Network Management

Apple iPad 4 Wi-Fi only tablet review

Beyond the screen, the iPad 4 delivers considerably more oomph than its predecessors. The Geekbench testing app showed that the iPad 3’s performance was much the same as the iPad 2’s, but the new model scores considerably higher: 1766 to the iPad 2’s score of 763. That’s in part because the chip is better, but also due to a 40 per cent increase in CPU clock speed.

Despite that, there’s no degradation in battery life - up to ten hours, says Apple, and I concur. If that’s due to a bigger power cell inside



Apple Rumored to Abandon Intel for Its Own Chip

Intel has not been able to ignore rumors that Apple is considering switching some of its Mac's Intel processors to its own A-series of mobile chips, saying it would be a remiss to be dismissive of the rumors.

According to Apple Insider, the claims came on Friday from the Japanese site Macotakara, who successfully predicted the release of the iPad 2 in March, saying that new thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Airs powered by an A5 processor were being tested.


iPhone maker Foxconn hatching US factory expansion plan?

Foxconn, the... manufacturer of kit for Apple, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, and others, is exploring the possibility of building plants in the US – Detroit and Los Angeles, to be specific.

Those aforementioned market watchers, however, say not to expect your next iPhone or iPad to be made in America – Apple products are too complex to be built by mere 'Mercans.


Intel to slip future Xeon E7s, Itaniums into common socket

The installed bases of HP-UX, NonStop, and OpenVMS users can breathe a sigh of relief if they were hitting a performance ceiling, and so can other server makers such as Bull, NEC, and Fujitsu that have proprietary operating systems that also run on Itanium iron.

The bigger sigh of relief is that Intel is converging the Xeon and Itanium processor and system designs such that future Xeon E7 chips and "Kittson" Itanium processors will share common elements – and, more importantly, share common sockets.

This is something that Intel has been promising for years, and something that HP – the dominant seller of Itanium-based systems – has been craving, as evidenced by its Project Kinetic. Convergence was the plan of record for HP in June 2010 – nine months ahead of the Oracle claim that Itanium was going the way of all flesh – and HP wanted to converge its ProLiant and Integrity server platforms, which used x86 and Itanium processors, respectively. A common socket helps that effort in a big way


Oracle: two new SPARC chips next year, and three more under construction

In the first half of 2013, the SPARC T5. Heydar performance during the first SPARC-based systems affected T5 chip - the processor itself to Oracle in August Hot Chips conference, explained in further detail when I got to know of it is based on the company's servers are under testing labs. The insert describing the HWSW you guessed, the T4-based machines favorable market acceptance due to either the end of 2013 can expect the T5 launch of Oracle, Heydar, however, clearly stated: the T5-based machines in 2013 in the first half appear commercially.

S3 is a statement of up to 8 processor cores capable of running parallel threads, manufacturing technology development, however, due to the T5-8 instead of 16 cores is the L3 cache size is doubled to 8 megabytes increased. The memory controller also doubled the number of Oracle, we have four instead of two found in the T5, which are standard DDR3-1066 memory modules continue to be handled. Even the T4 was part of two on-board PCI Express x8 controller from its predecessor, however, was supported only in version 2.0, but the new processor PCI Express Gen3 standard used by Oracle, which is twice the bandwidth, in addition to both separate data management unit was.


Oracle's mighty SPARC plug fries Fujitsu, bigs up new SPARC M4 processor

Oracle, to its credit, has been perfectly blunt about its long-term Sparc server roadmap: it very clearly outlined its goals with rough timelines. That is more than rivals IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard do with their high-end system roadmaps, which can be found if you mooch around the internet long enough for someone to accidentally posts something interesting.

And in the M4 presentation, which Oracle refused to share even though it knew the data was out there, we see that the new chip is a beefy version of a Sparc T series chip: it sports six S3 cores that debuted with the eight-core Sparc T4 processors and are used, in a modified form, in the forthcoming Sparc T5 chips. Those cores will share a 48MB L3 cache, a lot more than the 8MB of shared L3 cache used in the 16-core Sparc T5 processors. Presumably the S3 cores used in the M4 have the same 16KB L1 instruction and 16KB L1 data caches, and 128KB of L2 cache, that each S3 core has on the Sparc T4 and T5 processors.


Fujitsu to embiggen iron bigtime with Sparc64-X

with the Sparc64-X processors, which will converge the vanilla and fx versions of the Sparc64 chips into a single products, explained Takumi Maruyama, who is in charge of processor development within Fujitsu's Enterprise Server business unit.

The core has been modified to support the HPC-ACE instructions that accelerated parallel processing and also now includes special accelerators for encryption and other functions – a feature that Fujitsu calls "software on a chip" and akin to the accelerators that Intel, IBM, and Oracle have put into their high-end processors to boost encryption, hashing, and other algorithms.

The Sparc64-X also, thankfully, supports hardware-assisted virtualization, something that has been sorely missing from the Sparc64 series... The chip supports the Sparc V9 instruction set and the extensions to it that Fujitsu has created...

The Sparc64-X core has a deeper pipeline, which enables a higher clock frequency on the processor compared to the Sparc64-VII+, a better branch prediction scheme, bigger queues and floating point registers, more aggressive out-of-order execution, a two-port, multi-banked L1 cache (with twice the bus size and more L1 cache throughput), and a richer set of execution units.

There are two integer execution units, another two virtual address adders that can do double duty as execution units, and four floating point units that can do math and graphics functions. This is twice the number of the integer and floating point units that the Sparc64-VII+ chip had.


Network Management Implications:

Oracle seemed to be correct about Itanium proverbially "going the way of the dinosaur." The common socket seems to be the next move in migration from Intel 64 bit Itanium to the AMD created and Intel copied x64 architecture.

The expression from some analysts that SPARC's life expectancy was limited was certainly pre-mature, appearing to be set to out-live Intel Itanium, and forcing Intel to keep it's x86 line alive much longer than they ever intended. The move by AMD to move the Intel x86 architecture to 64 bits, with the successful seamless migration of SPARC from 32 bit to 64 bit processing were key drivers in forcing Intel to rethink the sunset of x86.

With Apple releasing ARM tablets, fully two to three times faster than competing tablets, one might wonder how long it will be until Apple starts releasing laptops, desksides, desktops, and servers based upon it's own ARM engineering and discard Intel x64? With rumors of MacBook Air's based upon Apple's ARM chipset, this could be a very interesting question. More software seems to be appearing under MacOSX ARM based iOS deviation, rather Intel based MacOSX .

SPARC seems to be proverbially "on the march" with 2 original SPARC vendors (Sun, now owned by Oracle, and Fujitsu) continuing to develop SPARC processors into the distant future, each showing innovation as well as "keeping up with the times" with virtualization.

For businesses continuing to look for a stable environment to build platforms which scale, for long-term network management investments, SPARC continues to be a reasonable investment for long term deployments. Multi-platform and multi-vendor network management seems to be "in the cards" for a long time, if people decide to build to standards, and if vendors decide it is in their best interest to support standards.

System Vendor - CISC, RISC, EPIC Update

Abstract:
Since the decline of the Motorola 68000 CISC processor, RISC processors had been on the rise, to eventually be re-challenged by Intel with the release 80386 (and future models) with a Motorola-like flat memory model. UNIX vendors had standardized on the 68000, migrating to the RISC processors, and occasionally moving back to Intel. There has been the prediction of the decline of RISC, the loss of major processor families like ALPHA and MIPS, decline of POWER, rumor of end of EPIC processor family of Itanium by Intel, but some level of diversity surprisingly continues.

IBM Update: Power 7+
In 1982, IBM released a 68000 based workstation, based upon a 32/16bit processor. There was a decision to move to x86 on PC form factor, leveraging an existing relationship between Intel for the 8088, reducing cost by using an 16/8 bit processor, and gaining ready 8 bit part availability. This started the business PC market. IBM started to design their own RISC chip, called POWER, for their own UNIX workstations. The POWER multichip CPU modules were physically huge and very costly to manufacture - gluing together multiple chips onto a single carrier socket, limiting production quantities.

Apple-IBM-Motorola consortium started manufacturing PowerPC processors, bring POWER RISC architecture onto Apple desktops through simpler manufacturing process, but Apple discontinue it's use, not long after Apple purchased NeXT (this is the point where IBM POWER lost the desktop market.) In January 2008, IBM starting using QuickTransit, to provide x86 Linux software on their proprietary POWER processor, later ending in IBM purchasing Transitive. IBM almost purchased Sun, which would have allowed IBM to acquire SPARC, the industry volume leading commodity [non-multichip module] RISC and Solaris, the industry leading UNIX OS vendor.


It was noted in Network Management end of August 2011 that POWER 7+ was late. March 2012, Sony appears to have abandoned IBM POWER - this is when IBM POWER lost the gaming market. April 2012, IBM POWER 7+ was a half-year late. May 2012, IBM POWER 7+ was 7 months late. June 2012 - POWER 7+ is now 8 months late. Multi-chip modules are much simpler to bring to market, over chips designed into a single piece of silicon. For IBM to be so late, something bad must have happened. This does not bode well for AIX users.

HP Update: Itanium
In 2007, HP licensed a Transitive's QuickTransit, to provide Solaris software for HP's Intel based Itanium servers. Transitive made HP a global distributor in 2008, right before IBM bought Transitive, killing HP's path to move SPARC software onto x86 Linux or Itanium HP-UX. Itanium was the first, and possibly last, nearly mainstream Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (or EPIC) CPU architecture.

February 2009, HP describes Project Blackbird - HP acknowledges Solaris leading UNIX in United States, Itanium is on a "death march", HP considers purchasing Sun/Solaris. December 2009, RedHat kills Linux on Itanium. April 2010, Microsoft kills Windows on Itanium. December 2010, HP-UX was booting under Intel x86 - Project "Redwood" suggested a "last" Itanium chip in 2014, while recommending funding to move HP-UX to Intel x86.. On March 2011, Oracle stops new software development on Itanium. In November 2011, The Register described HP's Project Odyssey - building high-end Intel x86 systems, map Itanium HP-UX features to Intel x86, giving away Itanium/HP-UX software technology to Linux (not available under Itanium), and enhancing Windows with Microsoft. On May 30, 2012, HP revived an old slide dating back to June 25, 2010 from Project Kinetic, where HP-UX and other HP [OpenVMS and NonStop] operating systems will remain under Itanium, but with a twist: socket-level compatibility between Itanium and x86; a new UNIX will run under both Itanium and x86; driving mid-range features into Intel, Linux, and Windows.

The HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop operating systems look dead because of their dependency on the doomed Itanium, whose architecture seems to have a trajectory to be moved to x86 while the OS's will have their features given to other operating systems. The movement to Solaris might be too late, unless HP decides to fix it's technology gap by partnering with an OpenSolaris distribution, like SGI did (see next section.) HP really needs something like Solaris Branded Zones, to encapsulate all 3 OS's.

SGI Update: OpenSolaris???
This is a most unusual update. In 1982, SGI was founded, selling UNIX IRIS Workstations using Mototola 68000 processors. Their OS eventually became AT&T System V - branded as IRIX. In 1986, the MIPS R2000 processor was released and incorporated into SGI workstations. In 1991, SGI went 64 bit with MIPS R4000 processor. SGI abandoned MIPS and moved to Intel Itanium, with their first Itanium workstation in 2001. In 2006, SGI abandoned Itanium for Intel x86, stopped developing IRIX. Rackable purchased SGI in 2009, renaming the entire company back to SGI. One version of the fall of SGI was recorded here.

Why go through all this effort, to remember Super Computer and Graphics Workstation creator SGI? It seems SGI is started to investigate UNIX again. SGI is using Nexenta for their SAN solution. Nexenta is based upon Illumos, formerly based upon OpenSolaris, which is the basis for Oracle's UNIX - Solaris 11. SGI embraces Solaris x86, for a portion of their solution, as HP considered in Project Redwood.
Dell Update: ARM???
The only thing stranger than fiction is reality. Dell would normally never appear in an article like this, but as other vendors are exiting the non-Intel x86 CISC marketplaces, Dell is about the only systems vendor who seems to be expanding out of the Intel x86 CISC market!


Now, May 29, 2012 - Dell announces a RISC machine, based upon the ARM processor! Project Copper was bundled under Dell's Enterprise web site tree, which is an indication where they are interested in pushing this new product. Will Dell learn from mistakes by IBM and HP, or corrections by SGI - by bundling a Market Leading UNIX... in the form of an OracleSolaris variant based upon Illumos?

Does an enterprise or manged service grade OS exist for ARM?

In June 2009, a release of OpenSolaris for ARM hit the wild. An example of the OpenSolaris booting on ARM was blogged. October 2009 the web page was created for the release of OpenSolaris for ARM - bringing the leading UNIX to the ARM processor family. Doug Scott mentioned he was reviving a port of OpenSolaris to ARM in October 2011 for ZFS on an ARM based SheevaPlug. In October 2011, ARM announces V8 processor release, migrating ARM from 32bit to 64bit architecture - which is where the OpenSolaris variants have all moved over to. Dell has an excellent opportunity.

Apple Update:Intel and ARM
This is, perhaps, one of the most interesting computer companies in history. Starting with 8 bit 6502 processors, they move to the Motorola 68000 CISC for their high-end publishing workstation, which they called the Macintosh. After kicking out the CEO & founder, Steve Jobs, Jobs started NeXT computer, based on Motorola 68000 processors and a UNIX core.

NeXT migrated their UNIX OS to Intel and went from being a workstation vendor to an OS vendor. Apple desperately needed a modern OS and almost went out of business. Apple purchased NeXT (getting the former CEO Steve Jobs back.) The combined company produced a UNIX based desktop with an OS called MacOS X (Macintosh Operating System 10 - based upon a NeXT Step UNIX OS core) placed on top of a PowerPC chip (designed by Apple, IBM, Motorola consortium - called AIM alliance.) Apple almost merged with Sun several times, collaborating on OpenSTEP (an open-sourced NeXT OS) during various aspects of this history. Soon, Apple created the iMac and the company started to turn around.






Most recently, Apple went through another migration - moving MacOS X back to it's NeXT Intel code base. Apple started to regain profitability and then they invested in a new set of consumer products. First, was the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. Many of these new devices were based upon the ARM RISC processor, based upon MacOSX, but it was branded iOS. At this point, Apple exploded, becoming the number client vendor on the market, growing to such an extent that they could buy Intel with the spare cash they had on hand. Apple did the nearly impossible: created a new RISC based UNIX ecosystem based upon nothing.

Oracle/Sun: SPARC & Solaris Update
Early on, SUN built their platforms on Motorola 68000 family, as did most workstation vendors. They experimented with x86 for a short while, discontinued them.Solaris 9 was released on Intel, where Intel based UNIX vendors like NCR started migrating to Solaris from their SVR4 platforms like MP-RAS. Solaris 10 was released only on SPARC, Solaris was open-sourced as OpenSolaris (for both Intel and SPARC), and Solaris 11 was released on Intel and SPARC after Oracle purchased Sun. Interestingly, Solaris was being ported to PowerPC for a short period of time, with designers working on a OpenSTEP interface, during a time when Apple was not doing so well. Various Solaris variants, based upon the OpenSolaris project have hit the marketplace, with more distributions being released regularly.

From Sun's early history, Sun had traditionally been a 32 bit UNIX workstation vendor, migrated to a 64 bit UNIX workstations, moved from desktop UNIX workstations to UNIX servers, created the ultra-thin SunRay client to replace UNIX desktop workstations based upon 32 bit MicroSPARC, and surprisingly migrated their SunRay platform from MicroSPARC to ARM. Various releases of OpenSolaris had briefly touched ARM, but Solaris had primarily remained focused on SPARC and Intel with the SunRay's being a firmware based system.


As variants of RISC and the one EPIC processor have been found to be losing mind share, there have been two major exceptions: SPARC and ARM. Oracle continues to make thin-clients based upon ARM, with no roadmap. Oracle committed to a 5 year plan on SPARC, which has been executed either on-time or early for multiple processors. The SPARC T4 brought fast single-threaded platform with octal cores in 2011. A few months away, the SPARC T5 processor will bring 16 cores (again) to the SPARC family from Oracle, with features including compression and Oracle number processing in hardware.


Fujitsu: SPARC64 Update
Fujitsu is another interesting company, in this article. They did not organically grow into the UNIX movement from Motorola 68000 processors, like most other industry players - Fujitsu co-developed with Sun into the RISC UNIX market.
SPARC was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1986. Fujitsu fabricated the SPARC 86900 developed by Sun Microsystems, the first SPARC V7 architecture. SPARC International was founded in 1989, standardizing the 32 bit SPARC V8 multi-vendor architecture, creating the first non-proprietary RISC mainstream platforms. Andrew Heller, head of the RS6000 POWER based UNIX workstation group, left IBM and founded a new company in 1990, HAL Computer Systems, to develop a SPARC processor. In 1991, Fujitsu donated significant funding for a 44% stake, in return to use SPARC chips for their own systems. In 1992, the SPARClite was produced by Fujitsu. In 1993, Fujitsu purchased the rest of HAL, making Fujitsu the sole driver behind SPARC systems. The 64 bit SPARC V9 architecture was published in 1994 and Fujitsu shipped their first system in 1995. Fujitsu actually beat Sun to market with the first 64 bit SPARC processor.

While other CPU architectures were proprietary, with various corporations suing one another (i.e. Intel suing AMD) - SPARC brought a level of openness to the industry where vendors could cooperate (and occasionally bailed each other out, spreading the risk, while sharing the rewards from the UNIX market.) During a time when Sun's SPARC development pipeline ran dry, Fujitsu provided SPARC64 CPU's for Sun & Fujitsu high-end platforms. Sun purchased a third-party SPARC development house Afara Websystems, produced the T line of SPARC processors, and jointly sold the SPARC T line with Fujitsu. Solaris is standard on all of these platforms.


Fujitsu continues to push ahead with SPARC on their own platforms, holding the fastest computer in the world for over a year. What makes this a special SPARC is that Solaris is not at it's core - rather Linux is. It seems rather amazing that Linux departed from Intel Itanium, in order to become the OS of choice for the fastest computer in the world, on a Fujitsu SPARC platform.
In Conclusion
IBM POWER is barely breathing, with their latest road mapped CPU being so late that POWER is almost irrelevant, placing tremendous pressure on AIX. Intel Itanium vendors have been abandoning EPIC family for a half-decade with the final vendor closing it's shop. HP-UX is bound to Intel's EPIC Itanium, which is basically dead, with HP announcing development of an unknown new UNIX OS (hopefully, a Solaris fork based Illumos distribution.) Dell is releasing their first RISC platform, without an enterprise UNIX OS, hopefully they will investigate a Solaris fork Illumos distribution. SGI, who abandoned Intel's EPIC Itanum and their UNIX, is partnering with Solaris fork Illumos based distribution on Intel x86.

Oracle has been executing on SPARC, scoring highest performing industry benchmarks. Fujitsu continues to execute on SPARC, holding highest performing super-computer benchmarks. At this point, there is great opportunity for Solaris forked Illumos distribution - if they can get their act together to support SVR4 industry standards.


The UltraSPARC family of processors could be a bridge for Illumos developers to offer Fujitsu SPARC64 support on the fastest computer in the world. OpenIndiana may be closest to being able to offer such, not to mention get paid for older system support via resellers and new system support from Fujitsu (where Oracle shows little interesting in making Solaris run today.)
ARM offer great opportunities to extend Solaris family of architectures on the server, especially for Dell, who needs an enterprise OS. Of course, HP needs a new enterprise OS under the Intel platform.

If Illumos developers fail to understand how pivotal this point in time could be - this could be the end of an era and they would only have themselves to blame for their short-sightedness in not executing on the OpenSolaris source code tree during a very short time period where they can shine the brightest.

Abstract:
With the delay and loss of single-vendor advocated central processor units, operating systems centered on that silicon are considered not necessary. Application vendors dependent upon a single operating system dependent upon a single underlying architecture are even at higher risk. This article discusses the top 3 UNIX vendors with the impact of their silicon trajectory.


[Rumored IBM Power 7+ Multi-Chip-Modules, courtesy softpedia]
IBM POWER 7+ Now 7 Months Late: AIX in the Crosshairs

It was reported last month that IBM POWER 7+ was delayed about 6 months. As of this date, POWER 7+ is now 7 months late. A little insight from the IT Jungle from end of January:

This year, IBM is also supposed to add support for Power7+ machinery to the SDMC, which presumably implies that Power7+ processors are coming out sometime this year.

Maybe 7 months for IBM POWER 7+ is enough?
Will IBM POWER 8 be mentioned 8 months after POWER 7+ was late?

Of course, the dominant operating system on single-supplier IBM POWER is IBM AIX. The delay single-supplier of POWER impacts single-supplier IBM AIX. Linux may also run under POWER, but Linux is not the reason POWER exists.

Applications locked-into IBM AIX on IBM POWER must wait. Applications compiled for IBM POWER under Linux must also wait. If an business application needs more power, one must wait on POWER.


[Intel Itanium, courtesy xbitlabs]
Intel Itanium End: End of HP-UX
The Web Logic Development Journal listed some HP statements during the Oracle-HP court case:

• HP did not want to reveal that the Itanium road map is "more an illusion than of technical significance."
  
• Its purpose was to "extend the Itanium roadmap... to create market perception of long term viability."
  
• "HP-UX is on a death march due to inevitable Itanium trajectory."
  
• That HP knew that customers are prone to abandon a server technology as soon as its end of life becomes "visible"
  
• HP's internal documents show that "the Itanium situation is one of our most closely guarded secrets."
  
• "The regions are unaware of the situation with Itanium and the impending end of life."
  
• The last Itanium chip, Kittson plus, is released in a throttled down version and then a full version to create "illusion" of longer roadmap.

The end-of-life for (single supplier) Intel Itanium is not a surprise, but the court statements are interesting.

In November of 2011, 3000newswire discussed Project Odyssey, HP's delivering HP-UX features to only Linux and Windows.

"Unfortunately project Odyssey will ultimately drive most companies to IBM's AIX. [HP-UX] features on Linux are desirable, but Odyssey won't get many customers to migrate to Linux. I think it is very interesting that only Linux and Windows are supported.

Clearly, HP-UX is on the ropes. The [court document revealed] death of Intel Itanium co-insides with HP pushing users off HP-UX and Itanium. With Oracle shutting down Itanium software development, the death of Windows on Itanium, death of Red Hat Linux on Itanium - the push off of Itanium's sole remaining HP-UX operating system is not unusual.

[Oracle SPARC T4 Processor]
Multi-Vendor SPARC: Solaris Diversity Thrives
Customer dependent upon IBM POWER or Intel Itanium are locked into those vendors and their single source operating systems (i.e. IBM AIX and HP-UX) as discussed earlier. The death-march by customers dependent upon those operating systems is uneasy. As single vendor CPU suppliers silently delay, operating system vendors tie their customer's fortunes to those single suppliers. Operating systems tied to single CPU vendors are even more at risk.

In the SPARC community, things is vastly different. SPARC is a specification, multiple commercial vendors build SPARC processors and systems, anyone can choose to make their own SPARC chips without going to existing vendors, there is no legal risk for additional vendors to building SPARC processors, and multiple operating systems by multiple profitable vendors exist for processor support.

Commercial SPARC vendors include: Oracle, Fujitsu. Fujitsu has the most diverse lines, including: Throughput, Mainframe, and SuperComputer SPARC models. Commercial operating system support for SPARC includes: Solaris, Linux. Solaris CPU support include: Fujitsu SPARC, Oracle SPARC, Intel x64, AMD x64. Solaris family OS vendors include: Fujitsu, Oracle, Joyent, Nexenta. Solaris based Open-Source distributions include: SmartOS, OpenIndiana, Illumian. Solaris source code trees include: Closed Source Oracle Solaris, Open Source snapshots of OpenSolaris; active Open Source Illumos.

Oracle released a 4 part virtual seminar on the Solaris 11 road map (note: published comments on Session 1.) With new processors from Fujitsu and Oracle being released (seemingly yearly) and diversification of Solaris under all major commodity processors - it feels like the 1990's, with the launch of the Internet, all over again!

[IBM POWER5 Multi-Chip Module]
POWER, AMD, Itanium, and SPARC


[Sony Playstation]
POWER Loss

Remembering the loss of POWER on the desktop and anticipating the loss of POWER on embedded gaming consoles, it seems AMD might pick-up the gaming console business.

Whatever manufacturer AMD will choose, with its heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA), it's facing interesting new challenges. The signs indicating that Sony intents to switch to x86 processors and AMD GPUs for its next Playstation generation (2013/2014) are mounting. That Cell is not an option for Sony anymore already became largely clear when Cell partner IBM pulled out. With AMD's HSA concept, Sony could even fit the chip with its own extensions (FPGAs, media processors, DSPs and so on). And also Microsoft is supposed to be highly interested in an extended cooperation with AMD, for its next Xbox generation.

August of 2011, IBM unplugged POWER on their high-end Super Computer.

The Power 755 was supposed to be at the heart of the petaflops-busting "Blue Waters" super at the University of Illinois, but IBM pulled the plug on that deal last August.

POWER 7+ is more than 6 months late, with the press being virtually silent about it. It seems the high-end, mid-range, low-end, desktop, and embedded gaming consoles are all experiencing POWER problems with IBM.


[Intel Intanium Processor, courtesy Kazor-PT]
Itanium Death Knell

There has been much discussion from Oracle, regarding the ceasing of Itanium application development. It seems Larry Ellison was really "The Oracle" he projected to be - Itanuim may officially be dead in 2016. (new link)

Oracle's fraud counter-claim against Hewlett-Packard was dismissed by a Californian Superior Court, but during the proceedings it became clear that the Itanium line really doesn't have much of a future anymore. About two years after the eight-core chip Poulson, scheduled for this year, rolls out, the Kittson is supposed to follow, and we might still see the minimally improved Kittson+. Then, around 2016, the Itanium line will finally be ceased.

It seems, with how big of an issue Itanium discontinuance rumors were, that there would be more press regarding the now confirmed death of Itanium.


[Japan's Oakleaf-FX petaflopper at the University of Tokyo courtesy The Register]
Fujitsu SPARC64

As other RISC and VLIW vendors are finding themselves on sinking ships, Fujitsu releases another generation of SPARC CPU for their #1 performing supercomputer platforms.

Fujitsu has fired up the first installation of its PrimeHPC FX10 massively parallel Sparc-based supercomputer, a machine called Oakleaf-FX that weighs in at 1.13 petaflops of peak raw performance... For the PrimeHPC FX10 machines, Fujitsu has etched a new 16-core Sparc64-IXfx processor that runs at 1.85GHz

SPARC under Fujitsu doubles down and lives on - with a very occasional article about about the vendor who creates the fastest supercomputer in the world.


[SPARC public roadmap February 2012, courtesy Oracle]
Oracle SPARC M-Series

When Oracle adjusted the SPARC roadmap - another M-Series with 6x the throughput was noted. The 16-64 socket platform has virtually no one in the industry speculating, which baffles this author.

An "unknown" blogger posted a comment, regarding the 10 month old #1 Fujitsu SPARC Super Computer article:

Too bad we'll probably never see those chips in an Oracle Server.

This writer is not exactly sure where an M-Series with 6x throughput will come from (in the next 6 months), unless it comes from Fujitsu's Super Computer investment. It seems pretty clear that the processor has to come from Fujitsu.

Oracle/Fujitsu M-Series receiving a significant boost is very good news for SPARC - considering other vendors (IBM POWER and Intel/HP Itanium) continue their decline.


[Oracle Magazine 2012 Cover with SPARC T5]
Oracle T Series

The March 2012 edition of Oracle Magazine had an image of the SPARC T5 processor, slated to be released later this year. With a doubling of the cores per socket and a doubling of the sockets per chassis - this should be a very nice addition to the SPARC family.

The addition of compression engines (in the T5), in addition to the well-know crypto engines in the SPARC T Series will be a welcome capability addition for general purpose computing. Fewer proprietary crypto cards, proprietary network devices with crypto engines, and proprietary disk arrays (sporting compression, encryption, and dedup) will be needed - to achieve outstanding performance of general purpose applications running under SPARC.

Oracle Magazine provided a comforting photo of another next-generation open architecture SPARC chip (SPARC is an open specification designed & manufactured by multiple vendors), as single-vendor proprietary CPU's from IBM (POWER) and Intel (Itanium) continue to demonstrate their decline.

Security, Networking, and Industry Articles of Interest


2011年03月16日 - Microsoft malware removal tool takes out Public Enemy No. 4

Microsoft finally used its Malicious Software Removal Tool to remove the fourth-biggest threat in automated program's history dating back to at least 2005.

2011年03月18日 - RSA breach leaks data for hacking SecurID tokens

'Extremely sophisicated' attack targets 2-factor auth

2011年03月20日 - AT&T acquires T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for 39ドルbn

There was one GSM network, to rule them all...

2011年03月23日 - Mac OS X daddy quits Apple

Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Mac software engineering and the man who played a lead role in the development of Mac OS X, is leaving the company.

2011年03月23日 - 'Iranian' attackers forge Google's Gmail credentials

Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo, Mozilla also targeted.

Extremely sophisticated hackers, possibly from the Iranian government or another state-sponsored actor, broke into the servers of a web authentication authority and counterfeited certificates for Google mail and six other sensitive addresses, the CEO of Comodo said

2011年03月23日 - Oracle announced all software development stopped on Intel's Itanium CPU.

Red Hat was the first to pull the plug on Itanium, saying back in December 2009 that its Enterprise Linux 6 operating system, which was released last summer, would not be supported on Itanium processors.

Microsoft followed suit in April 2010, saying that Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 would be the final releases supported on Itanium.

2011年03月24日 - Apple Mac OS X: ten years old today

OS X was the product of Apple's 1996 purchase of NeXT, a move that not only saw the acquisition of a modern operating system, but also the return of its co-founder, Steve Jobs, to the company.

IBM Power 7 and eDRAM Cache

Welcome IBM to the world of 64 Bit Octal-Core Computing!

On February 8th, 2010, Timothy Prickett Morgan wrote about the IBM Power 7 chip launch in The Register, "Sparc T 64-threaded T2 and T2+... quad-core, eight-threaded Tukwilas... the Power7 chip has 32 threads"'

It is nice to see the trail which first generation OpenSPARC T1 had blazed with 32 threads is being followed by IBM Power and Intel Itanium, both applying different technology to compete with Sun's second and second and third generation 64 threaded OpenSPARC processors.

Possible Architecture Trade-offs to eDRAM in Cache

Timothy Prickett Morgan also wrote, "The effect of this eDRAM on the Power7 design, and its performance, is two-fold. First, by adding the L3 cache onto the chip..."

The use of embedded DRAM, to reduce transistors, squeeze more cores, and reduce latency was a great idea, even with the refresh logic added onto the chip!

Every benefit comes with a drawbacks. The discourse on possible trade-offs have been silent, which confuses me from the media.

The use of Static RAM has been traditionally beneficial to the chip manufacturers, since they could get fast and regular access to the memory cells, without having to wait for a slow refresh signal to propagate across the RAM. It is interesting that no one (and I mean NO ONE) is talking about the impact of performance for the CPU cores needing to wait for refresh on the eDRAM.

I wonder what the ratio of performance hit to reduction in latency was in moving to eDRAM?

Multi-Ported Static RAM allows for fast (simultaneous) access from multiple cores into cache. With multi-process heavy workloads, where data in the cache may not be simultaneously accessed from different cores or hardware strands, eDRAM may be a good fit. With software multi-threaded heavy workloads, where the data in the cache will be accessed simultaneously by multiple cores and hardware strands, eDRAM may suffer in comparison to multi-ported SDRAM due to excessive inefficient re-loads from main memory and inefficient sharing.

I wonder what the ratio of benefit to performance hit in throughput for moving to eDRAM was in comparison under various real-world workloads where multi-threaded applications need to share the instructions & data in the cache?

I wonder if the performance of eDRAM will be as linear as SDRAM, as the processors get loaded up? (This reminds me of the Intel 50MHz 80486 vs Intel 66Mhz (33MHz bus) 80486 tradeoff from years past...)

Connection to Network Management

Network Management traditionally deals with extremely highly threaded workloads. Managing tens of thousands of devices with hundreds of thousands of managed resources often requires thousands of threads in a single process with very regular (1-5 minute) polling intervals required tremendous throughput.

The use of Power 7 in these types of managed device facing highly threaded workloads is yet to be measured - it may be one of the most fabulous chips on the market, or it may be mediocre, for the network management space. Power is not a substantial player in the Network Management world, so I would not really expect engineers to tune the CPU for this type of workload.

I would expect that engineers tuned Power for the Database market. Network Management does require long term storage requirements of data, so this may be a very good back-end platform.

Conclusion

The move to eDRAM is very interesting by IBM, almost as interesting as OpenSPARC moving to highly threaded octal cores many years ago.

Will other vendors emulate IBM in the move to eDRAM cache, the same way IBM, Intel, and AMD are moving to 64 bit octal-core as OpenSPARC did years ago?

U P D A T E ! ! !

Another article has come out to discuss the use of eDRAM by IBM.

First in the chain is the 32KB L1 data cache, which has seen its latency cut in half, from four cycles in the POWER6 to two cycles in POWER7. Then there's the 256KB L2, the latency of which has dropped from 26 cycles in POWER6 to eight cycles in POWER7—that's quite a reduction, and will help greatly to mitigate the impact of the shared L3's increased latency.

The POWER7's L3 is its most unique feature, and, at 32MB, it's positively gigantic. IBM was able to cram such a large L3 onto the chip by making it out of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) instead of the usual SRAM. This decision cost the cache a few cycles of latency

Itanium: The Death of Red Hat Linux Support

Announcement


The History
The processor market as basically split between two comodity CISC (Completed Instruction Set Computing) chip makers, Intel (x86) and Motorola (68K) where high-end workstation & server vendors consolidated in Motorola (68K) with PC makers leveraging Intel (x86).


Motorola indicated an end to their 68K line was coming, x86 appeared to be running out of steam. A new concept called RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) was appearing on the scenes. Wholesale migration from Motorola was on, many vendors creating their own very high performance chips based upon this architecture. Various RISC chips were born, created by vendors, adopted by manufacturers, each with their own operating system based upon various open standards.

• SUN/Fujitsu/Ross/(various others) SPARC
• IBM POWER
• HP PA-RISC
• DEC Alpha
• MIPS MIPS (adopted by SGI, Tandem, and various others)
• Motorola 88K (adopted by Data General, Northern Telecom, and various others)
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC (adopted by Apple, IBM, Motorola, and various others)

There was reletively small volume shipments to most vendors of full fledge processors, although the computing prices allowed for continued investment to create increasingly smaller chips to enhance performance. Many of these architectures were cooperative efforts, with cross licensing, to increase volume, and create a viable vendor base. The move to 64 occurred in most of these high-end vendors. As the costs for investment continued to rise, in order to shrink the silicon chip dies, a massive consolidation started to occur, in order to save costs and continue to be profitable.

The desktop market continued to tick away with 32 bit computing at a lower cost, with 2 primary vendors: Intel and AMD.


A massive move to consolidate 64 bit RISC processors from the minority market shareholders from their smaller shares to a common, larger, Intel based 64 bit Itanium VLIW (Very Long Intruction Word) processors. This was a very risky move, since VLIW was a new architecture, and performance was unproven. The consideration by the vendors was Intel had deep enough pockets to fund a new processor. Some of the vendors, who consolidated their architectures into Itanium included:

• HP - PA-RISC
• DEC, purchased by Compaq, Purchased by HP - Alpha
• DEC, purchased by Compaq, Purchased by HP - VAX
• Tandem, purchased by Compaq, Purchased by HP - MIPS
• SGI -> MIPS

Many of the RISC processors did not go away, they just moved to embedded environments, where many of the more complex features of the chips could continue to be dropped, so development would be less costly.

Majority RISC architecture market share holds in the desktop & server arena seemed to consolidate during the fist decade of 2000 around RISC architectures of an open consortium driven by specifications called SPARC (predominately SUN and Fujitsu) and proprietary final proprietary single vendor drive POWER (predominately IBM)


AMD later released 64 bit extensions to the aging Intel x86 instructions (which all vendors, including Intel, had basically written off as a dead-end architecture) - creating what the market referred to as "x64". Intel was later forced into releasing a similar processor, competing internally with their Itanium. Much market focus started, consolidating servers onto this proprietary x64 based systems, sapping vitality and market share from RISC and VLIW vendors.

Network Management Implications

HP really drove the market to Itanium, after acquiring many companies. There was a large number of operating systems, which needed to be supported internally, so the move to consolidate those operating systems and reduce costs became important.

HP OpenView is one of those key suites of Network Management tools, which people don't get fired for purchasing. HP made announcements of their proprietary operating system HP-UX, Microsoft proprietary Windows, and open source Linux support for Intel Itanium. HP was never able to get OpenView traction with it under Linux under Itanium or Windows under Itanium, although they were able to provide support for their own proprietary HP-UX platform, as well as Linux under x86 architecture.

With Open Source Red Hat Linux going away on Itanium. Itanium as a 64 bit architecture is clearly taking a severe downturn in the viable 3rd party architectures, and Network Management from OpenView will obviously never become a player in a market that will no longer exist.
The IBM POWER architecture, even though it is one of the last two substantial RISC vendors left, has never really been a substantial vendor in Network Managment arena, even with IBM selling Tivoli Network Management suite. Network Management will most likely never be a substantial power under POWER.

"Mom & Pop" shops run various Network Management systems under Windows, but the number of managed nodes is typically vastly inferior to the larger Enterprise and Managed Services markets. The software just does not scale as well.

Sun SPARC Solaris (with massive vertical and horizontal scalibility) and Red Hat Linux x68 (typically limited to horizontal scalibility) are really the only two substantial multi-vendor Network Management platform players for large Managed Services installations left. Red Hat abandoning HP's Itanium Linux only continues to solidify this position.