While I still anxiously await my cheap ARM based netbook and tablet, Chip designer ARM has targeting the data center. Servers are the high margin product in Intel and AMD’s range, so a real threat to their dominance in this space could be very disruptive. It could also bring more capable, cheap storage appliances to the rest of us.

ARM claims that servers using its multi-core chips will go up against Intel within the next 12 months.

Talking to EE Times, Warren East, ARM Holdings’ CEO, said that while its chips have traditionally been used in “relatively low performance” roles the firm’s architecture can “support server application as it is”. East said that the company is cranking out multi-core chip designs running at “up to 2GHz”. (The Inquirer)

New Atom n450 netbooks should start showing up in quantity next month.  Manufacturers have already dropped prices of the last gen product.  Savvy tightwads may want to hold out until the new product shows up on store shelves. Remaining stock of last gen should be at rock bottom then.

Asustek, Acer, Lenovo and even MSI planned to launch shedloads of Atom based netbooks in December in time for Santa to drop them in stockings hung by the chimney with care.

However now they have all announced that they will launch their Atom N450 based netbooks on January 11 of next year.

The reason seems to be a stiffly worked letter that has shown up on their CEO’s desks from Intel, which apparently does not want to see its glorious Atom N450 chips in the shops until after January 10. (The Inquirer)

Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “Intel’s actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices. These illegal tactics must stop and competition must be restored to this vital marketplace.

Well that is generally what I accuse Microsoft of. But if the shoe fits…

Here’s the problem as I see if for the NY AG’s case — viable market alternatives. Unlike the soft side of the business where M$ is rapaciously dominant, Intel has viable competitors. Granted Intel holds 80% of the market, but there is a huge list of competitors — AMD, VIA, Daewoo, Cypress, ARM. Well just look here. Nor has Intel always been the ‘winner’. Many a time AMD has bested Intel in the CPU wars. VIA caught Intel flatfooted with the introduction of the ITX low power Northbridge chip series. In the memory space where Intel at one time was a big player, their market shares have shrunk. Not only that but most of the high density mem chips are now made/designed by competitors in Japan and Korea.

Bad business practices? Well OK. But that is nothing new in the IT OEM battle space. Trades, discounts, special designs have long been a fixture of the silicon valley. Plus the AG misses a point, swinging a deal at or near mfr margin is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor do pressuring for long term contractual favors work over the long haul in silicon. No sooner than somebody from India comes out with a FPGA design 25% cheaper than the design a competitor just spent a half billion on fab plant for, all those contracts became long term drags on the bottom line.

The highlights here.

There are many who believe that AMD is close to flaming out after an extended run of big losses. If that’s true, no one has told AMD. The company just launched a salvo targeting Intel’s sweet spot in the mid range with very aggressive new multicore CPU prices. Intel will surely have to respond. That’s great news for Tightwads regardless of whose CPU you prefer.

There is a $77, two-core, 2.8GHz Athlon II X2 240e which is being aimed at Intel’s $119, 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo E7400 and the $87, three-core, 2.9GHz Athlon II X3 435 that’s going up against Intel’s $190, 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500.

Today’s announcement follows the release of AMD’s Athlon II X4 620 which was the first sub-$100 four-core CPU, priced at $99 and running at 2.6GHz with a TDP of 95 watts.

The Athlon II X4 630 was made available at the same time and had the same specs but had a slightly faster 2.8GHz clock speed and AMD was flogging that for $122. (The Inquirer)

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While conventional tech pundit wisdom bemoans yet another Linux distribution, I think there is a beauty in a fragmented ecosystem. The monocultures of Windows and Mac OS have spawned stagnant development with increasing vulnerability. With heavy investment from Intel, Moblin is evidence that chipzilla is weary of being so tightly integrated into these monocultures.

Intel’s Moblin project has just made release 2.1 available for download. While his product will not likely gain an Ubuntu like following anytime soon, Moblin is progressing fulfills the promise for an efficient mobile OS.

Intel announced Moblin 2.1 at the Intel Developer Forumon Tuesday as an upgrade to Moblin 2.0. Moblin was originally developed and pushed by Intel as an operating system for netbooks, but with Moblin 2.1, Intel is extending the OS to desktops and handheld devices that are powered by its Atom processor.

“Moblin v2.1 will be an incremental release over Moblin v2.0 and is the next release stream for adding new features and developments,” wrote Imad Sousou in a blog entry on Moblin’s Web site. The initial release is only for netbooks, but versions for handheld devices like mobile Internet devices “will align with the availability and release of those hardware platforms,” Sousou wrote. (Yahoo)

A cheap fast and efficient processor aimed squarely at mobile applications could could be a game changer. As 4G broadband makes mobile internet more like our wired connections, look for the market for mobile devices to explode. The next “killer app” is mobile everything.

Cambridge, England-based chip company ARM on Wednesday announced the development of dual-core, quad-core, and eight-core Cortex A9 processor designs, explicitly aimed at markets currently served by Intel’s x86 chips and IBM’s PowerPC.

“This is a huge departure from what we’ve done in the past”, Eric Schorn, vice president of marketing for ARM’s processor division, told ZDNet UK. “We really wanted to take off the handcuffs and see what could be done with performance, performance, performance.”

The new designs, available in two variants optimized for low power consumption or high performance, are intended for use by companies building their own chips. ARM claims that the new processors, which can run at up to 2GHz, are up to eight times more efficient than Intel’s low-power chips in terms of performance per watt, with the high-performance part running at five times the throughput of Intel’s Atom chip for similar power levels. (Cnet)

This new class of processor could be the enabler for that $99 tablet the Tightwads dream about.  If the performance is good, look for ARM CPU’s to stat showing up in servers too.

The main damage appears to have occurred in the first half, with flat shipments in the second quarter, and sequential rises in the third and fourth quarters. The third quarter will be down year on year, but the fourth quarter should show year on year growth of 3.6 per cent. Next year should rise 4.7 per cent on 2009.

As the firm’s principal analyst for computer platforms Matthew Wilkons pointed out: “An annual decline in unit shipments is highly unusual in the PC market. He said the last year on year decline was back in 2001, when the market dropped 5.1 per cent in the wake of the dot com bust, as VC-engorged web startups suddenly keeled over en masse.

Unsurprisingly, it is desktops which are showing the biggest decline, with shipments expected to plunge 18.1 per cent to 124.4 million, while entry level servers will slip 9.5 per cent to 6.9 million units.

That leaves notebooks - and netbooks - as the only segment likely to show growth, specifically by 11.7 per cent to 155.97 units. Which the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed means notebooks will have outstripped desktop shipments - a first, said iSuppli.

Years ago, this would have been a cause for celebration for PC vendors and their silicon suppliers. This is not necessarily the case now, as notebook prices - specifically netbook prices - have come down so low. At best, vendors might comfort themselves with the fact that netbooks have gotten so small and light that people are likely to lose them, necessitiating replacement purchases.

Just a microcosm of whatis happening all over the planet. The only segment showing in real growth being netbooks followed by the traditional laptop. The Desktop space we might as well not even talk about, though if mobility if not required (which is the case more than most people will admit.) it is the best value for the dollar. See the $50 bare bones below for example.

Part of this, especially on the server side is improving technology. Whereas 2 years ago, a web server might have used MySQL backend which to service all the requests coming at it might be stuffed with 32Gb of memory and sharded over 3 other servers just like it. Now? You might load up a key:value pair database like Redis or TokyoCabinet serve it off a single P4 with 4Gb of memory. Configure one other for slave backup and release the other 2 servers for other duties. That dramatic.

The other is sheer compute power. For the typical user A plain celeron is more the sufficient for most uses. That is why the VIAs, ARMs and Atom based systems have become popular. Low power, low cost with reasonable performance.

Finally there is the sheer saturation of these suckers. We humans have been cranking them out by the millions for years. The technology horizon has not changed greatly in the last 3-4 years for making a compelling case for an upgrade. So if that 4yo Duo box is still purring along why replace it? As to Intel’s winning quarter, think embedded. There are more uses for uP chips in something other than a beige box.

Linky.

There are several things that favor this board if you want to build a HTC. The PSU/Brick 90w supply is included. No Fan so it will be quiet. DVI and HDMI outputs. 6 channel audio. 6 USB, LAN, plus all the usual PC connector too.

Now the price of $160 sounds high compared with say a PIV Mobo CPU combo. But a 90w PS usually runs around $25. The PSU header/splitter is usually $25-35. So the board itself is priced at around $100. Its a new intro as well so expect the prices to come down. Maybe $70 for the board by Christmas?

NewEgg has this available for online order. NewEgg is a Tightwad partner.

Stan Beer, has a column over at ITWire — Beer Files. Its a good read, but even Stan says he is a Microsoft adherent. Unabashed and upfront about it. He has a piece up right now coined ‘Microsoft looking for Moore’s Law to save Windows 7′. That’s like the technical equivalent of ‘Waiting for Gidot’. –

The jury is in about the performance of Windows 7 RC on netbook computers - it’s as slow as a wet week. For Microsoft the “great white hope” is now Moore’s Law. Will new entry level netbooks be powerful enough to prevent Redmond’s second white elephant in a row?

What is becoming increasingly clear is that Windows 7 is merely an attempt at damage control after Microsoft’s monumental misreading of the market with resources hungry Vista.

In itself, Vista is not a bad desktop operating system if you’re running a power hungry machine with plenty of grunt. With a little tweaking, Microsoft could eliminate the stuff that annoys people like the incessant UAC queries.

However, it just so happens we’re living in an age where everyone is downsizing to notebooks and netbooks, which is the growth area of the PC market - an area where Vista can’t play.

Windows 7 was meant to address the failings of Vista - its huge footprint, its massive memory demands, its overall requirement for power hogging processors.

In many ways the IT biz is like the old Wild West. You don’t win by waiting for someone else to save your bacon. Doing that is to rapidly head for the ‘B’ list of tech companies. Not a pleasant place to be on the balance sheet. If Stan is right that is what Redmond is doing with the bottom end play with Windows 7.

Now, bottom fishing is never a very profitable segment. But like the car companies before them, smart IT execs know you have to put resources there as a defensive measure against upstarts. Look what ASUS did with the little eePC. Nobody else was looking at the bottom end and they took the market by storm and defined a new segment in the IT sector.

Well if Redmond has to depend on Moore’s Law so that processors like the Atom gain enough processing power to run W7 they might be waiting a long time. Or at least 18-24 months. That’s an eternity in IT.

My take is Intel is going a different route — multicore rather than ramping up clock speeds. Intel already has a dual core Atom on the market. Would not be far fetched for them to come out with a quadcore as well. The engineers have figured out that heat dissipation management is easier with multicore devices than single cores with higher frequencies. And low power is the name of the game in the marketplace right now.

Could W7 take advantage of a quadcore Atom? Maybe but not without some rework. In the meantime, an opportunity is lost and maybe a market segment is excluded from Microsoft forever.

Linky.

Not really a Tightwader’s item YET. Intel will be coming out with a 32 core GPU for video processing. –

Intel at the opening of Saarland University’s Visual Computing Institute on Wednesday gave clues as to its plans for its many-core Larrabee graphics processor. In a presentation to guests, the semiconductor firm showed that the design uses 32 processor cores and mates each of these with its own vector math unit, allowing each core to process very specialized tasks very efficiently. They also have a pool of cache memory and a memory interface on their edges.

Additionally, Intel’s Joseph Schultz mentioned at the event that it has moved back the launch of Larrabee from its original late-2009 target to the first half of 2010. The reasons for the delay weren’t mentioned.

Larrabee to my mind will be a Scandia Labs God send. Many of those in the white coats that make small things make big booms simulate much of their work visually. They usually pull this off these days by racks of servers doing parallel processing. Now a couple of servers with all the slots filled with multicore GPU’s can do the same thing.

I can’t imagine that Larrabee will be $89.99 at Fry’s anytime soon but give it 5 years. But we could see a 4 core that would satisfy many gamers in that price range very quickly. Chips that that have defective cores could be down graded and sold for that purpose. Yes they are culls but fully functional and would save money and have a very competitive price.

Linky.