But Wait, There's More

Intel to Debut New Chip Architecture at Fall IDF

If the big event at the Spring Intel Developer Forum was Intel's embracement of the concept of putting multiple processor cores into a single computer socket to deliver performance increases, the upcoming IDF show next week will be about the unveiling of a new processor microarchitecture, apparently code-named "Nehalem," but then again, Intel won't confirm that. The company did say it would be talking about the new microarchitecture, which has nothing to do with the 10 GHz Pentium 4 that Intel had been talking about delivering in 2005 back in 2002 that was also code-named Nehalem. (Remember that? 10 GHz. Well, we'll never see that, and thank heavens.)

There is a lot of speculation out there that Nehalem will involve taking the Pentium M core from Intel's laptop and notebook line of chips and making the Nehalem architecture by tweaking the Pentium M pipeline so it can handle desktop, workstation, and server workloads. This may involve adding HyperThreading to the Pentium M core (which it does not have), as well as tweaks that allow the processor to scale from four to maybe as many as 16 cores per socket and deliver a reasonable performance benefit. The new architecture will probably also feature the so-called Common System Interface bus, which allows either Xeon or Itanium processors to be plugged into the same box (although not concurrently), as well as Intel's answer to AMD's HyperTransport interconnection scheme for its Opteron processors. New processors based on this new microarchitecture are expected to come to market in the second half of 2006.

Debian Distros Back Common Core Alliance

The name has changed, but the plan is the same. As expected, one of the highlights at the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco last week was a federation of Debian Linux providers. The name the organization is taking is not the Debian Core Consortium, as we reported a month ago (see Debian Linux to Get Down to Business? from the July 19 issue), but rather the Debian Common Core alliance. The "ian" of Debian, Ian Murdock of commercial Linux distributor Progeny, is spearheading the DCC, and he is trying to peddle a concept called Componentized Linux as the central feature of this common core for Debian.

Joining Progeny on the DCC initiative are: Credativ, Knoppix, LinEx, Linspire, Mepis, Sun Wah Linux, UserLinux, and Xandros, who are also distributing products based on the "Sarge" Debian 3.1 release and they will adhere to the Linux Standards Base 3.0 specification, becoming the first Linux distro to do so. Exactly how they work together and support the Componentized Linux approach that Murdock is espousing remains to be seen. That's the beauty of a meritocratic community--you are just now sure how it is going turn out. It would be nice if the DCC could get Ubuntu, formerly controlled by Canonical and now controlled by the Ubuntu Foundation, to play along.

Sybase Gets Bundle Deal on IBM's Open Power Servers

If you want to attack the installed Sparc/Solaris base of Sun Microsystems with Linux alternatives, you have to get databases from Sybase running on your Linux box. While customers in the telecom and financial services areas who are tired of paying high prices to run their applications on Sparc/Solaris gear are considering Linux (as well as Sparc/X64 options) on Linux machines, they certainly do not want to change their underlying databases. And to that end, IBM and Sybase have been doing a dance with each other born out of necessity.

Just before the LinuxWorld event got underway last week, Sybase announced it had extended its agreement with IBM such that IBM can now pre-load its Adaptive Enterprise Server database on its OpenPower Power5-based, Linux-only servers. The bundle the two have cooked up includes the ASE Express Edition for Linux database. The two companies also announced Sybase IQ, the database and analytics bundle that Sybase has created for big data warehouses (typically deployed by financial services and telecom companies) has also been ported to Linux running on the OpenPower platforms. Sybase offers ASE Express edition for free on machines with one processor and 2 GB or under of main memory allocated for the database. The production version of ASE Express Edition costs $24,000 per processor core, while Sybase IQ costs $30,000 per core.

Red Hat, HP Deliver Blade Server Bundle

As part of the festivities at LinuxWorld last week, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat and server maker Hewlett-Packard announced a special bundle of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4 operating system on HP's BladeSystem blade servers. Red Hat has been participating in HP's BladeSystem solution builder program, which helps vendors cook up best practices for deploying their solutions on HP's blade iron. As a result of that collaboration, Red Hat has tweaked its Red Hat Network support infrastructure and service with a BladeSystem toolkit (Release 1.0) to help customers deploy the solution. This toolkit is expected to be available in September.

Additionally, HP will now let Red Hat's Global File System (which it got through the acquisition last year of Sistina) to be the core file system in a Serviceguard high availability cluster. Serviceguard is HP's own brand of clustering software, which it created for its HP-UX line of Unix servers and which it has subsequently ported to Linux. Red Hat GFS support for Serviceguard is available immediately.

OSDL Pushes Patent Commons Through New Initiative

At LinuxWorld last week, Open Source Development Labs, announced it was creating such a patent commons. Well, sort of. OSDL is the center of gravity of the commercial Linux community--by which we mean the vendors who are pushing Linux solutions and who are funding corporate development of the Linux platform--so having that organization establish the patent commons makes sense.

The patent commons is still in the planning stages, says OSDL. In some ways, a patent commons makes good sense; in other ways, it is counter to the spirit of the community it is trying to help. Someone has to think this through. Keeping a list of patent pledges by vendors, as the OSDL will be doing, is not the same thing as becoming the undisputed owner of a patent. Promises to not litigate are not the same thing as ownership of a software patent when it comes to a lawsuit. Just because Vendor A says it will not sue the parties in an open source project if they tread on (knowingly or not, actually or not) a particular patent, does not mean that Vendor B cannot sue the community members for the same violation. And the parties in an open source community do not have the resources to counter sue, and it seems unlikely that a vendor who promised a freebie on particular patents will pick up the tab for such a countersuit. What seems clear is that you can't do a patent commons half way. OSDL and the open source community who want to get a real patent commons off the ground have to make it more than just a list of promises. Ironically, the open source community tends to be against the granting of software patents--correctly believing that copyright and trade secret law is strong enough protection for code--but we live in a world where clever lawyers have argued for and stupid judges have allowed the patenting of software--as well as DNA and other silly things. It's already law, as we have to deal with what is.

Cray Names New CEO as It Posts Big Loss for Q2

Supercomputer maker Cray announced last week that its chairman and CEO, Jim Rottsolk, has stepped down from those positions as Cray continues to struggle with its big projects and with ramping up its three supercomputer product lines. Several months ago, there were rumors that the 41 teraflops "Red Storm" Linux-Opteron massively parallel supercomputer that Cray is building for Sandia National Laboratories had been hit by delays, but Cray said at the time that it had met its milestone on March 31 to demo the Sandia software workloads on Red Storm and had received payments for the project. But last week, Peter Ungaro, the former IBM supercomputer salesman who was brought in by Cray to sell its gear in August 2003, who was made president in March 2005, and who was tapped to be the new CEO last week, said that delays on some of its biggest projects had caused the company to report a net loss of $23.8 million in the second quarter of 2005 (which was 27 cents per share) on sales of $53.4 million. Cray's quarterly sales have been choppy every since the former Tera Computer bought Cray from Silicon Graphics and took its name back in March 2000, and it seems clear that Cray's board of directors and investors have ran out of patience. Hence, Rottsolk has retired. He will, however, remain on the board of directors through 2005. Cray said it had $58.8 million worth of computers sitting at customer sites, waiting for acceptance testing to be complete, an increase of $21 million since the end of the first quarter.

"While we had a solid revenue quarter, some of our largest and most complex installations have been delayed in getting into full production," Ungaro said in a statement accompanying the financial results. "We will not recognize the revenue on these systems until we receive customer acceptances, which should happen over the next several months. We have focused our development and customer support teams on accelerating these acceptances and continue to sharpen our business, product and marketing strategies to reduce costs and return to profitability." He also said Cray had to allocate an additional $7.8 million in costs to complete the Red Storm contract with Sandia, and because of this and other factors, Cray had to reduce its workforce by nearly 10 percent. Cray has appointed Stephen Kiely, a long-time board member, as its non-executive chairman. The company finished the second quarter with $8.5 million in cash, having burned down a big piece of its $43.1 million in reserves at the end of the first quarter. Cray has negotiated a credit facility with Wells Fargo and has not touched it.

Cray has been getting some traction on the commercialized version of the Red Storm machines, which is called the XT3, having just installed a 10 teraflops, 2,090-processor XT3 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center dubbed, appropriately, "Big Ben." The company also announced that it has just sold a 2.5 teraflops XD1 Linux-Opteron supercomputer to the Naval Research Lab in the United States; the XD1 is the supercomputer designed by the former OctigaBay, a Canadian supercomputing startup that Cray acquired in March 2004 for $115 million. As we go to press, Cray's stock is trading at $1.20 per share and the entire company, including the XT3 and XD1 lines as well as the X1E vector machines, is only valued at $112 million. Cray said the best case scenario--which means all large machines currently at sites get accepted and it can recognize their revenue as well as some new orders for smaller machines come in--is for the company to have sales of about $220 million for all of 2005. This is about the revenue level that Wall Street expects. However, any one of its key deals, Cray warned, could shave revenue by $15 million. Cray says depending on the timing of the layoffs and acceptances, it could see a modest improvement in its cash position at the end of the third quarter.

AMD to Ship SimNow to Simulate Future Opterons for Software Developers

If you are a software developer and you want to figure out how to code your system or application software for future Athlon and Opteron technologies like the "Pacifica" virtualization extensions to these chips or see what effect moving from single- to dual-core processors will have, then AMD has a tool for you. It's called the SimNow Simulator, and it gives programmers a way to simulate these features on a box that doesn't actually have them. The Pacifica virtualization features are due in Opteron chips that are expected in the first half of 2006. The SimNow Simulator was used by Novell so it could tweak its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 software to support these and other AMD chip features, and now AMD is offering it to the entire development community. You will be able to download it starting on August 22 at http://developer.amd.com/simnow.aspx.