Archive for category Hardware
Dell unveils Nano powered server
Posted by The Right Guy in Server, Via on May 22nd, 2009
Green and cheap
Dell has released a new server, codenamed Fortuna, which in itself wouldn’t be big news if it weren’t for its VIA Nano powerplant.
Based around a 15W CPU which is better suited to netbooks and nettops, the new XS11-VX8 server boasts power consumption of just 20-29W. Although it might seem a bit underpowered compared to most servers, it’s also quite a bit greener, and cheaper, too. The Nano is a 64-bit CPU, and it even offers some virtualization support.
Another advantage is the tiny form factor. The new server is just slightly larger than a 3.5-inch drive, and Dell says you can pack up to six Fortunas per rack unit, or 252 of them in a a 42U rack. Best of all, even getting a bunch of them won’t cost you too much, as Dell is offering them for as low as $400.
More here.
Intel turns to Broadcom for HD decoding on Pinetrail
Posted by The Right Guy in Hardware, Intel on May 21st, 2009
Next-gen Atom platform coming in Q4
It was only last week that Intel received the biggest fine of its corporate life for violating EU antitrust laws in a case with AMD. Not to mention, the other side of the picture rests in the fact that Nvidia has also been complaining about Intel’s Atom pricing structure, and is probably still shaken by the anti-ION propaganda in recent months.
With all backs turned against it, the blue chipmaker is now turning to Broadcom for its HD video processing needs on the Atom “Pine Trail” netbook platform that will be released in Q4. According to a few netbook manufacturers, Intel plans to offer the Broadcom BCM70015 graphics chip as an option to its partners on Pine Trail, which features support for popular codecs such as AVC, H.264, VC-1, WMV9 and MPEG2. The other strong feature of this chip is the fact that it can easily run Windows XP, Windows 7 and Linux at relatively low power.
The chip itself has a die area of 10mm² and consumes 30mW when idling. When playing 720p HD content, it consumes a little under 500mW and for 1080p HD content just under 1W. This is actually better than Nvidia’s Tegra, which consumes 100mW when idling and around 2W when decoding at full power.
Some retailers experienced a 30% netbook return rate
Posted by The Right Guy in Hardware, Intel on May 13th, 2009
Can’t blame anyone but themselves
During an Intel investor meeting Tuesday, the company’s head of marketing said netbooks cost some retailers dearly last summer, as they experienced huge return rates due to misinformative marketing on their part.
“In the first period–June, July, August of last year, there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (netbooks) as notebooks,” said Sean Maloney. “They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there, it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster.”
So, basically, they were to blame, not Intel. Maloney claims Intel later approached the retail chains and advised them to market netbooks differently, clearly state up front what they can and can’t do, and this seems to have remedied the problem.
More here.
Every computer will benefit from its GPU
Posted by The Right Guy in Hardware, Nvidia on May 12th, 2009
Claims Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO and one of the leaders of the computer graphics market, made a very good case that every computer can benefit from a GPU.
During the last financial conference call, he told investors that a lot of people are doing video editing of their family videos that they want to send to their parents. Some cutting and editing, and especially rendering and transcoding of edited HD videos can take hours.
If you have a Cuda based application, or in the future a DirectX compute API enabled application in Windows 7, you should be able to do the video editing up to 5 or more times faster than with a CPU alone.
This is a big difference and Nvidia hopes that a lot of people will realize this. This is what makes Intel angry as the computer of today can really benefit a GPU for something other than just playing. Let’s just hope that Nvidia can pull this one off.