MetaRAM now pumping 288GB of memory into Intel boxes
Triple stuffed
Super-charging memory shop MetaRAM has started talking up its beefy DDR3 modules.
MetaRAM's top customer Hynix has already taken delivery of the DDR3 MetaSDRAM, which allows server customers to pack far more memory inside their standard systems. For example, Hynix is hyping "the world's first" 16GB 2-rank DIMMs, which it …
Media companies urge judge to activate Intel's anti-redaction machine
AMD vs Intel Free those docs!
The Register has joined several other news organizations in a bid to make court records related to AMD's ongoing anti-trust lawsuit against Intel public.
Earlier this week, Situation Publishing - The Register's publisher - and the New York Times, Washington Post and Dow Jones & Co. filed a motion telling a Delaware court that …
Amazon gives marching orders to cloudy storage
Nomadic volumes
Amazon.com continues to offer deeper penetration into its cloud. The company this week unfurled a storage service for hard-core users that will let you keep data and file systems in separate piles.
The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) builds on the existing Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) processing service and lower-level storage …
Reg server and chip hack molested by Gray Lady
'They'll never take away my typos!'
Lady and gentlemen,
My time at the blessed Register has come to an end. As of this Friday, I'm off to The New York Times to bring the wonders of AIX, the vi editor, transactional memory, RAID 6 and FPGAs to the washed masses. Go figure.
I've hung around with Brits long enough to know that compliments are largely verboten. So, …
Investors introduce Salesforce to sell-off as a service
50 per cent Q2 growth won't cut it
Software as a service poster-child Salesforce.com today dished out second quarter results that showed a massive rise in revenue, which did absolutely nothing to impress investors.
The CRM code shifter reported $263m in revenue, which marks a 49 per cent year-over-year rise. Net income came in at just $10m, but that's still miles …
Intel stuffs Nehalem chips with joy
IDF They're turberrific
Intel has tick-tocked itself into a frenzy about its upcoming line of multi-core fancies now being discussed under the "Nehalem" code-name.
Server chief Pat Gelsinger took the stage this week at IDF to speak of Nehalem's wonders, telling the audience that the re-architected chip line will change their businesses and perhaps …
Intel does SSD flash dance
IDF Now with Dynamic Wear Leveling
Full of what we call "self mettle," Intel has championed its "highly anticipated line" of big daddy solid state drives (SSDs).
Units for laptop and desktop systems will ship in the next 30 days with Intel offering up both 1.8-inch and 2.5 inch gear. The X18-M and X25-M products come with all the associated miracles of SSDs, …
Sun double teams Xeon chip
IDF Makes grunty boxes
No server vendor worth its hot swappable fans will let an Intel Developer Forum go by without announcing some new kit. So here's Sun Microsystems doing its part for the epic Intel ecosystem with a pair of new servers.
The Sun Fire X2250 and X4250 machines are your go-to units for a wide variety of jobs, including hardcore stuff …
Microsoft running on at least 220,000 servers
Screengrabs air metallic laundry
Exactly how many servers does Microsoft own? Well, we still don't for sure, but it looks as if Redmond is running at least 148,357 boxes.
A crafty web site called iStartedSomething caught Microsoft revealing its metal haul in a promotional video. The question and answer session with Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard …
Microsoft's data crunching baby hit with lawsuit
Datallegro not so happy
Datallegro, a data warehouse maker in the midst of being acquired by Microsoft, has received a lawsuit, claiming that Datallegro's current CEO aided the company in infringing on a key patent.
Cary Jardin filed the lawsuit in a Southern California district court, alleging the abuse of a patent related to a "system and method for …
Nvidia pulls off Project Blowout in Q2
Disappointing disaster
Last month, Nvidia promised to bomb its second quarter. Today, the company delivered on those promises in smashing fashion.
The graphics chip maker's revenue dropped 5 per cent to $892.7m. In addition, the company posted a net loss of $120.9m, which compares to a profit of $172.7m in the same period last year.
Perhaps worst of …
Napster bullish on user engagement
Investors bearish on Napster sales
Napster continues to bumble along as one of those curious technology oddities haunting the NASDAQ exchange.
The tethered download king posted revenue of $30.3m during its first quarter - an unhealthy drop from the $32.3m posted in the same period last year. Thanks to higher expenses, Napster also posted a wider net loss, hitting …
Rackspace cages lackluster IPO
Your financial future looks cloudy
Rackspace appears to have a knack for ill-timed IPOs.
Shares in the hosting company dropped as much as 19 per cent during their debut on the New York Stock Exchange. And, at the time of this report, RAX - at $11.37 per share - was still sagging below the IPO price of $12.50 per share, which was already at the low end of an …
IBM hacks into chip peoples' pay
Poor reward for record revenue
Bunny people working at IBM's US chip plants face tough times.
IBM has confirmed reports that it will cut the pay of 3,500 assembly line workers at New York factories in East Fishkill and Poughkeepsie and another factory in Vermont. The workers will see their wages drop 10 per cent. Next year, shift employees will also lose out …
Teradata keeps warehousing money
Shrugs off economy and rivals
Teradata appears to be surviving a global economic slowdown that's affecting some of its largest customers.
The data warehouse maker this week reported second quarter revenue of $455m - a 6 per cent rise over the same period last year. (Although, that increase does include five percentage points worth of benefit from currency …
Transmeta hooks Nvidia for $25m power payment
The longest run
Transmeta - yes, you remember them - has picked up a prominent licensee scalp in the form of Nvidia.
Transmeta today revealed that Nvidia will pay a one-time fee of $25m for a license to Long Run and LongRun2 - a pair of power management technologies. Such licensing deals have become Transmeta's main path to revenue - outside of …
AMD thanks Ruiz for courageous ability to lose money
Comment Heck of a job, Hector. We'll keep it up!
Normally, a succession plan is a good thing. You want the new CEO to slide into the old CEO's chair with an ease that says, "Our asses were molded by the same country club rib eyes and crème brûlées. Everything is under control."
Yesterday, though, AMD could have done with some unforeseen CEO-swapping spatter. It should have …
Power6 meets Tukwila meets Rock meets SPARC64 in chip death match
Hot Chips China's Godson-3 whimpers in too
The grandest chip unveiling in many, many years will take place this August on the campus of Stanford University.
At the annual Hot Chips conference, the world's top chip makers including Intel, IBM and Fujitsu/Sun plan to show off some of their most ambitious designs to date. In addition, a host of start-ups dabbling in the …
Ubuntu made me puke in a bucket
Radio Reg And then a Playboy blogger saved my soul
The world is a disgusting, filthy place. So, it's important to take a moment away from the turmoil from time-to-time, spread your legs and eat some aromatic pistou of borage. And, god bless, that's exactly what you can do at the Ubuntu restaurant and yoga studio in Napa.
We discussed Ubuntu and better bowel maintenance during …
Here's the multi-core man coding robots, 3-D worlds and Wall Street
Radio Reg Kunle Olukotun gets pervasive
"You have to do some really good work and become famous."
That's what Stanford President John Hennessy said would be required if then associate professor Kunle Olukotun wanted to secure tenure. So, Olukotun set after that goal with some ground-breaking work in the field of multi-core processors. His research helped form the …
AMD loses $1.19bn and CEO Ruiz
Thanks for the, er, nightmares
AMD today hit Wall Street with a one-two punch. It lost a stunning $1.19bn during the second quarter. And it nudged Hector Ruiz out of the CEO role, replacing him with longtime planned successor Dirk Meyer, who has been President and COO.
Already very depressed, AMD's shares dropped close to 10 per cent in after-hours trading as …
EU thumps Intel with more anti-AMD charges
Abusive conduct threesome
It's true. The European Union has thrown a new set of anti-trust allegations at Intel.
Earlier this week, rumors swirled that the EU would spring into action, adding charges to a European Commission investigation against Intel that's been going since 2001. Now the extra charges have arrived, with EU regulators accusing Intel of …
Dell and Wal-Mart team on TV installations
Don't worry. Only Dallas affected
Good idea? Bad idea? Not even Wal-Mart and Dell are sure.
The two "low-cost providers" have teamed to experiment on Dallas natives with a range of technology services. Customers visiting local Wal-Marts will find "Solution Stations by Dell" where they can get help with "home television installation, PC set-up, wireless network …
Fastscale sends Windows Server to Weight Watchers
De-bloating Bill's code
Fastscale is bringing its unique brand of software shrinking to Windows Server.
The start-up this week unleashed - if you can use such a word for a company with 15 paying corporate customers - a shiny new version of Fastscale Composer Suite. Up to this point, the code has been locked down to Red Hat servers and applications, but …
Intel at ease with economic chaos
Q2 a grower
The economy looks bleak as can be, but Intel doesn't care. The chip maker today reported a record second quarter haul and expects the good times to keep on rolling throughout the year.
Intel's Q2 revenue notched in at $9.5bn, which is a healthy 9 per cent rise over last year's revenue total for the same period. Net income of $1. …
Sun calms investors with early Q4 dish
Not as bad as you might have thought
Sun Microsystems has issued an early take on its fourth quarter financial results, showing sales figures that have declined from the same period last year.
The company, which is due to report finalized Q4 figures on Aug. 1, expects revenue to come in between $3.73bn and $3.8bn. During last year's fourth quarter, Sun pulled in $3 …
And so we begin the tech sector's journey into the Heart of Darkness
Comment Can the nerds save the economy?
Does anyone else remember when technology companies were propping up this economy?
Yeah, that's right. Oil prices were surging. Housing prices were plummeting. But there was the resilient technology sector, making us think things might be okay. No companies missing earnings. No layoffs. Hope at the end of the fab.
Um, well, I …
Ubuntu trumpets aromatic pistou of borage
Hardy Haricot Verts
You thought Ubuntu Linux was bad enough, right? What with the freedom-loving Mark Shuttleworth behind it and all the peacenik developers. Baked Beaver and Stoned Salamander could only be a couple of releases away.
Near Silicon Valley, however, there lurks a darker, more sinister Ubuntu - one dripping with so much hippie …
Sun and Fujitsu ride Unix boxes to four-core country
SPARC64 VII plugs in
Now is about the time Sun Microsystems was meant to start telling the world of the wonders inherent in the Rock processor. No such luck. Instead, Sun and Fujitsu are celebrating the arrival of Version VII of the SPARC64 processor.
The four-core SPARC64 chip will ship inside Sun and Fujitsu's midrange and high-end Unix servers, …
IBM's eight-core Power7 chip to clock in at 4.0GHz
Exclusive Will fuel 300,000-core, 10 petaflop giant
IBM looks set to join the seriously multi-core set with the Power7 chip. Internal documents seen by The Register show Power7 with eight cores per processor and also some very, very large IBM boxes based on the chip.
The IBM documents have the eight-core Power7 being arranged in dual-chip modules. So, that's 16-cores per module. …
Intel stinks
Fouling Arizona
Who let the ass out?
That's the question numerous residents in Chandler, Arizona are asking ever since a rotten egg type odor started haunting their homes. As it turns out, the stench comes from organic material collected in city-owned and, yes, Intel-built evaporation ponds. That's a big thanks then to Chipzilla for giving back …
HP's big splash on EDS all about shrinkage
Comment Hurd 'The Butcher' gets out his knife
I love this Mark Hurd guy. He's turning cost-cutting into an art form.
When HP and Compaq were joined in matrimony at the gates of Hell, Carly Fiorina celebrated all of the forthcoming "synergies." She promised that the combined companies would teach Spending a lesson it would never forget. But such pledges failed to generate …
Shrinking Sun under the gun
Comment Could Fujitsu unite?
Here, with the stock market melting, we find Sun Microsystems in most uncomfortable territory. It's got a stock market value of $7.7bn, which means that the one-time lord of the servers is a mid-cap company.
Our friends on Wall Street warn that Sun needs to maintain at least a $10bn market capitalization to stay in the large cap …
Monitor your data center with a coffee mug-sized server
The cup that phones home
Plat'Home is a curious Japanese company that seems intent on cracking the US market with its weird brand of tiny Linux servers. This week, it has offered the land of the free and the home of the brave the KANSHI Blocks Pro 6.0.1 device, which is a coffee mug-sized monitoring server.
Shot of the Plat'Home device Coffee Mug …
Hawkeye technology turns tennis into a cartoon
Reality hardware needed
In those archaic days before tennis adopted the Hawkeye ball tracking system, the TV audience could have some fun with close line calls. Following a controversial shot, we'd receive a number of slow-motion replays from various angles and get to make up our own minds as to whether or not the lines person was a dolt. But, in the …
EMC CEO's ego has cost investors billions
Comment Whacks Greene when VMware needed her most
By firing VMware chief Diane Greene, EMC's top dog Joe Tucci has sent a message to investors that his personal likes and dislikes come before their broader interests. That's not exactly what you want to see from an executive who has already done so very little for investors over the past five years.
We've written more than any …
File system killer leads police to wife's bones
Reiser's desperate bid for a reduced sentence
Convicted murderer and, er, file system whiz Hans Reiser today led police to the buried body of his wife Nina Reiser.
In an apparent bid to reduce his sentence, Reiser agreed to drag police into Redwood Regional Park and disclose the location of his wife's remains. Police found a grave four feet by four feet by four feet filled …
Fiorina threatens to get in McCain's antique cabinet
Er, but Bush already mastered the 'Invent' agenda
Having turned HP into a model of consistency . . . Having morphed HP into a no-nonsense juggernaut . . . Having guided HP through the smoothest mega-merger in history . . . Er, okay. How about - Having rubbed out the Hewlett-Packard brand, the HP Way and HP's competitive position against IBM and Dell, Carly Fiorina would now …
Dell buys into Dell for $100m
He's a believer in pocket change
Dell's rebirth as a technology juggernaut is well underway. Just ask Michael Dell.
The company founder and CEO has purchased $100m worth of Dell stock. He acquired the shares via three transactions, buying a total of 4.5m fresh shares.
The mainstream press informs us that this indicates bullish optimism about Dell on Dell's …
Bill Gates battles Kermit the Frog in the name of open source
Radio Reg Twittering Shuttleworth's gas
Every time Mark Shuttleworth farts an angel gets its wings. Or at least that's what his girlfriend told me.
If only Bill Gates enjoyed the same enthusiasm for his bowel actions. Instead, Microsoft's Chairman is just pounded with ridicule and hatred by dolts who fail to understand his greater contribution to the human race.
We …
The9 exposed as China's supercomputing powerhouse
Exclusive The ninth mode of art runs on HP clusters
For more than six months, a list ranking the top supercomputers in China has been floating around, but no one has managed to solve its riddle.
The list begins much like any other supercomputer ranking. IBM built the top system, which is a cluster of servers running on Xeon chips from Intel. An oil company - China Petroleum and …
KVM backer takes virtual desktops on the road
Have branch office. Will ship code
Qumranet, the well-moneyed entity behind KVM, is asking folks to help it test out some new desktop virtualization code that sends applications out from headquarters to remote offices.
Back in April, Qumranet birthed SolidICE, which is the the company's take on desktop virtualization. Like rival software, SolidICE ships desktop …
Dell conjures magic SD card for virtualizing blade server I/O
Full height boxes ready too
HP and IBM have some super fancy technology for virtualizing the I/O of their blade systems, and they sell it for thousands of dollars. Dell now has something similar - an SD card that it sells for $499 a pop.
Texas-blessed Dell last week started shipping FlexAddress, which is "enabled by a special SD card." By "enabled" and " …
IBM woos Microsoft with iDataPlex oddity
When will you get a turn?
Never one to miss out on a marketing opportunity, IBM has already started tweaking the new iDataPlex system to reach more customers before the box has even started shipping.
IBM "launched" iDataPlex in April, ushering in a server designed just for large service providers and high performance computing customers pressed for space …
Yahoo! deckchair! shuffle! filled! with! insight! and! clouds!
Microsoft shame unit tabled for now
Trying to become less of an organizational disaster, Yahoo! has shuffled around some executives and even formed a cloud computing division. "Take that, activist shareholders, we've got everything under control."
The people who brought you the botched Microsoft acquisition bid remain in charge. So, that's chief Yahoo! Jerry Yang …
Dell ready to judge and repair your storage shop
'You could use some more DR over here, Jim'
You may not be a Fortune 100 company, but you deserve tiered storage too, right? Right?!?!
Dell certainly thinks so. The Texas-based hardware house this week rolled out a new fleet of storage services that focus on the needs of mid-sized companies.
The fresh services arrive alongside Dell's larger services pitch, which is that …
North Carolina will pay IBM $750,000 for 10 jobs
Great BBQ and strip clubs for execs too
North Carolina will do just about anything to keep technology companies happy, including offering IBM up to $750,000 to bring just 10 jobs to the state.
IBM has revealed plans to construct a $362m so-called "leadership data center" in either North Carolina, New York or Colorado. Hoping to secure this center, Durham County …
Rackable's super efficient gear fills the cloud
Proud to be dense
In a weird sort of way, you can think of this as Rackable Systems 2.0.
Rackable this week ushered in a set of new servers, including one system that fits into the IceCube data center in container. The boxes reflect Rackable's ever-present focus on delivering as much horsepower as possible while consuming the least amount of …
Sun's Niagara 3 will have 16-cores and 16 threads per core
Exclusive 256 thread per socket rocket
Sun Microsystems looks poised to lead the "mainstream" multi-core race for at least a couple more years. By late 2009, the server maker should deliver a third major revision of its Niagara processor which will have 16 cores and an astonishing 16 threads per core, The Register has learned.
Today, Sun sells an eight-core "Niagara …
Microsoft should buy Rackable instead of building custom computers
Comment Out-acquiring Google
We're in the midst of some very strange times. An online book seller owns the leading utility computing service. An advertising company manufactures its own servers and switches. And spots in rural America best known for being, well, rural are turning into technology heavyweights because they have access to cheap power and …
