ITS News

Here’s why you should care about the difference between Intel and AMD bus architectures I should be writing about Quad-Core Opteron, which was formally launched on Monday, but I feel the need to take a brief detour into a point-by-point contrast between AMD’s latest offering and Intel’s new quad-core Xeon MP 7300-series CPU. The MP designates the CPU for use in four-socket servers, which brings up the first difference between Opteron and Xeon MP: Opteron scales up to eight sockets. Intel certainly grabs your attention with its boast that quad-core Xeon 7300 performs at a nice, round 2X the speed of “prior generation” Xeon MP, yet reduces power consumption. The prior generation turns out to be Xeon 7100 MP, a dual-core CPU built with fatter transistors. Quad-core and process shrink brought Intel to the finish line. This muddy messaging doesn’t go over the heads of IT buyers, but X factors do get us press types excited. It turns out that Quad-Core Opteron is more than two times faster than its dual-core predecessor, and Quad-Core Opteron saves power not through process shrink, but by turning off or dimming the lights on walkways and in individual rooms that aren’t being used. The… READ MORE

I’ve got the rough first-pass performance numbers in hand. They’re quite voluminous, so I need to cut them down before I can post them. While I’m waiting for this huge file to load into my HTML editor, I’ll set the stage for the tests and the results. I plan to run SPECjbb, STREAM, and after a delay to get them compiled with the latest rev of Intel’s compilers, SPECint_rate and SPECfp_rate. For burn-in, I used a shareware app called SiSoft Sandra, and I re-ran that application overnight to get its full performance report. I’m a benchmark snob, and as such I have to warn that until I prove them out with standardized tests, Sandra’s report results have to be taken with a grain of salt of approximately one foot in diameter. Sandra is built to test desktop machines, and in the past, I’ve used it purely for burn-in and to make sure that systems under test aren’t hobbled by poor BIOS defaults. Sandra’s code and its methods are opaque, so I don’t trust it to produce meaningfully comparable results for servers. I’m passing along only that raw data that a patient reader can interpret; analysis will follow the results… READ MORE

For the past year, I’ve been immersed in research on server microprocessor and system architectures. There have been genuine breakthroughs on so many fronts. IBM’s POWER6 is built around 4.7 GHz processor cores that outpace the latest Itanium in single-core performance, while advancing POWER simultaneously toward power efficiency and mainframe functionality. POWER6 is able to adjust the power utilization of CPU and core sub-components with each clock cycle, and it does so based on its own analysis of computing and I/O load rather than the operating system’s. Sun’s UltraSPARC T2 proves that by focusing on total throughput, a one-socket server with a comparatively low clock speed can rival, and even outperform larger, more costly, more power hungry servers. IBM and Sun put the lie to notions about RISC having run its course. I’ve never seen as much new, exciting and remarkable technology emerge from microprocessor chipmakers as I’ve seen in the past twelve months. I’ve never seen computing’s goalposts moved so far in such a short span of time. For most of a year, I’ve also been deep in learning about AMD’s new server CPU architecture, Barcelona, which makes its debut today, 9/10/07, as quad-core Opteron. I’ve experienced Barcelona… READ MORE

The wireless market is skewed toward locking impulse-buying consumers into extra charges and long contracts, but business can bypass this You might be surprised how the mere sight of a new mobile handset motivates fellow business travelers to vent on the subject of their crappy phones and their inattentive, overcharging operators. I’m astonished that Executive Platinum frequent flyers, people who negotiate multimillion-dollar deals, put themselves at the mercy of wireless operators. All it takes for business subscribers to get what they need from wireless operators is to quit acting like a consumers — and start exercising the advantages business buyers enjoy. Clueless consumers can be smacked with a $300-$500 bill each month just by making daytime calls, sending text messages as if they were free, and auditioning ring tones by downloading them. In contrast, business subscriber revenue rises only as more devices are added to an account, and it falls off only if the customer gets unhappy. An unhappy business customer isn’t dissuaded, as consumers (rather foolishly) are, by penalties for early contract termination. A savvy business subscriber will pay to leave a lousy operator, knowing that a competing operator will welcome a shot at a new contract. So don’t… READ MORE

Web 2.0/AJAX complicates, not simplifies, substantial application development and porting projects There are few things more frustrating than filling out the last page of a four-page form on what purports to be a Web application, pressing Submit (or, if the site really fancies itself to be an app, Save), and getting “Server failure–try again later,” a SQL error sloppily spewed out to my browser, or “You are not connected to the Internet.” That last one is a problem on my end, sure, but it’s the site owner’s responsibility to deal with any failure condition gracefully. When I get the site back, my session has timed out for my protection, and I have to start over. That’s when I know that this would-be app was designed by someone who has never written a commercial client/server application, and that realization causes me to lose all faith in whatever services this erstwhile app purports to provide. That outfit lost my business for failing to understand the huge difference between a site and an application. I wish this were an isolated occurrence, but organizations are going ape over the promise of apps that deliver the desktop experience while running entirely on a server, zero… READ MORE

If your biggest gripe with Apple’s flagship media player is that it refuses to make voice or data calls on anything but AT&T’s wireless network, you’re officially free. But the price of freedom, in this case, is either a very steady hand and soldering iron, or a willingness to send money to Australia in exchange for a “Turbo SIM,” delivery date unknown. Of the two methods, I prefer the third: Buy a real phone. Following an exhaustive comparison of alternatives, I have overwhelming backing for my early conclusion that iPhone is vastly outmatched by several devices in its price class. If you simply must buy and unlock an iPhone, use George Hotz’s (forum nickname “geohot”) 10-step hack, the one that requires soldering. If you need help with the soldering, go to a ham radio fest or sit in on a robotics club meeting. If you want to tackle it yourself, practice with throwaway surface-mount electronics, scraping conformal coating from circuit traces and soldering wire to them before you crack the case on an iPhone. George’s method is the easiest possible hack to a surface-mount board. While George recycled his wire from a motor, I suggest you buy new magnet… READ MORE

You might be wondering why I posted nothing last week. I was in the Bay Area tapping the ample brains of people from Apple, Sun Microsystems and Adobe, and traipsing about at LinuxWorld Expo in my spare time. But my true reason for existing last week was to cover every horizontal surface in my hotel room, including myself, with wireless things built solely for professionals like you and me, and the enterprises that deploy mobile technology for workers and contractors. The magnitude of this project is enormous, but rather than prattle on about it, I’ll share the list of products that are in the piece and the follow-up coverage: BlackBerry 8830 (”Curve”) Nokia E61i HTC Advantage X7501 T-Mobile Wing (HTC “Herald”) Nokia E65 AT&T 8525 (HTC “Hermes”) BlackBerry 8800 TeleNav GPS Navigator (software) TeleNav GPS receiver (hardware) Plantronics P590A Stereo Bluetooth over-the-ear headset w/AVRCP (audio video remote control protocol) BlueAnt Z9 Bluetooth voice isolation, dual microphone in-ear headset Plantronics Discovery 655 Bluetooth in-ear headset BlueAnt Supertooth-Light visor clip Bluetooth handsfree kit T-Mobile HotSpot @ Home router with Nokia 6086 dual-mode (cell/Wi-Fi) phone iPhone (already reviewed; included for comparison) I have a couple of points I’d like to explain about… READ MORE

With iPhone a closed platform, Linux gets an wide-open road for phones and other smart devices Linux developers have been dying for a phone of their own ever since Sharp killed the Zaurus Linux-based PDA. Apple’s decision to close iPhone to 3rd-party applications gave the green light to Linux phones and mobile devices. LinuxWorld Expo 2007 basked in Apple’s unwitting generosity, with one booth after another featuring fledgling mobile Linux projects prospecting for funding, direction, and developers. The whole exhibit floor had the feel of a mining town that was just getting its footing. Linux on mobile devices is nothing new; success would be. It would take a phone handset maker the size of Motorola to make mobile Linux a hit, and as it happens, Motorola has staked a claim. Motorola’s been fiddling with Linux for some time, promising to open the Linux-based phone OS that it uses on a couple of shipping models, but, like many other exhibitors in the mobile Linux realm, Motorola can’t decide where to draw the line between protected intellectual property and The Public Good. As a result, in Motorola’s booth as at its developer site, Motorola teases a couple of Linux phones in its… READ MORE

IBM’s merging of its mainframe and RISC engineering groups lights the way to more reliable servers The advent of the microprocessor created a new class of system that liberated computing from air-conditioned rooms and washing machine-size storage. But as small systems have evolved, we’ve drifted from the design traits that made mainframes invaluable in critical applications. Well, there’s no reason the x86 advantages of low cost, standardization, and low power should be at odds with manageability, resource partitioning, and good old RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability). We need to break away from our love affair with cores and caches, and focus on making x86 servers self-diagnosing and self-adapting by nature. As with virtualization, getting RAS right means it must be a design priority all the way down to the copper and silicon. IBM gets that. Shortly after uniting its Power and mainframe engineering design teams, IBM produced a microprocessor — Power6 — that represents the crucial first step along the path toward bringing mainframe-grade reliability to small servers. The Power6 design, and the p 570 total system architecture built around it, incorporates several mainframe RAS qualities that seem impossible on an air-cooled microprocessor. Genuine RAS is predictive and proactive, not reactive,… READ MORE

Good-bye Office 2004, hello iWork ‘08. And welcome new iMacs and .Mac boost — all well worth skipping LinuxWorld Expo for, writes Tom Yager. During an unprecedented Q&A session following Apple’s Town Hall meeting Aug. 7, no less than Steve Jobs gave me a new nickname: “The Fringe.” He was referring to journalists who solidly panned the iPhone in the first round of high-profile reviews. To my knowledge, membership in that fringe is limited to one. I wear that moniker proudly, remembering the not-too-distant days when Apple, too, was dismissed as a fringe player and when Jobs himself was written off by the financial media for investing in some crazy idea, considered by pundits inside the sparsely populated fringe as the enemy of profit and market share — namely, innovation. Apart from habitually being at odds with conventional wisdom, I share one other trait with Jobs: Far more often than not, when everybody else writes me off as an idiot, I turn out to be right. It’s just a matter of patience. It’s OK with me that by the time the rest of the world catches up to my way of thinking, they’ve forgotten who told the truth in the… READ MORE