Media

Michael Oryl

The FCC appears to be following in the footsteps of the European Union in wanting to help consumers avoid “bill shock”, the surprise one feels at finding their cell phone bill is much higher than expected due to overage charges. The FCC is considering having carriers enact some sort of system that will warn consumers, possibly via text message, that they are about to incur overage fees due to excessive data or voice use.

The FCC’s new Consumer Task Force is behind the initiative.

The topic is now in an open comment period that seeks to get feedback from consumers and businesses alike. Verizon Wireless, according to MSNBC, already has expressed that it feels its current usage tracking services are sufficient and that government intervention is not warranted.

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Amina Khan

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking set off chatter in the scientific community in late April when he posited the existence of intelligent aliens on his new TV series, “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking” —adding that it would be best for human beings to avoid contact with them.

Hawking speculated that such aliens would likely be nomads, living in ships after sucking their own planet dry of resources, and hopping from one interstellar refueling station to the next. Earth, he said, shouldn’t do anything to encourage their visit.

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans,” he said.

Hawking has made such statements for years — in a 1996 essay, for example, he said humans should be “wary of answering [aliens]” until our species has become more sophisticated.

Though most of the show focused on what alien life — even very primitive alien life — might look like, it was the comment on alien invasion that captured public attention.

The Journal of Cosmology compiled responses from a dozen scientists and has published them online. Some criticized Hawking’s use of human behavior to predict what aliens would do, but others said that human behavior was a reasonable yardstick. Few, however, questioned the premise of Hawking’s statements — that alien life forms probably exist and we are likely someday to encounter them.

You can read the commentaries at journalofcosmology.com/Aliens100.html. Here’s some what the scientists had to say.

Blair Csuti, a biologist at Oregon State University, defended Hawking’s trepidation, arguing that the principles of evolution would have shaped those beings just as they did life on Earth, selecting for self-preserving behavior. “Aliens visiting newly discovered planets, like Earth, would place their own interests above those of unsophisticated indigenous residents.”

Robert Ehrlich, a physicist at George Mason University agreed, further imagining that the aliens would be “adaptable robots whose mental processes reflect those of their senders.”

Others, like Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom and B.G. Sidharth at the B.M. Birla Science Centre in India, took a more low-tech view of alien invasions. They argued that the threat would come not from green people with fancy tasers, but pathogenic microbes that could infect life on Earth.

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By Joseph F. Kovar

Several server vendors including IBM (NYSE:IBM), HP (NYSE:HPQ), Dell (NSDQ:Dell), and SGI on Tuesday took advantage of Intel (NSDQ:INTC)’s launch of its new Intel Xeon 5600 processors to unveil new servers featuring significantly lower power consumption than their predecessors.

Intel on Tuesday unveiled its new 32-nanometer Xeon 5600 processors, code-named “Westmere,” that feature up to six CPU cores. The Xeon 5600 series follows on from last year’s introduction of the “Nehalem” Xeon 5500 series.

The 15 processors, which include six models with six cores, in the Xeon 5600 family range in power consumption from 40W to 130W.

The common theme among all the various server releases is reduced power consumption in part from the adoption of the new processors. The power saving factor was increased by some of the vendors with the addition of other power-saving features as well.

Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday expanded its ProLiant G6 server portfolio with 16 new servers based on the Xeon 5600 processors.

This includes two new tower servers, six new rack mount servers, five new blade servers and workstations, and three new scale-out servers.

HP’s new Xeon 5600-based servers deliver a 27-times improvement in terms of performance per Watt compared to its ProLiant G4 servers from three years ago, with a server consolidation ratio using virtualization technology of up to 20:1, compared to 11:1 using last year’s Xeon 5500 processors, said Krista Sattherwaite, manager of HP ProLiant product marketing.

The new HP servers are expected to ship on March 29.

Dell on Tuesday introduced nine new Dell PowerEdge servers featuring the Xeon 5600 processors, including two new blade servers, four rack mount servers, and three tower servers.

Dell also plans to introduce three new workstations based on the Xeon 5600 processors in the next few weeks.

The company said performance of the new servers is up to 69 percent higher than the previous generation of Xeon 5500 servers, while energy efficiency is up compared to the older servers by up to 47 percent.

Dell also boosted the energy efficiency of its servers with the introduction of a new power monitoring feature for its Dell Management Console, and promised to speed up the deployment of new servers with its Lifecycle Controller technology embedded on its new server motherboards.

IBM on Tuesday unveiled a new line of two-socket servers based on the Xeon 5600 processors.

They include two new rack servers the company said offer 50 percent more memory capacity and 60 percent more storage capacity and up to 50 percent more energy efficiency than the previous generation.

Also new are two new enterprise tower servers with twice the storage capacity of older models, two new BladeCenter blade servers that consume 15 percent less power than previous models, and a new high performance computing server featuring a 36 percent improvement in operations per Watt of power consumed.

SGI on Tuesday started shipping servers based on the Xeon 5600 processors.

The new processor is being used across SGI’s entire scale-out server lineup, including its Altix ICE HPC clusters, its CloudRack and Rackable scale-out servers, its SGI InfiniStorage Servers, the octane III personal supercomputer, and its Origin 400 blade servers.

The new servers provide a core density improvement of up to 50 percent, with 24 cores per rack U now possible, according to SGI. The company also said the new servers offer up to 40 percent higher performance per Watt and up to a 60-percent increase in overall performance over its prior servers.

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By Ian Sherr

Intel Corp released its newest server chips on Tuesday, as it seeks to maintain its dominance over rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc, and prepare for an expected rise in demand.

The new microprocessors, designed to power both servers and high-end desktop PCs, are the first of Intel’s server chips featuring smaller transistors that have helped the company’s laptop and desktop chips push stronger performance while eking out better energy efficiency.

Intel also built in security features the company says can encode and decipher files much faster, effectively removing the “encryption tax” or computer performance lost due to protecting files.

The chips will be released under the Xeon product line for servers, and Core i7 for desktop computers, which Intel hopes will gain traction particularly with the entertainment and video game markets.

But the biggest opportunity rests with servers, said Intel’s general manager of server marketing, Boyd Davis, where an estimated one-third of the market is running on chips made more than four years ago.

Although roughly nine out of 10 of the world’s servers contain an Intel brain according to IDC, they are not the only ones vying for those potential server sales.

Patrick Patla, general manager of AMD’s server division, said the company’s newest chips will also offer increases in speed pushed by a dramatic redesign.

“There will be no single bigger performance jump in the history of Opteron than the jump we are going to take from 2009 to 2010,” he said, referring to the server chip’s product name.

AMD’s newest chips are due in the next few weeks. It remains to be seen how they will match up against Intel’s latest chips.

(Reporting by Ian Sherr)

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by Michael J. Miller

Intel on Thursday formally announced that the Core i7-980X Extreme processor–the 6-core chip code-named “Gulftown” manufactured on the company’s 32nm process–are up this morning, and the results are pretty much what you’d expect: The chip seems to easily surpass the current Core i7 as the fastest desktop processor, although it’s clearly not aimed at the mainstream market.

Intel shared a lot of the technical details behind the 6-core chip based on the “Westmere” architecture at the ISSCC show last month. This chip, called “Gulftown” in the desktop version and “Westmere-EP” in the server version, is a 1.17-billion transistor chip with 12 megabytes of Level 3 cache. It supports up to 12 simultaneously threads. Compared with the existing Core i7 desktop chips (known as “Bloomfield” or “Lynnfield” and based on the 45nm “Nehalem” core), it has 6 cores instead of 4 and 12 megabytes of cache instead of 8. That’s a 50 percent improvement in both areas, in roughly the same size and power envelope. In other words, Moore’s Law continues.

PC Mag has a story on the release here and ExtremeTech has some benchmarks here. Lots of other sites have benchmarks, with the best I’ve seen at Tech Report, Tom’s Hardware and Legit Reviews.

The first benchmarks indicate pretty much what you’d expect. On applications that take advantage of multiple cores – such as many image rendering and high-performance computing applications, you see very notable improvements. (Often around 50%, reflecting 50% more cores and 50% more cache.)

On some very specialized items, the new chip does even better: the Westmere family includes special hardware for AES encryption and decryption, so those operations are much faster. But on applications that are sequential or can only use one or two cores, you don’t see much difference at all.

Like the previous Core i7 Extreme, the 980X has a list price of about $1,000, so it really only goes in the highest-end systems; and in systems built by hobbyists.  (Expect to see versions at somewhat slower clock speeds for less money shortly). That means the chip makes sense for high-performance and certain compute-intensive applications. You will also find it in some high-end gaming systems, although it will probably make less of a difference there. (In fact, most gamers would be better off spending the difference between this and a lower-end dual-or quad-core processor on a high-end ATI or Nvidia graphics solution.)

Of course, AMD will be coming up with its own 6-core chip, code-named “Thuban” and now confirmed to be called Phenom II X6, shortly.

Both companies have had these chips on their roadmaps for some time now, and it’s interesting the different paths AMD and Intel are taking with Intel ahead on manufacturing and emphasizing multi-threading; while AMD has been focusing more on power consumption and price.

For sheer performance, Intel has held the top spot for a while, and with Gulftown, it appears to be certain to hold on to it for this generation.

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