Opera Mini 5 cranks things up a notch, with tabbed browsing, speed dial and a password manager.  Opera’s goal with the new mobile version was to bring things more on par with the desktop version, and it looks like it has come a long way toward that goal.

To download Opera Mini 5 just visit m.opera.com/next using your mobile browser. You can also download it on your computer.

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Problem is, HP is late to the mega data center party. SGI (formerly Rackable) has built special-purpose machines for years, and keeps introducing new options for the mega data center. IBM even launched its own, highly proprietary iDataPlex hardware for the same market last year. Two years ago Dell created a custom-order business aimed at serving this market while HP focused on better blades for enterprises and building custom setups for clients. HP is now combining some of the features its rivals’ cloud computing servers already offer, such as stripping out redundant power, sharing fans and making things easily interchangeable, as part of its new HP ProLiant SL server family. The resulting servers use 28 percent less power than standard rack-mounted servers, according to HP.

Creating some type of product portfolio for this market, however delayed, makes sense, and Christine Martino, VP and general manager of HP’s Scalable Computing & Infrastructure group says the company thinks it can compete with the existing offerings in the space quite well. She also stressed that both the data center mapping software (The HP Datacenter Environmental Edge), which helps cut costs by finding inefficiencies in the data center, and the consulting would be of use for enterprise customers that have the experience building out large-scale data centers that companies such as Google, or Amazon have.

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Reportedly, the 5-year-old company was doing well, but in these hard economic times, it’s possible that a cash-strapped investor just couldn’t front SiCortex the money to continue. EETimes reported a similar capital crunch leading to the closure of video processing chip firm Ambric last November. However, there may be an industry trend working against SiCortex as well. In general, supercomputers have moved from being proprietary systems to open systems built using commodity hardware and open-source software. Supercomputers are now defined by their jobs, not their hardware. While processors such as IBM’s Cell chip and Nvidia’s graphics chips are being used to augment the x86 CPUs in some HPC systems, for the most part, specialty chips are a dying breed. For example, earlier this year, SGI, which made proprietary machines for the HPC industry, filed for bankruptcy and sold its assets to Rackable Systems (which has changed its name to SGI). So I wonder, is SiCortex’s lack of money a sign of a venture capital problem or a supercomputing industry problem?

John West over at insideHPC, tells me that he thinks the large upfront investment in SiCortex’s hardware that it needed to recoup was what ended up hurting it. He emailed that the company had sold 80 machines since launching its computers in 2007, and had a sales pipeline “tens of millions of dollars deep,” but wasn’t profitable. So it simply may have run out of cash.  In that case, its failure may be a sign of both the venture industry’s reluctance to invest in capital-intensive businesses, and the difficulties facing a specialty hardware company today.

Below I’ve embedded an old video interview featuring the SiCortex personal supercomputer. Unfortunately, I didn’t show its main product, which features a rack of machines that can be accessed through a DeLorean-style door that lifts up, rather than opens out. That, and the low power consumption, are pretty neat.

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Intel today unveiled its latest and greatest Nehalem chip

Better performance per watt: Just like a Ferrari with 12 horses cylinders will consume more gas than a Civic, high-power server chips have never been shy about gulping electricity. But with Nehalem, this is improving. While the processor can consume up to 95 watts in server applications, when measured in terms of what it can do with that electricity — a metric known as “performance per watt” — Nehalem is plenty sexy. Server vendors from HP to Rackable have talked about how this particular metric (when tied to the cost of the chips) drives large-volume server purchases, which are becoming a bigger chunk of sales as companies like Google or Facebook build out their infrastructure.

Faster access to memory: One of the issues with multicore processors is that the cores can all process information really fast, but eventually they have to get more information to process from the memory. Under Intel’s previous architecture, they had to access that memory outside of the chip — and do it one by one. Intel has addressed this by including integrated memory on the latest Nehalem chip, and a transport protocol Intel calls QuickPath Interconnect. The integrated memory on the chip stores more information closer to the processor and the QPI manages the flow of information between the cores. Incidentally, AMD first offered this in 2003 with HyperTransport.

The bottom line is that by attacking the memory bandwidth problem instead of throwing more power-hungry cores at it, certain workloads can now run faster.

It has a future beyond servers: As part of the new server announcement, Intel also announced a line of Nehalem-based embedded processors for use in communications markets. As an Ars Technica article notes, the Nehalem architecture is so modular that it can be configured for a variety of different uses — in other words, beyond just workstations and servers.

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The updated servers feature a fan mounted behind the rack, rather than attached to each server, which also cuts power consumption for cooling to 8 percent, rather than 25 percent, of the total energy. Rackspace Rackable also announced that customers will eventually be able to build out servers in the CloudRack trays using Intel’s lower power Atom chips, which they can use for jobs that don’t need the full horsepower of the upcoming Nehalem-based Xeon chips. Customizing processors is one more way that data center operators are trying to boost efficiency.

The rising competition around designing power-efficient, heat-tolerant servers is being driven by a need to lower electricity and cooling costs in a data center contrasted with the need to pack as much computing into a box as possible to run web-scale application increases. Essentially, we need more computing but have less electricity to squander. Rackable can sell into corporate data centers, but its target market is the web world giants running thousands of servers.

It’s a market that’s growing increasingly competitive with Cisco planning a new line of servers dubbed the Unified Computing system, Dell creating a seperate business unit just to deal with web scale customers, and HP has  a web-scale service design team as well. Intel estimates that 25 percent of its chips will go into web-scale boxes by the year 2012. I’m sure Rackable’s hoping that many of them will go into its servers.

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An article in EEtimes today details the emergence of these Google-inspired servers, which include features such as heat-tolerant processors to save on cooling costs, a focus on motherboards containing 12v-only power supplies for servers, putting two servers on one board and stripping out unnecessary parts.

These are all ways Google apparently modifies its boxes to deliver information faster and more cheaply. Rackable’s new CloudRack servers will offer dual servers on one board that crams more computing power into a smaller space, as well as 12V-only motherboards. The use of only 12 volts on a motherboard is supposed to make the power supplies more efficient by reducing the energy lost when having to convert electrical current to run at various different voltage levels.

IBM’s iDataPlex servers, designed for the cloud, have stripped away unnecessary hardware — a move aimed at reducing power-consuming components and saving space. Heat-tolerant processors allow a data center operator to keep air conditioning bills down, saving as much as 4 percent of total energy costs for each degree dropped. So as computing requires more scale, Google’s innovations influence other buyers and sellers of technology even as the search giant slows its own data center construction.

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I’m inclined to agree with him, as there are a lot of networking and storage vendors here with really large and visible booths that seem outsized compared with the HPC market opportunity. There are also attendees here from companies that have little or no business in supercomputing, such as Dune Networks, Isilon or Rackable Systems. Some of the 219 industry exhibitors (as opposed to the 118 research exhibitors) can’t possibly make enough in the HPC market to justify such a large presence at the show, although a product manager at Ciena, which makes networking gear,  pointed out that HPC installations can act as an effective advertisement for other business.

So here among the 10,764 attendees at the show one might be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and a host of other consumer brands aren’t here to talk about basic computing — but supercomputing.

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I’ve embedded a three-minute video below with Wade Vinson, a thermal engineer with HP, and pasted a few photos of the outside of the factory. HP isn’t the only company filling shipping containers full of servers to save power and space; Sun Microsystems and Rackable are doing it as well. And IBM and Dell have indicated that they plan to get into the market as companies seek to place computing in remote locations or build out their data centers rapidly.

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In my conversation with Michael Dell, he said: “Our view is that there is definitely enormous opportunity in cloud infrastructure. A few years ago, we were out there selling our servers and found that some of these new companies had unique requirements that were really different from the general-purpose servers.” Dell has been trying to get closer to Facebook. Dell has worked closely with Joyent to offer a cloud service that offers free services to Facebook app developers.

A few days prior to our Structure 08 conference, I met with Facebook’s VP of Technology Operations, Jonathan Heiliger, and we discussed the issues with current server designs and how today’s startups need a whole new class of machines. I am pretty sure the announcement is along those lines.

The pending news can’t be good news for Rackable, which had been banking on some of the dollars Facebook was spending on its infrastructure. Rackable’s 10-Q filings show that at the end of the second quarter 2008, Facebook accounted for less than 10 percent of Rackable quarterly revenues of around $76 million. A quarter earlier, Facebook contributed about 24 percent to Rackable’s Q1 2008 revenues of $68 million. Rackable is trying to streamline its operations and recently announced that it is divesting its Rapidscale clustered storage business.

Bonus reading: Check out Facebook’s blog where the company explains why it needed to build its East Coast infrastructure. It is a fairly elaborate description of its entire architecture and worth reading.

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It also followed its competitors and introduced what HP believes will be the building block for the scalable data center, a new, two-in-one blade server. Like IBM’s iDataPlex, Sun’s Blackbox and Dell’s cloud computing efforts, HP is viewing the noise around cloud computing as a chance to sell more hardware — specialized, HP-built 10u racks of 32 blade servers containing 128 cores, to be exact.

I don’t know how important it is to build out scalable computing efforts with IBM’s iDataPlex or HP’s offerings rather than an array of commodity x86 boxes, but the merging of high-performance computing and cloud computing infrastructure is a triumph of the grid architecture running specialized software. It’s also the same trend that is leading Cray to work with Intel on designing the next generation of supercomputers.

HP’s blade servers are designed to save space in the data centers, but Paul Miller, a VP of marketing with HP, acknowledged that space was not at the premium that power is. Blade servers run pretty hot so it’s counterintuitive to think that cramming two of them in one blade makes much sense from an energy efficiency point of view. Miller said HP’s offering can be used with standard HP racks for water cooling or in conjunction with its Dynamic Smart Cooling technology. Without knowing how many watts are consumed, it’s hard to judge how energy efficient these blades are.

Update: HP has provided more information with regard to the server’s efficiency saying it ran in tests at 165 watts per server, and emphasizes that the servers are 60 % more efficient than stand alone boxes in part because they combine two servers into one shell, requiring one fan and power supply for double the compute power.

Fox Interactive Media is one of HP’s clients, so clearly there’s a market for HP’s brand of two-in-one blades, but HP will have to compete with existing hardware vendors such as Rackable and Silicon Metrics, who seem to be doing fine providing energy-efficient scalable hardware for Web 2.0 and cloud computing companies.

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