Tag Archives: Project Moonshot

Computers

Dell: Little momentum in ARM servers until 64-bit processors

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The low-power capabilities of ARM-based processors have created high expectations for their use in servers, but one of Dell’s top engineers said they are unlikely to take off until 64-bit versions hit the market.

“I don’t think you’ll see any serious momentum in ARM until 64-bit comes out,” said Jimmy Pike, vice president, senior fellow and chief architect of Dell’s Data Center Solutions division. ARM has said it expects 64-bit server chips based on its processor design to start shipping next year, with servers shipping in volume starting in late 2014 or early 2015. Pike is highly regarded in low-power server design and the Dell division he’s in was among the first of the top-tier server providers to experiment with very low-power servers for hyperscale data centers.

ARM processors are being used in most smartphones and tablets, but are being investigated for use in servers as a way to cut electric bills while efficiently processing large volumes of Internet transactions. To counter ARM, Intel is offering Atom server processors as low-power alternatives to its power-hungry Xeon server chips, which dominate the data center landscape today.

But Intel has an early advantage over ARM. Hewlett-Packard last week announced its Project Moonshot dense server with Intel’s Atom processor and Dell is already offering dense servers with low-power x86 chips. The companies are relegating ARM servers to the labs, where they are offered to customers for testing.

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From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2034178/dell-little-momentum-in-arm-servers-until-64bit-processors.html#tk.rss_all

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

These 3 Stocks Are Surging Past the Dow

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By Dan Dzombak, The Motley Fool

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 0.62% to 14,704 points as of 1:25 p.m. EDT, led by the technology sector. The S&P 500 is up 0.53% to 1,571.

Today’s Dow leaders
Today’s Dow leader is Microsoft , up 4%. This morning the FairSearch coalition, a group of 17 companies led by Microsoft, announced that it had filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging anticompetitive strategies by Google‘s Android. According to the group’s statement, “Google’s predatory distribution of Android at below cost makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform.” The group alleges that while Google gives its operating system away for “free,” in reality companies who want to use it must preload Google apps onto the phones, thus giving Google an unfair advantage that has helped Google acquire 70% of the smartphone market and 96% of the mobile search advertising market.

Google is already in hot water with EU regulators over its desktop search practices, which Microsoft and the FairSearch coalition complained of to the European Commission in 2010. Microsoft needs all the help it can get in the mobile-operating-system market. As of February, Microsoft is fourth in the U.S. among smartphone operating systems with a 3.2% market share.

Second for the Dow today is Intel , up 3.4%. Yesterday, at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Intel unveiled its next-generation Thunderbolt interface technology, codenamed Falcon Ridge. The new Thunderbolt runs at 20 Gbs, twice the speed of its predecessor. Initial production is expected before the end of the year and will ramp up in 2014.

In other Intel news, yesterday the company announced that it is shipping samples of its new “Avoton” system-on-a-chip. It also announced that the chips will be included in Hewlett-Packard‘s new Project Moonshot servers, which will be available later this year. This is welcome news for Intel investors, as it shows the company has a headstart on ARM in shipping 64-bit server chips. ARM is not expected to start shipping until 2014 or 2015. For more on Intel, Fool analyst Anders Bylund recently laid out the case for owning Intel stock.

Third for the Dow today is Caterpillar , up 1.9%. Caterpillar’s stock has struggled this year as falling commodity prices, and thus declining activity in the worldwide mining sector, have weighed on the stock. The stock has fallen 4.5% year to date compared to the Dow’s 12% rise. We have to wait until Caterpillar reports earnings on April 22 to see whether the stock‘s decline is merited. Early signs are mixed: After yesterday’s market close, Alcoa reported better-than-expected earnings but disappointing revenue. Caterpillar has been taking steps to make itself more profitable, including slowing production and cutting jobs.

While Caterpillar’s results remain to be seen, over the long term it’s important to consider what really matters for the stock. Caterpillar is the market share leader in …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

HP's Still Trying to Solve Yesterday's Problems

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By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool

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Most companies might define a “moonshot” as something huge and transformative. Google , for example, aims for improving something 10 times over its current capabilities. The search giant’s moonshot programs include things like self-driving cars, augmented reality, a connected house, a space elevator… you know, really big ideas. It’s exciting to see private enterprise try to take a leading role again in the pursuit of next-generation technology, but not everyone has Googley ambitions.

Hewlett-Packard , for example, will be unveiling its “Project Moonshot” platform at an April 8 webcast. What is Project Moonshot? Is it a new PC that can fly? A personal robot assistant? An actual moonshot, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX?

No, HP‘s “moonshot” is a scalable server. Way to set a low bar for yourselves, guys.

Wrong direction
The Project Moonshot server, according to Computerworld, is “the culmination of close to one-and-a-half years of HP‘s experimentation in low-power server designs for hyperscale environments,” with hyperscale being industry terminology for a setup that can rapidly scale from a few servers to a few thousand with relatively few issues.

Why does that sound familiar? Maybe because Amazon.com has essentially defined the maximally scalable server with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a fully virtual server infrastructure that can be rented out by the hour and scaled across a vast network of Amazon machines, all without the user ever needing to operate servers of their own. Hyperscale also happens to be a pretty good term for Google’s distributed-computing setup, which was originally known as MapReduce before the search giant moved on to even better solutions for solving big problems across lots of smallish, cheapish servers.

HP is building machines for companies that have never heard of cloud computing.

Maybe there are some benefits…
Let’s not be too hasty, though. Computerworld goes on to say that:

With the low-power servers, HP is placing preference on faster delivery of information rather than processing power. [CEO Meg] Whitman last month said that the Project Moonshot platform would use 89% less energy, 94% less space and cost 63% less than a traditional x86 server environment. Traditional x86 server environments use the more power-hungry Intel Xeon or Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors, which have more processing power and are seen as being more suitable for data-intensive workloads such as databases.

HP, in a case study, said a Moonshot server installation occupying one-half a rack, priced at $1.2 million and drawing 9.9 kilowatts, could replace an installation of 1,600 servers priced at $3.3 million and drawing 91 kilowatts per hour.

That’s not too bad, and it could give Intel investors pause — the chip maker’s fourth-quarter results had little in the way of good news beyond the growth of its data center segment, which develops those Xeons and other server products. It’s not likely to be particularly dangerous, though. In addition to the initial ARM Holdings design, HP also has an Intel Atom-based Moonshot server in the works. …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

1 Sector Making the Dow's Rise Look Easy

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By Jessica Alling, The Motley Fool

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One might have expected that reaching a new market milestone would incite some caution. But after setting a new all-time high with its close last night, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is still headed skyward. Breaking through the 14,300 mark in early trading, the index is still poised 28 points above yesterday’s close as of 11:55 a.m. ET. Perhaps news of the Dow’s record-breaking climb has finally brought back some investors who lacked confidence in the market.

Positive economic news continued this morning with the ADP jobs report, which showed steady improvement in private-sector job growth. Though the 150,000 jobs added in February was the lowest amount since October, it beat analyst expectations. Small businesses generated the most new positions, adding 77,000 jobs.

1 sector to rule them all
If you look at how the 30 Dow components are doing today, you’ll see a very clear pattern: Tech is up. Hewlett-Packard is leading the way this morning, up 3.14%. The computer-manufacturer held a webcast last night highlighting its new big-data software product, Vertica. The company’s product works in a “columnar” form, allowing queries to work against multiple data points at the same time, producing faster retrieval for analysis than a traditional relational database approach. In its infrastructure business, HP is adding new Texas Instrument ARM server processor options into its new “Project Moonshot” hyperscale servers — a big blow to Intel , which continues to fight for marketshare against ARM processors.

Despite HP‘s new plans for its Moonshot servers, Intel is up this morning by a solid 0.7%. The tech giant recently announced a new technology, DAAS, or Display as a Service, which may change the way people use their tech products. The service will disconnect the hardwire between a video source and the display, allowing people to view their phones or tablets on their big-screen TVs.The technology may also allow multiple devices to be linked to the same display. Intel has also announced that Chinese smartphone manufacturer ZTE will be using its new Atom Z2580 platform for its newest phone line.

Cisco Systems is also up 1.29% so far in trading. The network giant is one of the tech companies teaming up with European lawmakers to help improve technology training for the European workforce. With unemployment in Europe hitting new highs, it is important for workers to beef up their training for increasingly tech-centered jobs. Other Cisco news from Europe comes from Belgian cable company Telenet, which announced that it will be using Cisco’s Videoscape Snowflake user interface to provide increased user function for customers browsing through its available content.

Outside of tech
One company that doesn’t fit today’s trend is Bank of America . The bank is moving ever closer to the Fed’s release of its stress-test results, and many analysts are confident that BAC will pass with flying colors. If that is the case, investors may be trying to jump on board before the …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Computers

HP aims to launch low-power 'Moonshot' server next quarter

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Hewlett-Packard’s first low-power server for hyperscale computing environments, developed under a project it calls Moonshot, will go on sale next quarter, CEO Meg Whitman said last week.

Project Moonshot is an effort to build low-power servers based on alternatives to Intel’s Xeon processors for use in mega data centers like those operated by Facebook and Google.

Redstone server delayed?

HP announced the project in 2011, and the first server platform it talked about, known as Redstone, was to be based on an ARM-type processor from Calxeda.

HP switched gears last year, however, and showed another Project Moonshot server design dubbed Gemini, the first version of which was to be based on an Intel Atom processor.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld