GigaOM

I have to hand it to Intel. The company that brought us the brilliant marketing of Intel Inside (remember the stuffed guy in a bunny suit?) says Facebook has chosen its Xeon chips to power the social network. But because Intel is aware that server chips are commodities, the chip maker is also working directly with Facebook, tweaking settings to really make those dual- and quad-core chips roar in the hopes that they will continue to power the servers running Web 2.0 sites and compute clouds.

Despite this announcement and this week’s partnership to create a cloud testbed with HP and Yahoo, Intel must be sweating. The premise of the rise in cloud computing is that hardware will no longer matter to most people. Even during interviews with representatives from Yahoo, HP and Intel to talk about the test bed, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, explained that the clouds were more than “just the nuts and bolts of hardware,” a point Intel’s Andrew Chen was quick to downplay.

So Intel needs to make sure IT buyers know and love its chips. Architectures that are not x86, such as Sun’s SPARC or IBM’s Cell, made up 46 percent of the server market in the first quarter of the year, according to data from IDC — and those specialty chips’ share of the server market is rising. To be sure, servers using x86 chips from Intel or AMD accounted for $7 billion worth of sales in the first quarter of the year, but growth is slowing, partly due to success with virtualization. So look for similar high-profile announcements from Intel touting not just the chips, but the company’s ability to make those chips work even better.

Coming soon in India - world’s fastest growing mobile market - 3G services by the dozen. And what that means is a looming free-for-all in a market where competition is already fierce, prices super low, profits even lower and consumer is the ultimate winner.

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Computerworld has done a nice job of encapsulating a corporate IT trend we’ve been writing about for the last couple of months with our focus on accelerator chips — among them graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD and Cell (which was designed originally for the PlayStation 3) from IBM — moving into the enterprise. To sum it up, the x86 processor, the workhorse of corporate computing, can do a lot, but accelerators such as Cell or GPUs can do some things better and faster, such as Monte Carlo simulations on Wall Street or video encoding and decoding.

That’s leading some IT managers to look into hybrid machines like the newly launched Roadrunner supercomputer, which uses AMD’s x86 chips and Cell. Hybrid machines won’t take over the data center, but plenty of firms that build high-performance computing systems for enterprises are eying the trend with interest.

The Computerworld article quotes Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, as saying that 40 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies will be using hybrid computers within five years. One challenge will be getting enterprise software ported onto the different chip architecture through efforts like Nvidia’s CUDA or IBM’s software development kits for Cell, but there are plenty of companies working on that problem.

photos courtesy of IBM

Updated at the bottom: At long last, Hewlett-Packard is stepping up with an answer to cloud computing by inking a partnership with two other big technology vendors and three universities to create a cloud computing testbed. Through its R&D unit, HP Labs, the computing giant had has teamed up with Intel, Yahoo, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

The cloud will comprise six physical locations where mostly HP servers containing between 1,000 and 4,000 mostly Intel cores will run Apache Hadoop. The goal of the project is to give cloud access to academics and research institutions trying to build out services and work within the clouds. HP also hopes to use the testbed project to develop tools and software to push its Everything-as-a-Service idea. Researchers will be able to access the cloud through a proposal process later this year. Continue »

During its second- quarter earnings call earlier this morning, telco gear maker Alcatel-Lucent said its chairman, Serge Tchuruk, and its CEO, Patricia Russo, would step down. Both said they were stepping down because consolidation after the 2006 merger was complete, and now the company needed someone to take it in a new direction. Russo will leave at the end of the year or sooner if the board finds a replacement, and Tchuruk will leave Oct. 1. Russo especially had faced demands for her departure as the newly combined company lagged.

Demand is falling for Alcatel-Lucent equipment, while its carrier customers contemplate the slow migration to 4G technologies such as LTE and WiMAX. The next-generation networks are coming but are still several quarters out,with LTE networks coming online in 2010 and full deployment closer to 2012. WiMAX is growing now, but it’s a smaller market. Another wrinkle is that some carriers such as Vodafone in the UK are content with their 3.5G networks and don’t plan to move to LTE for even longer.

Given its main customers’ plans around network build-outs, plus the lackluster economic environment, Alcatel-Lucent has been seeking alternatives to telco networking gear, including outfitting electric utilities with smart-grid equipment. It’s a shame that the Alcatel-Lucent deal is faring so poorly, because more consolidation is still needed in this sector.