarks such as TPC-C and SPECint_rate2006 with the basic Xeon chips. When paired with the 1600MHz front-side bus available on some chips, Intel said it also set records on SPECfp_2006rate, long a stronghold of AMD's. SPECint_rate is a general measure of transactional performance that's important to business customers, while SPECfp_rate measures floating-point performance and is important to high-performance computing customers.

Intel avoided making direct comparisons to AMD's chips in briefing materials distributed ahead of the announcement. It plans to have a Web site up and running on Monday with more detailed performance information.

Intel did say that the new Xeons will be about 28 percent faster than their older brothers on SPECint_rate2006, and 30 percent faster on SPECfp_rate2006. Barcelona barely edged out the older generation of Xeon chips on SPECint_rate2006, so it looks like Intel will have an edge in that area.

If you make a server-buying decision based solely on these numbers, however, you're making a mistake. There are some truths to benchmarks, but companies like Intel and AMD spend millions of dollars trying to get an edge on benchmark results, which don't always mirror real-world performance. Still, they're the best comparison vehicles we've got, though those who are contemplating a serious server purchase test their applications on a system before making the leap.

Penryn marks the second generation of Intel's quad-core designs. Around this time last year, Intel packaged its dual-core Core generation processors into quad-core chips that enjoyed several months free from competition from AMD.

That free ride ended with the Barcelona launch. AMD gained back some market share in the third quarter, as Barcelona systems trickled into the market. Still, going into the launch the company didn't expect Barcelona to contribute meaningful revenue until the fourth quarter.

And it seems that AMD is having a little trouble getting Barcelona into the market. Reports surfaced last week in the run-up to the Penryn launch that some server vendors are quoting 2008 as the time frame for Barcelona's availability, even though AMD executives said they plan to ship "hundreds of thousands" of Barcelona chips this quarter.

That, of course, is exactly when Intel will fire back with the Penryn chips. The new Xeons will arrive in the same pricing bands that Intel's current lineup of Xeon chips occupy, and Intel plans to have systems available right away from the usual suspects in the server market.

And next year, it will get even tougher for AMD. The company has two new designs for desktops and notebooks (known as Spider and Puma) that are set to arrive over the next few months. But Intel isn't sitting still, either: the first quarter of next year will see Penryn chips arriving for desktops and notebooks, as well as an extremely low-power chip called Silverthorne that could open new markets for Intel that AMD can't touch until 2009.

To top it all off, Intel's main plan for 2008 is to release chips called Nehalem that borrow many of the same design techniques, such as an integrated memory controller and point-to-point connections, that made AMD's Opteron chips a winner for several years. AMD would say it's a sign that it was right all along, but it doesn't really matter: Intel has managed to stay very competitive without those techniques, and when it adopts them, AMD could be in more trouble next year.

The smaller chip company is clearly pinning its hopes on 2009, when it aims to release "Fusion" chips that integrate a high-powered GPU with a PC and server processor. The "Bulldozer" chips will also be assembled from smaller building blocks, which could let the chipmaker target specific customers with designs tailored for their needs.

For now, though, Intel is in excellent shape--assuming it doesn't run into any problems during the first few months of the Penryn launch. In just two years, Intel has managed to get beyond the embarrassment of its abrupt change in course at the hands of AMD to get its server group back on track.

Few of us will ever buy a server based on these chips, but this market is extremely important to both Intel and AMD because it's so much more profitable than cranking out chips for your desktop or notebook. That helps fund the development of other technologies that do have an impact on the rest of us, meaning that the competitive balance between the two companies in this segment has far-reaching implications.

For now, advantage Intel.

Intel will complete its transition to the Core architecture across its PC and server processors with the launch of a new quad-core chip next week, the "Tigerton" Xeon MP processor, CNET News.com has learned.

Tigerton is a quad-core server processor designed for servers with four or more chips that is part of an overall platform code named "Caneland." Intel plans to hold a launch briefings next Wednesday with the usual suspects--Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM--plus its new best friend, Sun Microsystems, to preview the new processor and servers. Looks like the formal launch will be on Thursday. Intel had said it expected to ship Tigerton in the third quarter, but it hadn't said when the exact launch was to take place.

These Tigerton-based servers will be very powerful, very expensive, and therefore relatively rare. The overwhelming majority of the server market consists of systems with two processors, but there's enough demand and profit in the four-way segment to keep chip companies and their customers interested.

This segment is also one where AMD's Opteron chips have excelled in recent years. Dell's first product with Opteron processors was a four-way server. Intel expects to be more competitive in this segment with the shift to the Core microarchitecture, which is more powerful and more power-efficient than the Netburst architecture still in use for Intel's four-way chips. When Caneland launches, Intel will have introduced Core-based processors in every major segment of its lineup.

Tigerton will also see the end of the dual independent bus structure needed to help the four-way Netburst chips talk to the rest of the system. It will instead use dedicated links between each processor and the chipset, in a preview of a broader design overhaul expected in 2008 with the Nehalem processors.

Bringing quad-core chips to this segment gives Intel a boost ahead of AMD's quad-core Barcelona launch, which will take place the following Monday after six months of delays. (Come on, AMD, the first Monday Night Football game of the year? At least it's only Cincy-Baltimore.) Later this year, Intel will refresh its quad-core processors for two-way servers with the launch of the Penryn chips, expected to come prior to Thanksgiving.

Intel is telling its resellers to get ready for new server chips in November.

DailyTech spotted a pricing list on an unprotected Web page at Intel's Reseller Center that reveals seven Xeon processors with 12MB of cache memory are scheduled to launch on November 11. The thing is, Intel doesn't have any server chips with 12MB of cache memory right now.

But the chipmaker has already disclosed that its Penryn generation of processors will have up to 12MBs of cache memory, making it pretty clear what to expect in November. All Intel has said is that Penryn chips are expected to arrive in the second half of the year. An Intel representative said he could not comment on rumors, and though the Web page has been pulled from Intel's site, I did see a copy before it died.

Penryn server processors will be Intel's first processors built on its 45-nanometer manufacturing technology, and will arrive a few months after AMD's first quad-core server chip launches in September. Intel already ships quad-core server chips, but they don't have as much cache memory as the Penryn chips will have.

Cache memory stores frequently used data right on the chip next to the CPU, so the CPU doesn't have to leave the chip and reach out to system memory to find that data. The more memory, the more data you can store on-chip and the less often the CPU has to leave the chip, improving performance. This is especially important for Intel given its reliance on a front-side bus to handle that interaction between the CPU and the memory, AMD uses an integrated memory controller that provides a direct link to the memory bank.

A source familiar with Intel's plans said to expect the Penryn chips to arrive before Thanksgiving, but that the November 11 date might not be exact. Desktop and notebook chips based on the same design are expected to arrive in the weeks following that launch.