Today, the Department of Energy has announced that is has granted $425 million to build two new supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as part of a broader CORAL initiative which is a collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore. $325 million of that will be spent on the actual supercomputer building while an additional $100 million will be used for the FastForward2 program, which is designed to encourage and enable hardware vendors to increase performance and efficiency for the next generation.

The first supercomputer, to be known as Summit, will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will replace the currently existing ‘Titan’ supercomputer which is capable of a peak performance of 27 petaflops. Summit will be capable of delivering between 150 and 300 peak petaflops and will be used for ‘open science’. The Sierra supercomputer, designed to replace the existing Sequoia will be used for nuclear security simulations and will be capable of speeds in excess of 100 petaflops as well. Both systems will be faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer right now, Tianhe-2 in China, which currently clocks in at 55 petaflops of peak performance. Argonne’s hardware win is yet to be announced, but will be unveiled at a later date.

In order to achieve this level of performance, the laboratories participating in the CORAL initiative are harnessing the power of IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Power 9 architecture CPUs and Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) yet-t0-be-announced Volta GPUs. This means that since this machine is expected to come online in 2017, that we can very likely expect to see Volta GPUs in 2017. The project will use Mellanox’s interconnect technologies to connect the systems together, but in order to connect the GPU to the CPU, they will be using Nvidia’s own NVLink GPU interconnect. NVLink is Nvidia’s own proprietary interconnect specifically designed to increase the communication speed between GPUs and Nvidia is working with IBM to get this interconnect embedded directly into the IBM Power CPUs that will be powering these different supercomputer designs. Additionally, the Summit supercomputer will also be using IBM’s own IBM Elastic Storage using GPFS technology and will store 120 petabytes of data.

The system as a whole, Summit, will only use 10% more power than Titan but will deliver approximately 5-10 the performance of Titan, illustrating where supercomputer designs are headed and how the Department of Energy is really trying to drive high performance increases while also promoting energy efficiency. The expected performance for Summit has already been stated to be between 150 and 300 petaflops, however, this is thanks to over 3400 compute nodes, each delivering 40 teraflops of performance alone. Each node will consist of IBM Power 9 CPU(s) and Nvidia Volta GPU(s), unfortunately we do not know if each node will be a dual processor node or how many GPUs will fit into each node, but the expectation would be a dual processor node with at least 2 GPUs per node.

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This hardware win for IBM and Nvidia is a huge one because it illustrates that the Open Power partnership between the two companies is working and that it can enable IBM to ship more CPUs. This is a very big deal for IBM and Nvidia because this is the first supercomputer in the US in a long time that will be built without either Intel or AMD CPUs. It also means that Nvidia will finally make use of NVLink, which they announced will be coming out with the Pascal GPU, the predecessor to Volta. Nvidia has already said we can expect to see Pascal in 2016, which means the transition from Pascal to Volta will be a fairly quick one.

The Department of Energy has stated that the whole purpose of these new supercomputer designs is to enable exascale computing. Both Coral and FastForward2 are supposed to enable hardware manufacturers to help their customers build efficient and powerful suptercomputers capable of over 1 exaflop (or 1000 petaflops). And if they can get the Summit supercomputer to 300 petaflops, that’s going to be a huge step forward to achieving exascale computing and an exaflop supercomputer.

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International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) has released its earnings report for third quarter 2014, and the figures are less impressive than anticipated. For 3Q 2014, Big Blue reported an EPS of $3.68, which is 14% lower than the $4.32 expected by analysts. With a reported shortfall of $1 billion in the company’s revenue target year-over-year, IBM’s revenue fell 4% to $22.4 billion.

CEO Ginni Rometti says the company is “disappointed” with its performance this quarter, which the company attributes to a “marked slowdown in September in client buying behavior.” Moreover, this quarter’s results also “point to the unprecedented pace of change in our industry,” says Rometti.

With this turnout, Rometti says the company is abandoning its medium-term earnings target made by former CEO Sam Palmisano, who promised that IBM will earn a combined $20 EPS by 2015. As that is not likely to materialize, the company is set to focus on its cloud computing strategy, which it has put a premium in with the recent acquisition of a major cloud services provider and the off-loading of hardware-making divisions.

IBM has been making strategic acquisitions of cloud-focused companies in the past six years. In 2013, Big Blue acquired Softlayer Technologies — the biggest privately-held cloud company — for $2 billion. IBM has also off-loaded hardware-related divisions and assets. These include selling its consumer PC operations to Chinese firm Lenovo in 2004 and then doing the same for its server business this year.  Other strategic moves, such as a renewed focus on security, mobile and business analytics have also seen growth in the first three quarters of the year, so far.

Along with the Q3 2014 earnings announcement, IBM also confirmed the earlier report that it is off-loading its Microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries, booking this as a one-time charge of $4.7 billion pre-tax. IBM is set to pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion over the course of three years to produce chips with access to IBM’s intellectual property and engineering resources.

With its weak quarterly report, IBM fell 7.3% Monday with shares trading at $13.30. Being a component of the Dow Jones Industrial average, IBM’s decline has pulled fown the Dow by 85 points.

The cloud may have a silver lining after all, however. IBM reports that revenue from its cloud-related businesses have grown 50% year-to-date. Meanwhile, cloud delivered as a service has grown 80% year-to-date, with third quarter annual run rate of $3.1 billion.

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Over the weekend, IBM (NYSE:IBM) posted a statement that it would be making a “major business announcement” this Monday, during which the company will also make its third quarter earnings report before the market opens.

There have been earlier speculations that this announcement could pertain to a deal with GlobalFoundries, as IBM had been courting the semiconductor foundry to take over its chipmaking division. Insider sources cited by Bloomberg basically confirm this, saying that IBM has agreed to pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take over its unprofitable chip manufacturing operations.

As part of the deal, IBM will also reportedly receive $200 million in assets, bringing the net cost to $1.3 billion. According to the sources, GlobalFoundries is keen on IBM’s intellectual property and engineering talent rather than just the manufacturing facilities. This will be particularly essential to GlobalFoundries’ business, in view of the increasing miniaturization of the chipmaking process.

Under the deal, GlobalFoundries will produce Power processors over a period of 10 years. IBM will pay the $1.5 billion over the course of three years.

What’s the deal?

IBM has long been courting GlobalFoundries to take on its chipmaking division, which has been largely unprofitable over the past few years, given the dominance of companies like Intel, Samsung and Qualcomm in the server, desktop and mobile chip business. IBM’s micro-electronics business accounts for only 2 percent of the company’s revenue, although this division contributes to as much as $1.5 billion in annual losses. Given this, the company has reportedly made earlier proposals to off-load its chipmaking division. GlobalFoundries was named as a prospect earlier this year, as the two companies already have dealings as part of a joint venture. However, IBM’s $1 billion offer did not match GlobalFoundries’ $2 billion asking price, sources say.

Still, the company will not abandon its involvement in chip design altogether, as it still reportedly plans to maintain control over the design and intellectual property of the chips it will use.

The $1.5 billion price tag is seen to be a financial win for IBM, as it announces its Q3 2014 earnings later today.  The company is expected to hold its earnings conference call 7 a.m. New York time, before market opens. With its “major business announcement”, the company will be mitigating the $1.5 billion annual loss and will instead reduce this to about $500 million a year for the next three years — a move that will improve its bottom line.

IBM’s revenues are projected to fall for the 10th straight quarter this Q3 2014. As of the same period last year, earnings-per-share was at $3.99. EPS at 2Q 2014 was at $4.32, and analysts expect the same level this period. Will this be the start of a turnaround for IBM? Off-loading a poorly-performing division might be a good start.

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Lenovo(港股交易代號：0992)週一在記者會宣佈與IBM(紐約證交所交易代號：IBM)就x86伺服器業務的交易，預計將在獲得美國、歐盟和中國主管機關核准後，於10月1日成交。

這兩間公司進行的交易價格約為$21億美元，其中$18億交付現金，餘款則以股票支付。交易此部門的消息在今年稍早公佈時，其原始購買價格為$23億美元。

IBM會繼續保有使用Power系統的伺服器，Lenovo則會收購IBM的System x、BladeCenter與Flex System刀鋒型伺服器和轉換器。和Lenovo入主IBM筆記型電腦業務的情況類似，伺服器業務也將保留相同的品牌名稱，且將由Lenovo的企業事業群(Enterprise Business Group)負責管理。根據記者會的說法，x86伺服器團隊會繼續由IBM前任全球總經理Adalio Sanchez領導。

對身為全球最大PC製造商的Lenovo(國際數據資訊IDC報告指出其市佔率達19.6%)來說，x86伺服器業務雖然利益豐厚，市場卻極為競爭。Lenovo買下全球第二大伺服器供應商(市佔率為23.6%)時，但是對伺服器採用ARM架構產生的興趣，可能進一步引發了他們對低階x86的興致。

展現中國公司的新風貌

IBM的伺服器業務雖然遭遇對手的激烈競爭，依舊擁有強大的品牌實力。但是Lenovo能達成IBM做不到的一件事：中國化。

雖說IBM在中國擁有一群忠實的伺服器客戶，有時仍不免受到地緣政治影響。過去兩年間，中國市場對美國科技公司的態度變得越來越不友善，特別針對IBM而言，中國政府出手鼓勵銀行的資料中心移除IBM的伺服器，改用國產伺服器。沒有報導指出銀行確實服從這項要求，因為關鍵任務應用程式需要運用經測試證明可行的解決方案，但這個例子正顯示出中國市場對IBM身為「美國」公司的敵意。

這筆即將簽訂的$21億美元交易，比當初宣佈時短少了大約$2億美元，這是因為兩個公司之間轉移的庫存價值有所變化。雖然雙方沒有透露其他細節，推測庫存價值之所以降低，可能就是因為中國市場對IBM的伺服器產品採取日益敵對的態度。

Lenovo收購這個部門意味著上述挑戰就這麼消失了，現在IBM的x86伺服器部門已經成為真正的中國公司了。

相反的，當公司想把伺服器賣給美國客戶時，可能就會發生問題。中國電信設備供應商Huawei(華為)由於據說與中國軍隊和情報機構關係密切，而始終飽受美國和許多西方國家的嚴厲抨擊，雖說依然缺乏決定性的證據，而且跡象顯示這更有可能是美國競爭對手的遊說之舉。

兩間公司的這筆交易將於週三在中國、美國和歐盟成交，緊接著會在今年年底之前於其他各大市場定案。

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Lenovo (HKG: 0992) announced in a press release Monday that it expects its deal with IBM (NYSE: IBM) for the company’s x86 server business to close on October 1 after receiving approval from US, EU and Chinese regulators.

The deal between the two companies is worth approximately $2.1 billion, with $1.8 billion being paid in cash and the remainder to be paid in stock. The original purchase price for the division, when the deal was first announced earlier this year, was $2.3 billion.

IBM will continue to maintain its Power-based servers. Lenovo will acquiring IBM’s System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches. The server business will retain the same branding — much like what happened when Lenovo obtained IBM’s notebook business — and will be managed by Lenovo’s Enterprise Business Group. According to a press release the x86 server team will continue to be led by former IBM executive Adalio Sanchez.

For Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker by market share (IDC reports it at 19.6%), the x86 server business is a lucrative albeit competitive market. The company has purchased the world’s second-largest server vendor (at 23.6%), but this comes at a time when interest in ARM architecture for servers may galvanize the low-end x86 for Lenovo.

A fresh take on China

IBM’s server business, while facing fierce competition from rivals, is still a strong brand. Lenovo can do something with it that IBM could not: Sinicization.

While IBM has cadres of loyal servers customers in China, geo-politics sometimes got in its way. Over the past two years the Chinese market has become progressively more hostile to US technology companies. For IBM in particular, this came in the form of the Chinese government encouraging banks to drop IBM’s servers  in their data centers in favour of domestic alternatives. There were no reports of banks actually complying with this request, as for mission critical applications they need solutions that are tried and true, but it shows the hostility of the market to the company — in its US form.

The $2.1 billion the deal is being signed for is about $200 million less than when it was originally announced. This is due to a change in the value of inventory being transferred between the two companies. While the two firms won’t say much more than just that, this decline in inventory value could be because of a Chinese market that’s becoming increasingly hostile to IBM’s server products.

Having the division acquired by Lenovo means that these challenges will simply dissipate. IBM’s x86 server division is now, effectively, Chinese.

This, alternatively, might present its own problems when trying to sell servers to US-based customers. Chinese telco equipment provider Huawei has been the victim of a vicious attack in the US and many other Western countries for its alleged ties to China’s military and intelligence apparatus, though the evidence for this remains inconclusive — and points more towards a lobbying campaign by its US competitors.

The transaction between the two companies will close Wednesday in China, the US and EU then will be finalized in most other major markets by year’s end.

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In the five years since GlobalFoundries broke ground in Malta, Saratoga County, New York for their Fab 8, they have exceeded their promise of job creation in the community. Instead of its initial projection of 1,200 new jobs, the company is responsible for approximately 2,400, including construction of the Technology Development Center on its existing 223 acre campus.

The direct jobs have a trickle down effect resulting in 3,000 indirect jobs according to a study by Dr. Everett Ehrlich, business economist. GlobalFoundries also made a capital investment of $6.9 billion, plus the building of the new Technology Development Center which increases that number by $2.1 billion as reported by the Saratoga Economic Development Corporation (SEDC). In January, Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Investment Company’s (ATIC) chief executive said they plan to invest up to $10 billion over the next two years in GlobalFoundries’ upstate New York semiconductor factory.

GlobalFoundries Fab 8 first job fair drew nearly 1,500 applicants in Saratoga, New York

GlobalFoundries has an interesting history. It came into being in March 2009 through a partnership between AMD and Mubadala Technology (formerly known as ATIC). In January 2010, the company picked up Chartered Semiconductor. In 2012, AMD [NYSE:AMD] divested itself of GlobalFoundries which is now wholly owned by Mubadala Technology (formerly known as ATIC). With corporate offices in California’s Silicon Valley and manufacturing facilities in Germany, Singapore and New York, GlobalFoundries now has five 200mm fabs and three 300mm fabs in production.

In Saratoga, their first chips were manufactured in 2012 using the 32nm SOI (silicon on insulator) process. The customer for the 32nm microprocessors which featured HKMG (High-K Metal Gate) and eDRAM was IBM. The SOI process was used to build the microprocessor that powered IBM Watson, the question-answering computer that won the Jeopardy quiz show.

Since then, the relationship between IBM and GlobalFoundries has waxed and waned. Big Blue was courting GlobalFoundries to buy its not-so-profitable chip-manufacturing operations. However, reports indicate that GlobalFoundries’ bid was lower than what IBM had hoped for. It is said that GlobalFoundries wanted IBM’s intellectual property, not its physical property which is no longer state of the art.

GlobalFoundries has not relied solely on IBM business. For example, a fabless semiconductor company is using the 55nm eFlash NVM Platform from GlobalFoundries which is a member of the Automotive Electronics Council (AEC). Scaleo chip headquartered in Sophia-Antipolis, France specializes in automotive electronics for powertrain and in-vehicle information. The company has developed a new family of microcontrollers embedding unique technologies related to real-time process and control of highly electrified internal combustion engines and electric motors using the GlobalFoundries’ Platform. The microcontrollers are based on programmable logic and a set of ISO 26262 compliant functional safety features to improve powertrain system safety integrity and accuracy.

GlobalFoundries technicians work in a cleanroom

The Scaleo order is only one of many opportunities for prospective GlobalFoundries employees to work on. If you want to be one of the many international applicants interested in working at the Malta campus on the grounds of a former missile testing range, GlobalFoundries is hiring. A few of the open positions are: hardware test engineer, manager of information technology, senior financial analyst, and equipment technician.

Despite its success, GlobalFoundries has its problems ranging from anecdotal to tragic. This week, three individuals were charged with grand larceny for stealing scrap metal from the plant. On a more serious note, a man employed by a construction company working on the new Technology Development Center was fatally injured as they were moving an industrial air exchanger into a fourth floor opening. Construction was suspended during an investigation of the accident.

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Yesterday, Apple and IBM announced that they would be entering into a partnership where IBM would help Apple develop enterprise software for iOS devices and Apple would supply OS and hardware to enable those enterprise applications. This announcement marked the first partnership or relationship between the two companies since Apple stopped using IBM’s Power PC CPUs in their systems in 2006 with the last product announced in 2005. It’s been a long time since the two companies have worked together on anything and now that IBM is mostly a software company (They still have the Power Architecture and Power Chips for HPC) it makes sense that the two companies would work together again.

IBM’s enterprise software and cloud offerings are some of the most developed on the market and squarely focused on the needs of large enterprises, which already have millions of iOS devices in deployment. Apple will be supplying the devices for IBM’s planned iOS-based enterprise software platforms which will boost Apple’s enterprise sales even better than they already have them. It will also give Apple a very strong foothold inside the enterprise that none of their competitors are anywhere near having. It should also provide Apple enough enterprise sales to become even more of a fixture in enterprise applications than they already are. Apple is not struggling in enterprise, they don’t NEED IBM, however IBM does need some sort of a hardware partner. And if you’re going to look for a hardware partner, you might as well go for the biggest one and the one with the most enterprise deployments already.

As a result, IBM gets some sort of hardware platform to build their enterprise applications platform and Apple gets to sell more iPhones and increase iOS’ penetration in the overall market. This marks Apple’s first serious movement into enterprise, even though they already have a pretty strong presence in most enterprises because of their consumer product success. While I don’t suspect that Apple will do anything different to iPhones deployed with IBM software, there is a good chance that we could see ‘pro’ or ‘enterprise’ hardware in the future that might command an even greater price premium than Apple’s current line of consumer products. Enterprise customers want to feel special and feel like they’re getting what they pay for, which is why IBM has committed upwards of 100,000 employees to be available to the Apple project.

Overall, this is a very good move for both companies and I would suspect that this is only the beginning of such relationships between software and hardware companies. After all, Apple has seriously been struggling recently to deploy software that is popular with consumers and enterprise outside of their operating systems on their own hardware. With IBM’s enterprise software, Apple partially solves part of that equation and IBM is able to provide quality and reliable hardware to their enterprise customers that they’re already familiar with.

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Poorly trained salespeople take heart. If you’ve ever had to evade a customer’s question about your merchandise, help is on the way. Red Ant, who won the IBM Watson Challenge, is creating an app, RetailOS, that provides product information on the spot.

A survey showed that out of 1,000 retail workers aged 18–55 plus, 50 percent admitted to lacking product knowledge. Worse yet, 43 percent admitted that they lied to customers at least weekly because they didn’t have a good answer to a question. A few said they hid in the bathroom to avoid an inquisitive customer. Red Ant is stepping in to save the day – and the sales. Sixty-three percent of the respondents thought having a tablet on the sales floor with them to refer to could increase their sales by 10-30 percent. An even larger number, 74 percent, claimed that having mobile technology to depend on would have a positive effect on their morale and productivity.

This writer is among many who declare: “I knew more about the product than the person selling it.” Red Ant strives to correct that by supplying the clerk with product information, local pricing, tech specs, and customer reviews to arm them with accurate ammunition to close the sale. Beyond product information, the Red Ant app, RetailOS, provides information about the customer to help the salesperson direct them to a desirable item. It stores their demographics which indicate buying preferences, shows their actual purchase history, and lets the salesperson know what the customer has on their wish list. The clerk can view the information on a handheld screen or have the information whispered in their ear via text-to-speech through an earpiece.

Alex Sbardella, Head of Product; Stephen Keep, Lead Developer; Dan Hartveld, Technical Director, accept a 2014 IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge Award from Steve Gold, Vice President, IBM Watson Group (Photo Credit: Visually Attractive, Inc.)

Red Ant combined their RetailOS in store mobility platform with IBM’s Watson to come up with a customized retail helper for beleaguered, undertrained retail sales staff. The company was one of three that won recognition and assistance from IBM to implement their prototype. Steve Gold, VP of the IBM Watson Group said: “Red Ant has discovered an innovative way to apply Watson that can deliver demonstrable business benefits.”

See Alex Sbardella, Head of Product Development, talk about Red Ant’s RetailOS in this video:

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IBM challenged developers to write apps for Watson, their intelligent contextual super computer. Submissions arrived from across the globe. More than 40 countries responded with ideas submitted from 400 companies. Only 25 lucky companies were chosen to get access to Watson in order for them to build a prototype of their proposal.

IBM then backed the winners helping them take their idea from prototype into an actual application for consumers. The three winners of the contest were GenieMD, obviously related to health, Majestyk Apps, related to childhood education, and RedAnt, related to retail selling.

If you want to develop something that will run on Watson, you must apply to IBM for permission to access the platform. However, Big Blue is hoping more developers will want to write for their super computer. Obviously, altruism aside, more applications running on Watson translates into revenue for IBM.

IBM hopes the contest will build awareness beyond that generated by Watson squaring off against questions from the TV game show Jeopardy. IBM apparently saw the movie “Her” as a challenge to enlarge upon what Watson already is capable of. Mike Rhodin, senior VP of the Watson Group talked of the hopes for Watson’s future in his blog. He says the world is moving towards cognitive computing. To that end, the Watson Group is creating a library for cognitive technologies which includes the areas of Perceiving, Reasoning, Relating and Learning.

Never Dreamed Watson

The Watson Cloud Developer Enterprise offers training with twelve month access to Watson Developer Cloud, data, and development tools. It allows enterprises to create non-production cognitive applications using their own data and expertise. This is an opportunity to learn about the new era of computing and evaluate potential for live deployment. Successful applications could be sold on the IBM Cloud Marketplace.

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So, AMD announced that they would be reshuffling the company’s corporate structure which includes some business unite consolidation and executive shuffling. First and foremost, they would be appointing Dr. Lisa Su as the COO from her current position as Senior Vice President and GM of Global Business Units. Anyone that knows how AMD works and what Dr. Lisa Su has been doing already knows that she’s effectively been the COO for quite some time and that the company had actually vacated that position a long time ago. Keep in mind that AMD’s current CEO, Rory Read, was once COO of Lenovo before he came from IBM (which is where Lisa Su spent most of her career before she worked at Freescale).

So, that point is merely nothing more than a technicality. Now, there have been a few organizational adjustments made within the company as they’ve consolidated the entire company into two divisions.

AMD will have a Computing and Graphics Business Group as well as an Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group. This effectively separates the professional and consumer graphics divisions as well as the consumer processors from the server processors. AMD’s current CSO, John Byrne, will be made the Senior Vice President and GM responsible for leading the entire division and will report directly to Dr. Lisa Su.

Now, for the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group, the company will have Dr. Lisa Su herself as the acting lead of the division. This includes AMD’s server, embedded, dense server and semi-custom businesses (consoles), it also includes the related product engineering and sales functions necessary for these various businesses.

There have been rumors within AMD that the company would be grooming a new CEO to replace Rory Read, their caretaker CEO. Rory Read has done exactly what he was brought on to do, keep the company stable, and more importantly, alive. We’ve been hearing rumors that John Byrne may be one of the front runners for the CEO position, which makes sense with today’s announcement even though he was already CSO. And Lisa Su’s role within the company already groomed her for the position and her involvement in the company’s public events further makes this seem plausible.

Dr. Lisa Su (center) pictured along with John Byrne (left of her) and Colette LaForce (to her right) at last week’s Computex 2014

However, there is no denying that the constant presence of both John Byrne and Lisa Su at company announcements and launches is without a clear sign that the job for CEO is effectively between the two of them. This is why I believe AMD has decided to split the company up in two and has essentially given each of them a chance to show who of them is more capable of making AMD a successful company.

One weird thing that AMD did was mention the ages of everyone involved including Rory Read (52), Lisa Su (44) and John Byrne (43), which even further clarifies that this is more of a CEO race than anything. However, some investors and members of the board may be concerned that Lisa Su and John Byrne may be ‘too young’ to run the company even though they are clearly the two most qualified people to do so. It just adds another drop into the CEO race bucket.

I honestly didn’t see it coming down to this, as normally the CEO position is mostly politically battled from within the halls of the companies in question. If this is indeed the board of AMD’s way of giving each of them a chance to show their stuff, they may have just telegraphed it to the entire world and we will probably be able to pick the next CEO of AMD purely based upon the performance of these two divisions of AMD over the next year or two. Until then, we’ll just have to keep watching. These changes will be reflected starting July 1st.

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In what appears to be a retaliation to the US official claims of Chinese Government Officials hacking US companies, the Chinese government has quietly advised their banks to review their security policies and hardware implementations, especially those with IBM hardware. While this study of Chinese Banking security risks is not an official or public one, Bloomberg has spoken to four sources that confirm that such a review is under way and is currently focused on IBM, but likely involves others as well. IBM itself has a very interesting history in China as the company claims to have been doing business there for the past 30 years, which may both work for them and may also work against them. Additionally, IBM recently announced that they would be offloading their ‘low-end’ server business to Lenovo while they continue to hold on to their high-end and high-performance server businesses that don’t operate on x86 processors.

Knowing IBM, they would be pushing as much of their high-end products as possible on these banking customers in China, even though there’s a good chance that the majority of current IBM hardware in China is ‘low-end’ server stuff that Lenovo will be taking over. After all, Lenovo is a Chinese company and I believe that the Chinese would love to build and sell their own servers to their own banks instead of having to buy from American companies. And frankly, IBM does have a lot of competitors in China already that are more than capable of competing against Lenovo for the banks’ business. But even so, companies like Inspur have a lot of growth potential and if anything, it gives them an opportunity to replace IBM’s high-end business in China as tensions increase between the two countries.

Ultimately, IBM is likely not responsible for trying to make China’s banking system insecure or involved in any sort of American plots to monitor China’s banking system, even though we already know through Snowden disclosures that the NSA has already been intercepting hardware bound for abroad from US companies and embedding it with their own backdoors. IBM is also trying to gain some momentum in China with their POWER 8 processor, trying to offer themselves as an alternative to Intel’s Xeon processors, however, both of these products are made by American companies and may prove a bit more difficult to sell into China than had originally thought. Sure, there aren’t many other options available to most of these companies or the server builders that use them, but it may spur the Chinese to consider alternatives (that already exist) like MIPS, Alpha and others. This just means another threat to IBM’s business after they’ve already suffered quite a bit of damage last year due to the Snowden disclosures.

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Since we’ve had quite a bit of time between Snowden disclosures of NSA activities, it appears as though Wikileaks has gotten ahold of some secret NSA documents that name names as to whom has been cooperating with them. They claim that they have over 80 different companies in their strategic partnerships.

Wikileaks Tech NSA

The Wikileaks obtained slide states that these 80 “Major Global Corporations” are supporting BOTH missions. However, the document doesn’t specify exactly what both of those missions are, exactly. However, since this slide is labelled as COMINT that means it specifically pertains to communications between people, which may narrow exactly what those missions might be.

They list that those 80 companies are in a long laundry list of businesses including:

Telecommunications and Network Service Providers – AT&T, Verizon and Qwest (now part of Centurylink).

Network Infrastructure – Cisco and HP

Hardware Platforms Desktops/Servers – HP, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, EDS (now HP)

Operating Systems – Microsoft

Applications Software – Oracle, EDS (now HP) and Microsoft

Security Hardware and Software – Cisco, Oracle, EDS (now HP)

System Integrators – HP, IBM, Cisco and EDS (now HP)

However, if you do look at this list, it only specifically names 12 of the 80 companies that they’re cooperating with. This is the first time that companies are specifically being named as cooperative partners in NSA activities. Back when the NSA’s PRISM activities were disclosed most of the companies were able to feign their being victims of the NSA activities as completely unknowing as to the PRISM program. However, there have been numerous suspicions that many of these companies had been cooperating with the NSA on certain backdoors and such in order to obtain government contracts and such. Additionally, some executives even claimed that they were attacked by the government because they wouldn’t cooperate, namely Qwest’s former CEO Joseph Nacchio.

While Wikileaks has been known to leak documents that the US government doesn’t particularly like being seen by the public, this is a rare disclosure by Wikileaks that doesn’t come with much more information. While we would like to know the full list of companies involved and the rest of the slides in this deck, we’ll have to go off of what we have now. However, we will be contacting our people at the companies mentioned above to see what they have to say about their involvement with NSA security programs. On the record.

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Many websites have been talking about the return of the cassette tape with the announcement of Sony’s new storage medium innovation. Yes, Sony has managed to innovate a new standard for magnetic tape drive storage, however these tape drives require a fairly large 5.25″ mounted LTO reader which is usually connected via SAS to a server as a backup to the hard drives on the server. Sony has improved upon the LTO-6 Ultrium standard of magnetic tape drive systems and instead has improved the storage capacity per square inch by 74x. Resulting in a final drive density of 185 TB per tape drive based upon an unheard of areal density of 148 Gb per square inch, which comes out to 18 GB of storage per square inch when converted from Gigabits to Gigabytes. This is possible because of Sony’s new magnetic and chemical composition of their tape drives and how they are able to pack so much data density into such a small space.

Essentially, Sony’s approach is far more precise and results in capturing more data into a smaller area, which allows for significantly more data density within effectively the same surface area. The images above show how Sony’s approach (and results) thanks to IBM’s testing have enabled this astonishing breakthrough. IBM was brought onto the project to evaluate and benchmark the tape drive technology’s actual density, even though Sony is the sole owner of this technology.

What does this mean for us? Absolutely nothing. This technology is almost exclusively going to get used by the enterprise in large server deployments and data backup deployments. These tape drives are designed to be a long term backup to the backups of your data. That way, if there are any critical errors on the hard drives, there are backups of those drives somewhere on tape because buying one of these tapes is still cheaper than buying a hard drive of equal capacity especially since they don’t require power to store the data and only need power when being pulled to be read by the LTO drive.

So no, cassette tapes are not making a comeback, but Sony has potentially vastly improved the value in using tape drives for backups and could have possibly made themselves the defacto standard for the future if their data density provides a good enough value to the enterprise customer. Also, remember, that Sony has recently also developed a new physical media standard in their Archival Disc which they developed with Panasonic and is currently capable of storing 300GB of data per disc and is aiming to store up to 1TB per disc.

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Ever since the announcement of the OpenPower Foundation (or consortium) there has been a lot of wondering about whether or not IBM would actually make something of it. After all, IBM’s market share in servers nowadays is fairly low compared to Intel’s and Intel has pretty much dominated the server market for the past 10 years. So, many saw IBM’s move to create the OpenPower Foundation as a desperate move to make something of their new Power8 processor technology and to broaden their market share at any cost. However, companies have been slowly joining IBM’s OpenPower Foundation and their movement has gotten quite some important companies to join in addition to the original founding members in Nvidia, Tyan, Mellanox and Google.

Since September of last year, OpenPower has added Altera, Samsung, Micron, Hitachi, Inspur, Teamsun, Verisilicon, ZTE, Fusion-IO, SKHynix and Xilinx. What this means is that OpenPower is growing, and its growing really fast and that spells trouble for Intel because OpenPower means that companies can utilize IBM’s incredibly powerful Power8 architecture and Power ISA without spending anywhere near the money they would if they simply bought into Intel’s ecosystem and paid thousands of dollars for Intel’s Xeon E5 and Xeon E7 x86 CPUs. Intel is the market leader and they know it, so they charge prices that make leaving Intel incredibly attractive whenever an opportunity presents itself. So, naturally, companies like Google and Facebook that have their own server farms and have hundreds of thousands if not millions of severs around the word are going to want to look for ways to boost performance and reduce cost. So, this week, Google showed off their own motherboard (probably manufactured for them by Foxconn) that utilizes two Power8 processors to power a server, effectively cutting Intel out of Google’s future server plans.

In a statement on Google+, Gordon McKean of Google talked about this new board that Google has developed and is showing off at the OpenPower booth at the IBM IMPACT 2014 conference. Obviously this statement was meant to be a significant one as this was Gordon’s first and last post on Google+ and it makes a pretty significant statement about Google porting over to Power8 from x86.

Today I’m excited to show off a Google POWER8 server motherboard in the OpenPOWER booth at the Impact 2014 conference in Las Vegas.  We’re always looking to deliver the highest quality of service for our users, and so we built this server to port our software stack to POWER (which turned out to be easier than expected, thanks in part to the liitle-endian support in P8). A real server platform is also critical for detailed performance measurements and continuous optimizations, and to integrate and test the ongoing advances that become available through OpenPOWER and the extended OpenPOWER community. (Google, IBM and others formed the OpenPOWER Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing an open ecosystem.)

Clearly, Google and IBM are making progress with their OpenPower Foundation and companies like Intel should be watching them very closely because they have everything that they need from all of the key companies to be able to turn this OpenPower Foundation into something seriously competitive with Intel. Ironically, though, companies like Mellanox are very closely allied with Intel, but are still members of OpenPower because in the end, their technology is really processor agnostic and if they can sell more interconnects, why not? If you look closely at the board, you can see that Google intentionally blacked out a lot of the ICs on the board, which isn’t very open of them, but is probably done in order to keep their platform safe from prying eyes until it starts being deployed on a broad scale.

A Google built IBM Power8 Motherboard

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DNS getting an injection of IBM patents...

Voice recognition is one of ways of the future. Personally, I view OCZ’s NIA with Brain Fingers technology and Dragon Naturally Speaking as two best possible products to accelerate our interaction with computers, given that the speed of thought is better than our fingers

In that light, seeing that Nuance Communications (developers of Dragon Naturally Speaking) and IBM signed a “licensing and technical services agreement” is a great day for the speech recognition industry. This contract enables Nuance to access whole speech recognition patent portfolio from IBM. Given the fact that IBM was a pioneer in speech recognition technology and used to own Nuance, this deal is a positive course between “ex-couple” that IBM and Nuance are.

When the first product based upon IBM patents is released, Nuance will purchase speech-related patents from IBM. This way, Nuance got two years to enhance its own technology with IBM’s patent, and when the time comes, purchase all related patents and gain control over the speech-related technology.

We hope that Nuance will know how to start using GPUs for speech recognition, given the stream nature of the voice recognition patterns. 2011 can’t come soon enough for next-generation of Dragon Naturally Speaking. The time for talking to computers is coming

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The Race for a New Game Machine is a fantastic title, an absolute must read. The book was penned by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps, disclosing bombastic details about the development of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It effectively shows that IBM betrayed Sony and Toshiba and took Sony’s and Tosh’s money to develop the CPU for Microsoft Xbox 360 console. Yes, you’ve read that right. The topic of this book could have ended in court if Sony and Toshiba managed to find any loopholes in their contracts with IBM – sadly for them, IBM was all too wise to sign a contract that would not give them enough free space to play with.

Long story short, IBM’s Cell PowerPC core ended up tripled and landed itself inside Microsoft Xbox 360, without Toshiba and Sony learning the truth until the bicker end. This is an excerpt from this bombastic title:

IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. Sony and Toshiba sent teams of engineers to Austin to live and work with their partners in an effort to have the Cell ready for the Playstation 3’s target launch, Christmas 2005. But a funny thing happened along the way: A new “partner” entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft’s rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM’s Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony.

All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony’s primary videogame-console competitor. The result was that Sony’s R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it.

IBM employees were hiding their work from Sony and Toshiba engineers in the cubicles next to them; the Xbox chip being tested a few floors above the Cell design teams. Mr. Shippy says that he felt “contaminated” as he sat down with the Microsoft engineers, helping them to sketch out their architectural requirements with lessons learned from his earlier work on Playstation.

MSFT: We'll just take things in red, and leave Sony and Tosh to cope with the rest.

You can buy the book for mere 15 bucks on Amazon.com and trust me, it will give you more hours of fun that most of games that came out in 2008.

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This specification covers all GPGPU-capable hardware, regardless of that hardware being in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks or handhelds – if your GPU is able to compute, the manufacturer only needs to adopt OpenCL support in the driver and that’s that.

That should not be an issue, with AMD/ATI and Nvidia strongly standing behind the standard. Computing engineers on both sides bickered about Brooke+, CAL or CUDA in the past, but both makers are firmly behind OpenCL as the way for the future.

So far, companies that developed and ratified this initial spec include 3Dlabs, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, BARCO, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umea University.

You can learn more at the official page of OpenCL API, but I wasn’t able to check the site as it was hammered down with numerous requests (this story was written at 10:05AM CET).

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The motherboard for the ultimate workstation

The board supports both SLI and CrossFire in their respective maximum configurations (3 or 4 GPUs), but what makes this board really interesting is the fact that you could connect 12 LCD displays on it, or create a GPGPU/rendering/scientific/folding farm in a single case. Putting six ATI Radeon 4850 graphics cards would enable roughly 6TFLOPS of computing power. In case of Nvidia, you would have to pick up GeForce 9800GT (Palit has single-slot 1GB card) and have less theoretical computing power, but in terms of folding, you would be looking at 30-35.000 PPD system (at a cost of two GTX260 cards).
This is really impressive engineering feat from ASUS, with the only disappointment being usage of RealTek GbE controller. For a workstation motherboard, I would much happier if Marvell was on-board.
Storage-wise, you can install no less than eight SATA devices and not a single IDE device, since ASUS stayed in “Revolution” theme and killed of the PATA connector. Also, I found that a shared PS/2 port was also pretty neat solution, even though real revolution would be killing both PS/2 slots. This way, you still have one legacy part: PS/2.

There is one shared PS/2 port, for either keyboard or a mouse

Funny part of this story is that if anybody would have a time machine and go back to IBM engineers in 1986-7 frame and told them that only remain of their failed standard is going to be a keyboard/mouse connector, and that PS/2 connector will outlive PATA, I guess they would call you… crazy? Lunatic? Infidel?

P.S. If you’re wondering… yes, the answer is true. There are no technical issues that would prevent you from installing 3-Way SLI and 4-Way CrossFireX setup, consisting out of three GTX280 and two 4870X2 cards. Only problem is that you would have to have a watercooling setup, since you are limited to single-slot cooling solutions. I guess Asetek, CoolIT or somebody similar could come up with a solution for this “problem”.

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