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Category: Hardware

Intel Unveils Hybrid Xeon-FPGA Chip for Betterment of Cloud Services

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

Intel announced one of the biggest ever changes to its chip lineup, it develops a new Xeon CPU with an integrated FPGA. It is a move to address the needs of cloud service providers and offer better performance to the users.

The giant said its next-gen Xeon chip deliver up to 80% more performance and will fir in the standard E5 LGA2011 socket. The integrated FPGA will allow each chip to be customized to specific workloads. The move is to make a better all-round platform for a huge variety of workloads in enterprise. The company is expanding on its promise of customizable solutions, by combining its Xeon processor with a customizable logic block and that too inside a single-chip package.

Let’s discuss a little about FPGA…

FPGA is a blank chip that can be again and again reprogrammed after manufacturing and its stands for Field-programmable Gate Arrays. In simple words you can take an FPGA to program it to perform one set of function, and then reprogram it to handle different or another type of workload. With some exemptions, every chip inside a computer is hard-coded to perform just one set of functions. Your CPU can only perform exactly what AMD or Intel designed it to do.

As far as the benefits of FPGA are concerned, the main advantage is that its customizable and has monstrously high performance. Over the last few years, more and more processing has moved to the cloud and Intel’s server market dominance has also been attacked on a few fronts. As far as Xeon chips are concerned, they are fast, efficient and all-round chips.

To address more specific workloads, Intel has paired its Xeon CPU with an FPGA. According to Intel, it has delivered around 15 custom products to big customers like Ebay and Facebook and will do over 30 custom designs this year. The aim is to provide a high performance, programmable capability to perform critical algorithms.

There’s no word on availability or pricing, but it’s quite clear that it’s not going to be cheap.

Internet of Things Starter Kit: Latest Revelation by IBM and ARM

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IBM and ARM wants to make everything smart!

To give a push to the ‘Internet of Things‘, IBM and ARM have announced a joint project for launching a starter kit with cloud support, as per the sources.

A ‘starter kit’ designed to take the Internet of Things to a new level has been announced by two leading firms – cloud services giant IBM and chip designer ARM. According to them, it will take only few minutes to unbox the kit and send readings to online apps. This could be a huge step towards smart cities, smart homes and other prototypes using the technology. The ARM embedded kit will let users create cloud-ready products that could receive as well as transmit data for alerts.

In further revelation of information, the kit is expected to arrive with ARM’s mbed OS that will connect into BlueMic Cloud of IBM. With these main specs, the kit will assist developers or users in the development of apps and services based on Internet of Things. The kit will be helpful for both experienced and non-experienced enthusiasts so that they can design and make useful apps.

What they are offering with the new Starter Kit?

As discussed on ARM’s product page, the official name given to the new starter kit is ‘IoT Starter Kit – Ethernet Edition’ and it’s based around the Freescale K64F platform and a Cortex-M4 processor. The processor comes with an integrated floating point unit and DSP. The site also discussed about some more features which includes that the chip is clocked at 120MHz with 256KB of RAM and flash of 1MB.

Krisztian Flaunter from ARM said, “Securely embedding intelligence and connectivity into devices from the outset will create cloud-connected products that are far more capable than today.” This simply indicates that the main idea is to enable small companies to get involved in prototyping and device testing.

How to get started?

According to ARM, getting started with the starter kit is very simple and can be done in just 3 steps. See how:-

ARM Starter Kit

Open IBM.htm and you can see the data reported by your board after connecting them to your computer. For more info, visit here.

Looks like the tech companies are pretty serious about bringing together the physical and digital worlds. This will help connecting everything together and share rich information about their surroundings.

Not much details about the new starter kit hardware have been made public yet. We’ll catch you back once the details are disclosed by the companies. Till then, you can share you views on Internet of Things…

Image Source:

http://eandt.theiet.org/news/2015/feb/images/640_arm-iot.jpg

Lenovo Working on its First Prototype ARM Server

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Lenovo’s computing energy-efficient effort!

Companies are trying hard to make the server environment more competitive by introducing energy-efficient computing systems. The latest in line is the Chinese hardware giant, Lenovo and it is testing the use of ARM-powered servers as an alternative to systems working on Intel processors, according to a news on pcworld. As per the news, the tech giant is all set to test it with a prototype ARM server.

Lenovo will be using 64-bit ARM processors in a NextScale system, which was originally developed by IBM. The hyperscale system was developed with an idea to provide more flexibility and scalability and at the same time lower operating costs for data-intensive workloads. As mentioned on their website, NextScale delivers the agility, density and scale for today’s most demanding workloads.

NextScale system was designed to compete with HP’s Moonshot and later transferred to Lenovo. Now, the hardware giant is building the server together with the U.K.-based Science and Technology Facilities Council. The aim looks to boost up system performance and making it as power-efficient as possible.

Use of ARM Technology

ARM technology is used to develop more power-efficient, connected electronics and the approach requires significantly less transistors than other processors. Low-power ARM chips are used in devices like smartphones and tablets and mainly used to bring energy-efficiency. Today, data center servers are undergoing heavy processing burdens due to the increasing cloud services and applications.

Lenovo is not the only one to offer ARM technology, HP already offers ARM processors, while Dell is working on the similar architecture. The technology is optimized for specific uses such as caching and cloud and web search.

As discussed on various news sites, the NextScale hold up to 12 ARM-based server boards and that’s why the company is experimenting on the system. The Cavium ARM microprocessors used by the hardware giant has up to 48 cores, and can work at a frequency of up to 2.5GHz.

The development seems to be a positive effort and looks like the tech giant wants to make the ARM server environment more competitive. There’s a lot to done yet and the scope seems to be just indefinite.

Image Source:

http://www.arm.com/images/homepagebanners/image1.png

Intel Corporation Takes ‘Intel Inside’ to Cloud: To Head Off Competition

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Intel Corporation, an American multinational semiconductor chip maker, is taking its ‘Intel Inside’ into cloud computing.

Intel Inside marketing campaign goes cloud computing to give smaller rivals a tough competition. The giant said that the data center service providers would begin offering their clients details about the Intel chips. The company wants to help customers make smart buying decisions by providing them appropriate information.

The awesome thing about cloud computing is that you don’t have to think what kind of hardware is used to run your virtual machines. Intel is all set to take its long-running processor in the cloud world. It controls nearly all of the server market and is driven not to hand over ground to Advanced Micro Devices.

Raejeanne Skillern, the marketing director Intel, said in an interview, “Strengthening awareness of the features, quality and impact of Intel technologies is a challenge to competing vendors and architectures.”

The campaign namely “Intel Cloud Technology” expands on an agreement with Amazon Web Services last year. The aim was to provide the specifications about the different kinds of Intel chips used in AWS services. Amazon has long been appreciated for informing customers about cloud.

The marketing campaign was not just a shallow one, Intel would appear to be able to justify the promised performance differential by using Intel silicon in cloud applications. Rackspace, AWS, Virtustream and Expedient were all used as examples in the briefing materials.

Today, market is obsessed by ‘higher performance’ like things and there’s no scope for low quality materials. Hence, companies, big or small, are trying their best to offer cutting-edge solutions to the customers at best possible price.

Whatever the main reason behind turning cloud computing, high-quality and higher performance is always appreciated. The extra information always help customers avoid making wrong buying decisions.