GigaOM » Tilera

Cleantech and investment in 2013

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:05:16 +0000

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:31:50 +0000

Cloud computing is shaking up the worlds of computer design and microprocessor-chip design, and its related concepts and business models have changed both industries, possibly forever. In the near future we will see a division between the traditional players (typified by Intel and AMD) that stick with their existing product lines and a separate group of nontraditional players (Tilera and others) that start fresh in order to make the world’s microprocessor chips as efficient as possible. This report examines some of the most important trends and technologies influencing this space right now.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Wimpy cores are coming to Facebook. But which cores?

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:40:54 +0000

Frank Frankovsky, VP, Facebook
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Facebook has made waves by detailing its plans to use what an executive calls “cell-phone chips” — or “wimpy cores” — in its future data centers. Frank Frankovsky, the VP of infrastructure at Facebook, told me the social network plans to test such chips now and throughout next year, with plans to have them in production in 2014.

“We’re testing and generally bullish on the category, and based on some of the early testing our useful work per watt per dollar will improve, although that varies by workload,” said Frankovsky, “although our Hip Hop [loads are] the most CPU intensive and that hasn’t been ruled out.” HipHop is the open-source code Facebook uses to speed up the PHP code underlying the entire site.

But the question Frankovsky can’t or won’t answer is which of these cell-phone chips Facebook might adopt: a question that is hugely important, given the size of Facebook’s infrastructure and the influence it can exert on other companies as a founding member of the Open Compute Project. So let’s just do a quick rundown of the possible winners in this particular data center cage match.

Frankovsky was very clear in talking to me about what he thought of as a wimpy core. It doesn’t have to actually be an ARM chip to have the cell-phone-style architecture he referred to earlier. Intel’s Atom is still in the running. However, he did say graphics processors aren’t something he’s considering, because they don’t make sense for his workloads. On the issue of whether 64-bit-compatible chips would be in store, Frankovsky hedged, refusing to outright commit to 64-bit, but he said the social network doesn’t “plan to adopt anything that’s not 64-bit.”

As for timing, he said the testing is ongoing with some adoption in the latter half of 2013, and “if all the stars align then [Facebook's adoption] will be a material impact to the market” by 2014. So which companies might see the impact of Facebook’s adoption of wimpy cores? Let’s run down the contenders.

(L to R) Andrew Feldman of AMD, Barry Evans of Calexda, and Guido Appenzeller of Big Switch Networks
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Calxeda. This Austin, Texas–based startup counts Frankovsky as an advisor of sorts, but its product — a system that combines several ARM-based cores and a proprietary networking chip so those cores can communicate — is just off the line. Plus, it will have to wait until 2013 or 2014 until its systems can support the 64-bit instruction set. This is within the Frankovsky timeline, and the workloads he has mentioned are ones where Calxeda is trying to establish tests and benchmarks.

Marvell/Dell. Marvell is also using ARM-based cores in its Armada line of chips, and Dell has picked up those chips to start testing a line of servers. Dell announced the line in May, and it is already a huge supplier of hardware for Facebook as well as a participant in the Open Compute Project that Facebook founded. Plus, Frankovsky is a former Dell employee from the DCS group, where Facebook bought a lot of its hardware.

Intel. Frankovsky was very clear that he regards Intel’s Atom core to be in the class of wimpy cores he is considering. And while many may scoff, Intel has done a good job reducing the power consumption of its x86 chips for the Atom line, unveiling the Centerton chips this month that will ship inside HP’s low-power servers (HP also has a deal to bring Calxeda’s systems to market). The new systems will be able to do as much work as a traditional 150-watt system in a 12-to-14 watt envelope. Plus Intel already makes a 64-bit Atom part designed for SeaMicro, a company building low-power microservers. Intel has an existing relationship with Facebook, the dominant x86 architecture and a 64-bit part in the market.

AMD. This is a bit difficult to assess, given that prior to buying SeaMicro in March, AMD didn’t really have much of a story or option for wimpy cores. It still doesn’t, but buying SeaMicro, which uses Intel’s Atom part, gives it an entrée into the market that it will press. Plus, when I listed the competition Frankovsky told me, “I wouldn’t leave AMD out of this race either.”

Tilera. This Cambridge, Mass.–based startup has been building massively multicore chips designed for big data and cloud workloads since 2004. It has an advantage of having more than 10,000 existing cores running in production at unspecified customers, according to Ihab Bishara, the director of server solutions for Tilera. It has also been tried by Facebook in its 32-bit iteration and won favorable comments from the social network. Cynics have claimed Facebook did that test just to keep Intel on its toes, but Tilera has the first non-x86, 64-bit-based server available in the market and is already deployed in servers in 3 of the top 20 websites.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 06:55:39 +0000

Cloud computing continues to change and shape the technology industry, and these days discussions are about more than simply reorganizing the IT department. New developments in chip and hardware architectures, finding greener data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying data analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. For this report, GigaOM Pro has gathered six of its analysts to discuss these topics and others in current cloud market. Here we present several areas to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:55:41 +0000

The year 2012 may be remembered in the cleantech space as one of both hope and disappointment. Electric vehicles from the plug-in Prius to the Mitsubishi i to the long-awaited Tesla Model S rolled out, but disappointing sales mean the market may not have caught up to innovation. Acquisitions and investments chugged along in the smart-grid market, with Landis+Gyr’s acquisition of Ecologic Analytics and the anticipation of a Silver Spring Networks IPO that has not yet materialized. Meanwhile the quest for the low-power server continued in the green data-center space with AMD’s purchase of SeaMicro for $334 million. We examine these events and others in this report, which also provides a near-term outlook of trends and companies that will be important to watch in 2012.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

After SeaMicro, why AMD’s next step will be an ARM license

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:54:30 +0000

Look, Ma! Six servers on a board.

Now that AMD has confirmed its purchase of low-power server maker SeaMicro, I think its next move will be an announcement around licensing the ARM architecture. That’s right: Intel’s long-abused x86 underdog should do a deal with Intel’s newest rival– the company that provides the architecture for chips inside your cell phone.

With the SeaMicro purchase, AMD gets a company that has fundamentally redesigned the server to make it dense, low-power and able to handle a variety of different types of CPUs. SeaMicro’s CEO Andrew Feldman has told me on many occasions that the company’s box is flexible enough to handle a variety of different CPUs. Its real value is in the specialized chip that manages the communications between the hundreds of processors inside the SeaMicro server — its so-called fabric. And that fabric works with any chip, as Feldman and AMD executives said over and over again on the conference call discussing the deal.

By the end of the year, AMD plans to offer SeaMicro’s boxes using AMD’s Opteron chips as opposed to the Intel silicon currently in the boxes. But because AMD doesn’t want to hack off its server-making customers at Dell, HP, etc., it will likely offer its customers access to SeaMicro’s “technology building blocks,” which can be interpreted to access SeaMicro’s fabric.

These guys are building the future of heterogenous computing.

However, the far more exciting story is how the SeaMicro buy plays into AMD’s heterogeneous computing strategy. AMD calls this its “ambidextrous strategy.” It clearly sees that the future in the cloud and webscale computing world is in providing the right kind of compute for the workload, a task that companies such as Calxeda, Tilera and SeaMicro were all attempting to do in varying ways. If AMD is really serious about this ambidextrous effort, it doesn’t make sense for it to focus solely on x86 chips. Lisa Su, SVP and general manager of Global Business at AMD, agrees. When asked about a potential ARM license in an interview, she said, “We’re not going to be religious on architecture.”

And since Marvell, Calxeda and others are trying out ARM chips in servers at the behest of customers pursuing better efficiency (and SeaMicro can adapt its fabric to that architecture), AMD should quit dithering and call up ARM to get a license.

Pat Moorhead, a former AMD executive and now president at Moor Insights & Strategy, said the SeaMicro deal is a “good move for AMD and gives them instantaneous access to the microserver market which at its worst would be 20-10 percent of the market.” Far more exciting from his perspective is that it underscores and gives AMD the technical pieces to build out its ambidextrous computing strategy. A strategy that should involve an ARM license.

AMD actually had an ARM license when it purchased ATI, but it sold those businesses to Qualcomm and Broadcom. In fact, the Adreno graphics core inside the Snapdragon mobile application processor is former AMD technology by way of its ATI acquisition. If we dig further back into the previous decade, AMD also had a MIPs-based line of processors. So AMD is no stranger to the non-x86 chip world.

And apparently other ARM-based server vendors would welcome the addition of AMD to the ARM server business. Barry Evans, the CEO of Calxeda emailed the following statement:

We are seeing accelerating market momentum for ARM-based solutions in the data center where an entirely new class of applications such as Big Data, Analytics, cloud and web demand drastic improvements in power efficiency. AMD’s announcement demonstrates that they realize that this new epoch requires a different approach.

So unless AMD wants to buy Calxeda (which is located in Austin, Texas, where AMD has a huge presence) maybe it should call up Sir Warren East and talk licensing terms. Plus, if AMD does license the ARM core, there’s no reason it has to limit its application to servers. Perhaps it can develop processors for the mobile market, where all the action is — a market it has failed to develop for in the last five years.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

3 startups that showcase the future of chips

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:26:49 +0000

Mobility has changed the chip industry already, but the rise of the iPhone and devices such as e-readers are only the beginning. If we’re going to create an Internet of things that connects back to a cloud powered by millions of servers, the chip world will have to change drastically to reduce power consumption, shrink in size and embrace new architectures. Fortunately these things are already happening, and here are three startups that showcase the big upcoming shifts.

SuVolta

SuVolta doesn’t want to design chips, it wants to make the process that fabrication plants will use to build the devices. Its technology cuts the energy used in chips in half, and requires a fairly simple tweak of the chemicals layered onto the chip during the manufacturing process. The resulting chips made using SuVolta’s process are just as fast but consume about half the power.

This power reduction is cool, but it’s not the main reason why SuVolta’s on this list. SuVolta tweaks both the manufacturing process and the circuit design. But the process works best for systems on a chip, as opposed to stand alone processors. A System on a chip (SoC) is when multiple types of processors are placed on a single chip as an integrated package.

SoCs are common in the mobile world because they are a way to cram more functionality into a smaller package and they consume less power. SuVolta’s President and CEO Bruce McWilliams, believes SoCs will be the way of the future for how most chips are built.

Ambiq Micro

Ambiq is commercializing technology out of the University of Michigan to build a real-time clock designed for sensors. The clock consumes less power, but also takes over functions that currently involve other chips in order to reduce the power usage of the sensor even further (yup, it’s like an SoC microcontroller). Scott Hanson, the CEO and co-founder of Ambiq explains that today’s sensors usually contain a microcontroller, a clock that puts the chip to sleep and wakes it as necessary, a power supply, a sensor of some sort (typically a MEMs device) and a radio.

But Ambiq combines the clock and the microcontroller so the chip requires less power and takes up less space. Some proposed uses of the chip include implanting it inside the human body, or a chip that can run on tiny solar cells the size of a penny (see image).

As we put more sensors on devices and inside our infrastructure, Hansen believes we’re about to open up a new frontier for chip design firms who can build chips for the sensor web. Ambiq is his bet on this, but he expects many more. With an investment from ARM, he’s not the only one betting on a new generation of chips that will need specialized microcontroller and a smaller size, the British licensing company clearly sees an opportunity as well.

Adapteva

The demand for power in mobile devices and in the servers that power large web sites such as Facebook or Google has led to a boost for ARM, which licenses a chip architecture that trades performance speed for power efficiency. For phones this is fine, but for tablets and even servers, it may be time to think up an entirely new architecture. That’s where Adapteva comes in. The company has rethought a RISC-based architecture for chips and built massively multicore chips that are built to run in parallel or independently.

Much like an older startup called Tilera, which is also building massively multicore chips for data centers, Adapteva thinks that x86 doesn’t offer the energy efficiency needed, while ARM doesn’t offer the performance that next generation mobile devices such as tablets and servers will need. So it’s borrowing the concept of massively multicore chips from the high performance computing world and dialing it down for tomorrow’s mobile applications and up for the next generation of HPC. In the coming years, we’ll see more massively parallel chips, but we’ll also see a willingness to jettison the tried and true architectures as we embrace more specialty computing.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Webscale and cloud are changing the server value chain. Who wins?

Stacey Higginbotham — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:02:49 +0000

The compute and server world is changing rapidly, with webscale companies such as Facebook and Amazon dominating the web and creating new lines of business. With that comes change to the value chain of server and silicon companies, and we now stand at an inflection point that could alter the server market radically. One one side is the commodity hardware built around Intel’s x86 architecture, rich in history and powering 90 percent of the world’s servers. On the other lies the competition: ARM-based architectures put forth by new and existing chip companies and server makers. Which stands to win? We take a close look at both here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:36:23 +0000

Last quarter we highlighted the fast maturation of the Platform-as-a-Service and big data spaces. Those two trends only picked up speed during the third quarter of 2011. Joining them on the cusp of IT greatness, though, are the OpenStack project and flash storage. The former gathered serious validation from big-name companies, while the latter saw less funding than last quarter but a significant number of product launches. Of course, the third quarter wasn’t all lollipops and rose petals. We saw new computing technologies and delivery models such as tablets wreak havoc on both HP and Cisco, and there are concerns (aren’t there always?) about how the Internet will handle our increased use of streaming video and cloud computing. Unfortunately for HP and Cisco, the latter problem might be an easier fix than the strategic woes facing them. Additional companies mentioned in this report include CloudBees, Rackspace, Engine Yard and Joyent. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

It’s time to go beyond PUE in the data center

Adam Lesser — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Last week Google disclosed the details of its energy consumption, and its data center engineers argued that the leading figure cited to assess how energy-efficient a data center is, power usage effectiveness (PUE), must be continuously measured and averaged over a twelve-month period. This was a [...]

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.