Imagine consumers en masse dumping their old PC clunkers for a svelte MacBook Air running the sleek, new Snow Leopard operating system. An implausible Orwellian vision but probably not that far removed from Apple's marketing aspirations.
In short, walk into any Apple Store in any tony neighborhood and the message is: relieve yourself of those old bulky PCs and flip phones and we'll give you smaller, more stylish computing with the Apple cachet.
Ford Fusion: Ford is emphasizing smaller, more efficient designs, like Apple.
(Credit: Ford)The analogy may be a bit strained, but imagine trading in a 14 mpg Hummer H2 for a 45 mpg hybrid Ford Fusion. The point: smaller is better. And it's not just Apple hardware. Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system is smaller too. About 7GB smaller than the version it replaces.
As this New York Times review graphically (and some claim fawningly) shows, making software smaller violates a basic tenet of operating system upgrades: more is better. Historically, Windows has been the most egregious example of this immutable law of software marketing. This trend culminated in the fiasco that was Windows Vista--at least the dysfunctional version of Vista that appeared in early 2007.
At General Motors, this trend culminated in the H2, a car too big even by Detroit's standards. (GM subsequently struck a deal to sell Hummer to China-based Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company and is trying to make the electric Chevrolet Volt into its marquee model for the Chevrolet nameplate.)
Are those days over? No, but it's safe to say that at an even more profound level, personal computing is moving to smaller gadgets which, by necessity, use efficient operating environments running on efficient silicon. The iPhone comes to mind. Tiny Netbooks are another good example. In short, despite the obvious compromises that small size imposes, many consumers are realizing that they can do what they need to do with less.
Even Microsoft has figured this out, albeit slowly. Microsoft's Windows 7, based on preliminary reviews, is leaner and faster than Vista. (Yes, there's Windows Mobile 6.5 but I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that this isn't the future of smartphone operating systems.) Intel has got religion too. Its Atom and ultra- low-voltage (ULV) processors both offer significant power savings over standard Intel chip designs.
Apple wants to go a lot further than "Wintel" has gone, however, just as Ford wants to out-mpg GM in the fuel-efficiency race. The argument can be made that Cupertino is offering a sleeker operating system in preparation for devices to come. Maybe a tablet. Maybe something that has yet to be reported. What is clear is that Apple is focusing a lot of its in-house development on small, efficient technology. Both silicon and software.
The same thing can be roughly said about Ford. Its highest profile cars these days are the Fusion, Focus, and Escape--all relatively small, fuel-efficient cars (two are sold optionally as hybrids). All the polar opposite of the most popular cars in its gas-guzzler heyday: the Explorer, Expedition, and Excursion.
No Orwellian vision here, just smaller, more efficient computing devices (and cars) that make a clean break from an obsolete past.
Fusion-io, the company that boasts Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, says it has achieved extremely high data transfer speeds on servers from Hewlett-Packard.
Fusion-io ioDrive Duo
(Credit: Fusion-io)Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data, and have no moving parts, unlike hard disk drives.
Working together in HP's ProLiant engineering labs in Houston, HP and Fusion-io built a system using five 320GB ioDrive Duos (see photo) and six 160GB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with four Quad-Core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, Fusion-io said.
This configuration allowed the engineers to achieve about 1 million IOPS, or input/output operations per second. By comparison, hard disk drives typically don't excel at IOPS, achieving only a fraction of this level of data transfer speed, which makes solid-state drives appealing to large customers such as CitiBank and Bank of America. These kinds of companies need lots of IOPS for their financial transactions.
HP offers solid-state drive arrays as part of HP's BladeSystem. The HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator is a flash-based storage adapter based on Fusion's ioMemory technology. Each IO Accelerator card achieves more than 100,000 IOPS. A single HP BladeSystem server can accommodate two or three IO Accelerator cards.
"The ioDrive and ioDrive Duo are able to supply the extreme storage performance (for data centers) at a fraction of the power, cooling, and per unit-of-processing-power price compared to traditional solutions," said David Flynn, chief technology officer of Fusion-io, in a statement.
These drives are especially valuable for database and data mining, virtual machine deployments, and financial transactions, according to Flynn.
Fusion-io on Wednesday announced the IoDrive Duo, which the company claims is the fastest to date. Fusion-io also claims Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.
Targeted primarily at business applications such as database servers, capacities range from 160 gigabytes to 640 gigabytes. And by the second half of this year, this will increase to 1.28 terabytes.
Fusion IoDrive Duo solid-state drive capacities range up to 1.2 terabytes
(Credit: Fusion-io)The boards are based on PCI Express data bus and can sustain up to 20 gigabits per second of raw throughput--many times the rate of fast hard-disk drives. Sustained read bandwidth is 1,500 megabytes per second, while sustained write bandwidth is 1,400MBps--many times the speeds of SSDs found in laptops today. (Additional specifications are posted here.)
Because Fusion-io targets businesses, reliability is important. Its Flashback protection, for example, is a self-healing technology that is capable of instantaneously restoring lost data and uses an extra dedicated chip to repair failed devices.
Currently, the IoDrive sells for "under $30 per usable GB," according to a statement from the company.
What does Steve Wozniak know about solid-state drives that we don't? David Flynn, the chief technology officer of SSD start-up Fusion-io, provides some insight into why the Apple co-founder is joining the company as chief scientist.
I talked with Flynn on the phone about what the Salt Lake City start-up, founded in 2006, does and what attracted Wozniak.
Enterprise solid-state drives typically offer much better performance than even the fastest hard-disk drives. Fusion-io claims that its IoDrive improves storage performance by as much as 1,000 times over traditional disk arrays while operating at a fraction of the power and at a tenth of the total cost of ownership.
Flynn offered an analogy to describe what his company hopes to achieve. "The 3D accelerator decimated the vertically integrated companies like SGI, Evans, and Sutherland," he said. "They used to be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for workstations." But inexpensive, off-the-shelf 3D graphics cards from companies like 3dfx, Nvidia, and ATI Technologies in the late 1990s changed all of this, Flynn said.
"The storage accelerator (that Fusion-io sells) is ultimately going to liberate the proprietary storage market," according to Flynn. And Fusion-io is not just whistling Dixie--it has some big backers. Dell was an early investor, and Hewlett-Packard--though not an investor--plans to deploy Fusion-io's drives across its server line, Flynn said. (An announcement that updates the HP deal is coming later this spring.) IBM has also certified the drives for use in its servers.
"We intend to greatly simplify things that have been a bastion of proprietary, high-margin, vertically integrated (storage) companies," Flynn said.
So how will Fusion-io's solid-state drives change all of this? "We have the ability to put five and soon 10 terabytes within a standard 4U server," he said. ("U" is the term used for rack unit in a server, equivalent to 1.75 inches, or 4.45 centimeters.) "In the near future we will be announcing a card which holds two of our I/O memory modules, therefore doubling the capacity but also the performance per slot," Flynn explained.
Flynn continued: "What we're finding is that putting an entire database on silicon has enough benefit, that you don't have to futz around with putting some of it on mechanical disk, some of it on silicon." The company is telling potential buyers to think in terms of $30 per gigabyte.
"We are not replacing a 15K-rpm disk drive," Flynn said. (Hard-disk drives spinning at 15,000 revolutions per minute are the highest-performance disk drives used in enterprise servers.) "We are miniaturizing an entire (storage area network) of multiple drives by making it out of silicon. While a 15K-rpm drive may cost $2 to $3 per gigabyte, a high-performance SAN costs $50 per gigabyte and up--built from those same HDDs, mind you," he said. "Our ioDrives are made up of chips that cost only $2 to $4 per gigabyte, but when we integrate them into a miniaturized silicon SAN, we charge $30 per gigabyte."
Fusion-io's technology is pegged to IOPS (input/output operations per second). And companies such as Citibank and American Express are increasingly looking at server performance through the IOPS lens, according to Samsung, which makes both hard-disk drives and solid-state drives. Enterprise SSDs process 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a typical 15K 2.5-inch server hard disk drive, according to Samsung data.
A key role for Steve Wozniak at Fusion-io, says CTO David Flynn, is 'not just the visionary part, but involving him in the public eye.'
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Lower power consumption is also a plus. Enterprises solid-state drives consume less than 25 percent of the power of a 15K hard-disk drive, according to data provided by Samsung in October.
Performance and low power consumption, however, aren't enough, according to Flynn. Because enterprise solid-state drives are a relatively new technology, reliability is crucial. Fusion-io offers a technology called "Flashback" protection--extra chips that can jump in to take over immediately if there is a failure. "This is at the chip level. It's not wear-out that's the problem, it's chips that short out" because of the high voltages, Flynn said.
Here are some more specifics Flynn offered. Currently, Fusion-io can achieve just shy of 1 terabyte of storage by using three 320GB cards. "We're doubling density per module and doubling the number of modules per card so we're going to have 1.3TB on a single PCI Express card," he said.
"We'll be able to address 90 percent of the databases with a single drop-in card. Most databases are less than 1TB in size," he said.
And what will Wozniak do? "Not just the visionary part, but involving him in the public eye," Flynn said. "He is (also) helping us change the architecture and focus of our technology."
In a statement earlier this month, Wozniak invoked the potential for "innovation and radical transformation" and said, more prosaically, "Fusion-io's technology is extremely useful to many different applications and almost all of the world's servers."
"SSDs are only the tip of the iceberg," said Flynn. "How silicon will change storage infrastructure...It's a huge thing around messaging and how a disruptive technology will impact all of this."
"The Future is Fusion." So Advanced Micro Devices would like you to believe.
AMD is turning to a new branding strategy with the hope of infusing new life into its processor platform and the company as a whole.
AMD's Fusion for Gaming is the first "proof point" of AMD's Fusion branding strategy.
(Credit: AMD)The chipmaker on Thursday is expected to introduce a "smaller proof point" of the larger Fusion strategy dubbed "AMD Fusion for gaming," which is software that optimizes PCs for faster gaming.
Confused yet? Wait, there's more. To date, AMD has used the term to describe its future silicon graphics strategy that proposes to fuse the main processor and graphics chip onto one piece of silicon. AMD believes the broader Fusion concept "captures the benefits of this same collaborative initiative across a range of technology platforms."
Branding is one thing, execution another. Though AMD's graphics chip business has performed well since it brought out the 4800 series in June and--at the very least--made it competitive with Nvidia, the same can't be said about its processors.
It's a generation of process technology behind Intel and its vaunted and long-delayed "native" quad-core processors have not displaced Intel silicon in any significant way. Certainly not in the gaming world.
And AMD faces Intel's formidable Core 2 technology in the mobile space.
The company is also on the verge of a major restructuring--a strategy AMD calls Asset Smart.
AMD's Chief Marketing Officer Nigel Dessau describes the larger strategy as marrying innovation with collaboration. "Fusion is the most focused articulation yet" of this concept, he said in a statement.
We'll see. For now, the proof of concept is software that AMD claims can run a user's existing PC up to 10 percent faster and "simplifies the PC gaming experience," said Brent Barry, AMD's gaming strategist.
The Fusion for Gaming utility (a beta version can be downloaded from AMD's Web site now) will tweak the PC's settings. The first time it will run in "basic mode" and turn on "AMD Boost," according to Barry. This is "a set of registry changes and settings within the processor," he said.
"The other thing it does is shuts down background processes and services that you don't need to be running while playing a game. It frees up a lot of the memory space and CPU utilization," Barry said.
There's also a more advanced mode that shuts down features in Vista such as the Aero glass interface, the gadgets sidebar, and user applications. The expert mode gets into hard drive acceleration and CPU/GPU overclocking.
Barry said AMD also plans to bring out a more general-purpose Fusion application that allows users to fine tune their laptop PCs to save power when, for example, taking a long flight.
All of this, however, is only available on an AMD platform, Barry said. An AMD processor and AMD GPU are required. Though the utility won't check for an AMD chipset, the user will lose some features in a system that doesn't have an AMD chipset.
On the first beta, AMD is only supporting Windows Vista 32, Barry said.
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