Intel

Solid-state drives jump on PCI Express

四月 12, 2012
By

Solid-state drives jump on PCI Express

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4370635/Solid-state-drives-jump-on-PCI-Express

Rick Merritt 4/9/2012 12:22 PM EDT

A coming wave of solid-state drives for the PCI Express bus will continue the SATA vs. SCSI protocol split and accelerate the shift to competition based on software. SAN JOSE, Calif.

– A wide group of vendors is poised to roll solid-state drives for the PCI Express bus, promising improved performance over current flash drives that mainly use serial ATA and Serial-Attached SCSI interfaces.

The wave of new products will continue the current split between SATA- and SCSI-based protocols, and accelerate the shift to competition based on new software features.
As many as 80 companies including Dell, Intel, Micron, Oracle and Stec are part of the trade group that defined the NVMe interface last year.

The first drives using the interface are expected to ship later this year.
Separately, the SCSI Trade Association (STA) recently announced it will adopt the SCSI over PCI Express standard being completed by the ANSI T10 committee. STA will hold a technology showcase in Silicon Valley on May 9 where members may demo some of the first SCSI Express flash drives.
The competing NVMe and SCSI Express drives are expected to continue the same split between SATA and SCSI command sets that exists in today’s SATA and SAS flash and hard-disk drives.
The NVMe and SCSI Express drives represent a challenge to Fusion-IO, a startup that soared to success based on pioneering the move to plugging solid-state drives into the fast PCIe bus, closely linked to system CPUs. Most first-generation solid-state drives used the slower SATA and SAS hard drive interfaces that reside lower in the hierarchy of interconnects on a server.
The performance benefits of PCIe helped Fusion IO tap into sales that soared to $84 million in its most recent quarter. The strong sales supported two successful public offerings in the past two years, raising more than $300 million.
With the advent of many more PCIe flash drives this year, Fusion faces a two-fold challenge. A wider supply of standard drives could help speed price decreases in the sector. In addition, the presence of more solid-state drives will likely narrow Fusion’s performance benefits based on its proprietary approach.
Fusion pioneered a method of giving host CPUs fast access memory stored on flash drives.

The company has a proprietary approach for sharing with the host processors a map that describes where all the data on a flash drive physically resides, enabling write access at latencies of as little as 15 microseconds. Most drives maintain less comprehensive logical-to-physical translation maps on the drive controllers and thus have higher latencies.
The new NVMe and SCSI Express specs will enable vendors to leverage common software stacks for PCIe drives, lowering their costs and time-to-market.
“Today most PCIe flash drives include a proprietary driver and no industry software standard,” said Amber Huffman, a spokeswoman for the NVMe group and a senior principal storage engineer at Intel. 

With NVMe’s consistent feature set, “we expect to see faster time-to-market and broader adoption,” she said.
For its part, Fusion will back the SCSI Express approach because it is based on the work of a recognized standards group, the ANSI T10 committee. Access to the NVMe spec requires signing a legal document managed by Intel Corp., the group’s leader, said Gary Orenstein, vice president of products at Fusion IO.
“Is too early to tell what the shift to NVMe and SCSI Express will mean,” said Orenstein. “Some people think there could be a merging of the two efforts eventually,” he added.
To date, nearly three-quarters of Fusion’s sales have gone to three large customers, likely the top server makers—Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Dell has already signaled its support for NVMe in its latest servers, casting a shadow over at least one of Fusion’s big customers.

Shift to software
Value-added software is increasingly the secret sauce for maintaining flash drive prices.

For its part, Fusion says software is now the key focus of its R&D efforts, and it acquired IO Turbine, a developer of storage virtualization software, in August for $65 million. 
Fusion is already shipping the renamed ioTurbine software.

It enables solid-state drives to be used as memory caches on a server running VMWare virtualization software. Fusion sees opportunities to roll software that enables other applications with its flash drives in areas such as database, enterprise search and social gaming.
In this way, Fusion may again be pioneering the direction for the rest of the flash drive market—a move to flash-enabled applications software. Long term, the industry still needs broader standards and support from operating systems for how flash storage can fit into the memory hierarchy.
The good news for all sides is it’s still early days for solid-state drives with plenty of growth seen ahead. International Data Corp. expects the market for PCIe-based flash drives to expand 85 percent on a compound basis from 2010-2015. Even the older market for slower SATA and SAS flash drives will grow a solid 56 percent over that period, IDC predicts.
PCIe-based flash drives came from virtually nowhere in 2009 to sales of 200 to 300 million units in 2011, according to various market researchers.
Long term, PCIe will supplant SATA and perhaps SAS as well, said Huffman.
SATA development ended at the current 6 Gbit/second generation with a SATA/Express merger planned as the next step.

“SAS will have trouble getting beyond 12 Gbit/s—we definitely see PCI Express as the future,” Huffman said.
Interest in the NVMe spec is strong based on engineers adding about 20 errata to the spec to date, a sign products are in development.

“We’re processing lots of clarifications, and that means people are using the spec,” she said.
The group has interoperability test labs set up at the University of New Hampshire and it is working on extensions to the spec. They include options for supporting multiple hosts and power-saving features.

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Intel rolls first processor optimized for datacenters

三月 8, 2012
By

Intel rolls first processor optimized for datacenters

R. Colin Johnson  3/6/2012 12:01 PM EST

http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4237522/-Intel-rolls-first-processor-optimized-for-datacenters

Intel announced its first processor optimized for the datacenter with 70 percent boost in performance for same energy consumed by up to eight-core processor per socket.

PORTLAND, Ore.—Intel Corp. says it has designed its first processor built from the ground up for the "green" datacenters of the future, claiming a 70 percent increase in performance for the same energy consumption.

The new E5-2600 also features a high-speed bi-directional ring encircling its up to eight cores per socket connecting up to 20 Mbytes of cache, quad DDR3 memory controllers and 40-lanes of PCI-Express 3 for input/output (I/O).
"The E5 is our first CPU optimized for the energy-efficient datacenter of 2015," said Jeff Gilbert, Sandy Bridge architect.

"It features twin 32-byte wide ultra-high-speed rings going in opposite directions to encircle the eight [Sandy Bridge] cores and connect them to cache."

The E5 family is also Intel’s first server processor family with integrated input/output (I/O), rather than using a separate chip, thereby reducing latency by 30 percent while doubling the bandwidth with PCIe3.

The E5 is also the first Intel server processor to support LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) by virtue of industry’s first integrated 10-Gbit per second Ethernet local-area network (LAN).

Intel also claims the E5 is its first processor optimized for a lowest idle power of 10-20 percent utilization.

A sophisticated power management agent puts separate power limits on the whole device, its cores, memory and I/O, then smartly manages them for optimal performance, energy efficiency or other datacenter goals.

Using dynamic switching, depending on load conditions and turbo requests, the E5 will automatically switch between "performance" and "low-power" modes plus a new "balance" mode that compensates for turbo requests by adjusting the voltage/frequency of other cores.

For instance, if datacenter managers decide to clamp power at a certain overall level, then the balance mode will adjust some cores down in voltage and frequency to compensate for the heavy load on a turbo-mode core.

The new turbo 2.0 mode is also smarter on the E5, employing better thermal management algorithms that keep track of how long a core has been held idle building up "turbo credits" that can be used when over-clocking is invoked.

Besides voltage and frequency scaling for each core, the new power management agent also manages energy efficiency in I/O by dynamically reducing its width in response to workload and thermal management goals.

Core power can be scaled from 50-to-95 watts, which likewise scales memory latency from 118-to-64 nanoseconds, while a "unicore" technique scales cache and ring frequency to match.

In all, 23 different parameters are adjusted by the E5′s running-average-power-limit architecture.

As a result of optimizations enabled by Intel’s Node- and Datacenter-Manager software, Intel estimates that up to 40 percent more servers can be installed per rack using E5 processors.


Intel’s E5-2600 processors will be available with up to eight cores encircled by a high-speed bi-directional ring connecting caches, memory, direct I/O.

Intel’s phone reference design is what it needed to be

一月 24, 2012
By

Intel’s phone reference design is what it needed to be

Solid hardware, competitive with current chips

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/01/17/intels-phone-reference-design-is-what-it-needed-to-be/

Intel - logoWe have looked at the silicon for Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) new phone offerings in the last two articles, (Part 1 and Part 2) but what about the rest?

The first step to figuring out how the silicon will fare is to examine what is made with it.

Intel has a reference design, and it is very likely that we will see similar hardware coming from Motorola and Lenovo in short order.

Some things will change, the cameras and what features are exposed are the two highest on the list, but the basics are all going to be in any of the first generations phones.

The reference platform looks like this, but the products will obviously be wrapped in corporate themed plastic.

 

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Intel: Medfield ‘Step in Right Direction,’ Says MPR

一月 24, 2012
By

Intel: Medfield ‘Step in Right Direction,’ Says MPR

 

 

 

By TIERNAN RAY

 

Linley Gwennap, editor of the venerable microprocessor pub Microprocessor Report, or MPR, penned an interesting item yesterday on what was learned about Intel’s (INTC) “Atom Z2460” processor for smartphones, which has been code-named Medfield, which was formally unveiled last week during CEO Paul Otellini‘s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Gwennap notes that Intel’s processor will clock in at 1.6 gigahertz and will remain within the power envelope of current generation processors based on ARM Holdings‘s (ARMH) “Corex-A9” CPU, at 1 watt or less. In fact, the processor may even be more power-efficient than some more recent ARM-based chips, such as Nvidia‘s (NVDA) “Tegra 3” quad-core part.

And so Gwennap concludes Intel has “got it right” with this third Atom generation.

The problem is, the chip is no more powerful than those other chips, and processors from ARM’s partners that use the newer “Cortex-A15” CPU, or similar CPUs such as Qualcomm’s (QCOM) “Krait,” will eclipse the Z2460 later this year.

So this is not the chip that will save Intel’s smartphone efforts, writes Gwennap.

But with Intel headed toward definite process advantages in 22-nanometer production, plus its “Tri-Gate” three dimensional transistors, Gwennap concludes Intel has taken “a step in the right direction,” and that the new process technologies may add the winning performance advantage needed to make the low-power Atom a hit in phones.

Some critics say that we’ve heard this story before:

Moorestown was supposed to be Intel’s foot in the smartphone door, and Medfield was supposed to be the real deal. To maintain its market momentum, the company must deliver the next two Atom generations on schedule, achieving a sizable performance lead over 28nm ARM-based processors. With Medfield, Intel has proven that it can deliver a competitive smartphone processor while maintaining x86 compatibility.

The company still needs to prove that it can deliver a superior one.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2012/01/17/intel-medfield-step-in-right-direction-says-mpr/?mod=BOLBlog&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+barrons%2Ftechtraderdaily%2Ffeed+%28BARRONS.com+Blog%3A+Tech+Trader+Daily%29

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Intel 32nm processor enables up to 10 hours battery life

一月 6, 2012
By

32nm processor enables up to 10 hours battery life

Posted:03 Jan 2012

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800658735_499489_NP_950eb936.HTM?8800089119&8800658735&click_from=8800089119,8723946550,2012-01-03,EEOL,ARTICLE_ALERT#

Intel Corp. has unleashed its latest mobile Intel Atom processor-based platform that the company said is designed to provide small, compact, on-the-go computing with great battery life at an affordable price. Formerly codenamed ‘Cedar Trail,’ the device has added several new features to netbookcomputers for light productivity and Internet browsing.

The new design’s dedicated media engine enables full 1080p HD playback of videos and Blu-Ray content and includes additional digital display and output options including HDMI and DisplayPort. The integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3600/3650 combined with the integrated memory controller provides enhanced performance and system responsiveness, including an improvement in graphics performance up to 2X compared to the previous generation platform.

Intel Atom

Intel Atom processors claim to deliver a noticeably snappier, more responsive consumer experience with great battery life.

Systems based on the new Intel Atom processors may have up to 10 hours of battery life and weeks of standby, allowing for all-day use between charges, noted Intel. Additionally, Intel increased processor and overall system performance while reducing power consumption up to 20 percent compared to the previous platform, added the company.

Based on Intel’s 32nm process technology, the company incorporated features including Intel Wireless Display and Intel Wireless Music. With these, people can share videos or photos wirelessly from their netbooks to a television, or stream music through their home stereo speakers, described Intel.

Additional features such as Intel Smart Connect Technology allows users to have an instant Internet connection as soon as they open their netbook, and have email, Twitter and RSS feeds automatically updated even in sleep mode. Intel Rapid Start Technology enables fast resume from standby mode and helps conserve battery life.

The dual-core Intel Atom processor N2600 and Intel Atom processor N2800 are paired with the Intel NM10 Express Chipset and feature a small form factor package size that saves system board real estate and enables thinner netbook designs.

In addition to the mobile processors, Intel offers the Intel Atom processor D2500 and D2700 for entry-level desktop and all-in-one designs, as well as intelligent system solutions.

The platform supports a range of OS including Windows, MeeGo and Tizen.

The Intel Atom processors provide a lower thermal design power (TDP) and power management features such as Intel Deeper Sleep and Intel SpeedStep Technology that enable lower power designs, making it especially attractive for netbooks as well as intelligent systems including healthcare equipment, retail systems and entry-level digital signage, indicated the company.

The always on, always connected capabilities are also ideal for entry-level PoS systems with the ability to boot up instantly to serve customer’s at a moment’s notice.

Intelligent system designs are offered seven-year lifecycle support, as well as support for Windows Embedded Standard 7, Windows XP and XPe, Windows Embedded Compact, Yocto Project and Wind River VxWorks OS.

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Intel rolls 32-nm Atom, preps 22-nm Ivy Bridge

一月 3, 2012
By

Intel rolls 32-nm Atom, preps 22-nm Ivy Bridge

Rick Merritt   12/28/2011 1:59 PM EST

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4233666/Intel-rolls-32nm-Atom–preps-22-nm-Ivy-Bridge

Intel rolled out 32 nm Atom chips for netbooks and embedded systems and is reportedly planning to release its 22 nm Ivy Bridge notebook and desktop CPUs in April. SAN JOSE, Calif. – Intel Corp. rolled out Cedar Trail, its 32 nm Atom chips for netbooks and embedded systems as a Taiwan newspaper claimed it had uncovered details about the company’s plans to release its 22 nm Ivy Bridge notebook and desktop CPUs.
Intel plans to release in early April, 25 Ivy Bridge processors made in its 22 nm technology, according to a report in Digitimes. It said seventeen desktop chips will range in price from $184 to $332, and eight notebook CPUs will range in cost from $40 to $1,096—a range that is not likely accurate.
Since about 2008, Intel rolled out its next-generation desktop and notebook CPUs at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. This year is an exception to the trend, sparking one analyst to suggest the Ivy Bridge chips were delayed by at least a quarter, something an Intel spokesman denied.
An Intel spokesman declined to comment on the report.

However, Intel did formally unveil its latest Atom chip set called Cedar Trail.
Cedar Trail includes two new dual-core Atom processors for netbooks—the 1.6 GHz N2600 with 400 MHz embedded graphics dissipating about 3.5W and the 1.86 GHz N2800 with 640 MHz graphics consuming 6.5W. The chips support faster graphics cores and DRAM interfaces—up to 1,066 MHz DDR3—and consume less power than Intel’s previous generation Oak Trail parts.
An Intel executive described Cedar Trail as single-chip integrated processors in a talk in April.

However, the chips now in production are paired with the NM10, an I/O hub that supports PCI Express, USB, Ethernet, serial ATA and audio.
Intel said Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba will ship netbooks using the chips as early as January.

The company said the systems could sport battery life of up to ten hours and start at prices as low as $199.
In addition, Intel rolled out D2500 and D2700 Atom processors for entry-level desktops and embedded systems.

The chips support data rates up to 2.1 GHz and consume up to 10W.

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Intel rolls 32-nm Atom, preps 22-nm Ivy Bridge

十二月 31, 2011
By

Intel rolls 32-nm Atom, preps 22-nm Ivy Bridge

Rick Merritt    12/28/2011 1:59 PM EST

http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4233666/Intel-rolls-32nm-Atom–preps-22-nm-Ivy-Bridge

Intel rolled out 32 nm Atom chips for netbooks and embedded systems and is reportedly planning to release its 22 nm Ivy Bridge notebook and desktop CPUs in April. SAN JOSE, Calif. – Intel Corp. rolled out Cedar Trail, its 32 nm Atom chips for netbooks and embedded systems as a Taiwan newspaper claimed it had uncovered details about the company’s plans to release its 22 nm Ivy Bridge notebook and desktop CPUs.
Intel plans to release in early April, 25 Ivy Bridge processors made in its 22 nm technology, according to a report in Digitimes. It said seventeen desktop chips will range in price from $184 to $332, and eight notebook CPUs will range in cost from $40 to $1,096—a range that is not likely accurate.
Since about 2008, Intel rolled out its next-generation desktop and notebook CPUs at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. This year is an exception to the trend, sparking one analyst to suggest the Ivy Bridge chips were delayed by at least a quarter, something an Intel spokesman denied.
An Intel spokesman declined to comment on the report.

However, Intel did formally unveilits latest Atom chip set called Cedar Trail.
Cedar Trail includes two new dual-core Atom processors for netbooks—the 1.6 GHz N2600 with 400 MHz embedded graphics dissipating about 3.5W and the 1.86 GHz N2800 with 640 MHz graphics consuming 6.5W.

The chips support faster graphics cores and DRAM interfaces—up to 1,066 MHz DDR3—and consume less power than Intel’s previous generation Oak Trail parts.
An Intel executive described Cedar Trail as single-chip integrated processors in a talk in April.

However, the chips now in production are paired with the NM10, an I/O hub that supports PCI Express, USB, Ethernet, serial ATA and audio.
Intel said Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba will ship netbooks using the chips as early as January.

The company said the systems could sport battery life of up to ten hours and start at prices as low as $199.
In addition, Intel rolled out D2500 and D2700 Atom processors for entry-level desktops and embedded systems.

The chips support data rates up to 2.1 GHz and consume up to 10W.

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Intel yocto

十二月 30, 2011
By

Intel reshuffles mobile, wireless units

十二月 24, 2011
By

Intel reshuffles mobile, wireless units

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800657844_499489_NT_5ecb6e53.HTM?8800088515&8800657844&click_from=8800088515,8723946550,2011-12-16,EEOL,ARTICLE_ALERT

As part of its plans to tighten its mobile technology focus, Intel Corp. has reorganized some of its business units to form a new mobile and communications group. The new group will be in charge for all of the company’s smartphone, tablet and wireless communications efforts.

The reorganization fuses together the mobile communications, netbook/tablet, mobile wireless and ultra-mobility business units into one group headed by former Palm executive Mike Bell and former Infineon Wireless chief Hermann Eul.

A spokesperson said Intel was looking to "speed up and improve development of Intel-based mobile devices," from streamlining the software development efforts for tablets and phones to fine tuning the SoCs for mobile usage.

Intel's communications strategy

Intel has said publicly it hopes to have a viable smartphone offering on the market within the first half of 2012.

Back in March 2011, Intel announced that Anand Chandraskher, GM of the former ultra-mobility group, would be leaving the company to "pursue other interests," with many analysts positing that he had been ousted for failing to deliver on Intel’s long held mobile aspirations.

An Intel spokesman said Bell and Eul’s role would be bigger than Chandraskher’s, with the pair boasting numerous years of wireless industry experience between them.

Though Palm was never a big player in the mobile market, Bell also has previous experience at Apple Inc. where he worked on the Macintosh and the early iPhone model. Eul, on the other hand, will be instrumental to helping Intel integrate wireless baseband onto its Atom chips, putting the firm in direct competition with rival Qualcomm.

It’s generally believed that Atom products with integrated baseband could emerge within the next two years.

Intel has said publicly it hopes to have a viable smartphone offering on the market within the first half of 2012, and has made much of its partnership with Google for Android x86 development.

Whether Intel’s engineers are able to reduce Atom power levels significantly enough to compete seriously with ARM’s chip architecture, however, remains to be seen.

- Sylvie Barak
EE Times

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Intel plans huge investment in China

十二月 16, 2011
By

Intel plans huge investment in China

http://www.eetasia.com/ARTP_8800657011_480200.HTM

Posted:05 Dec 2011

Intel Capital, Intel Corp.’s venture-capital division, has announced that it plans to increase investment in China next year. According to the company, this is in line with its emphasis on technologies related to mobile devices and ultra-thin portable PCs.

Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital, indicated that the company made 10 investments in China this year totaling more than $70 million—out of a combined $500 million globally—and expects that to grow next year.

The company’s interests are "multifold," he said, with emphasis on cloud computing, software, hand-held devices, security and other products and services that fuel the growing ecosystem around mobile devices.

The executive’s comments come amid heightened concerns that the Chinese government may tighten regulations around foreign investment and that high valuations of Chinese technology companies signal a possible bubble.

Sodhani explained that the company is monitoring these issues. In terms of the government’s attitude toward foreign investment, Intel Capital is "the largest foreign direct investor in China and we feel very welcome.

Valuations are always a concern, and from time to time valuations go out of whack," but there are investment opportunities in China that are a good value for the risk, he continued.

Intel Capital sees more technology innovation coming from Asia as more consumers and enterprises in the region are adopting new technologies, the executive stated.

The majority of new investments announced this year by Intel Capital were in Asia, including three in Greater China.

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