Lead Article
EXCLUSIVE- SLAC installs hyper efficient server
By Lou Covey
Editorial Director
A hyper-efficient, high-performance data center was recently installed at a SLAC facility in Menlo Park, California that operates on an energy efficiency several orders of magnitude over the most efficient data centers in the world— and it fits on the back end of a pickup truck.
While most server racks operate on a ratio of 1W of cooling power to 3-4W of processing power, the system installed at SLAC operates at a 1 to 200W ratio. The system is a collaborative project between Intel, Emerson Network Power, Panduit, One Stop Systems, Inc., Smart Modular, Inc. and Clustered Systems…
[continue reading...]Recent Posts
- Inside the hyper efficient server
- EXCLUSIVE- SLAC installs hyper efficient server
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- IC design is focused on wrong problems
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- Quest for the $10K Chip: The wild west of design services
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Electronic Design
By Lou Covey
Editorial Director
The semiconductor design industry is focused on the wrong problems, according to Brad Brech, distinguished engineer at IBM at the ISQED symposium in Santa Clara yesterday. Stating his position in the most diplomatic terms, that was the upshot of his talk on “sustaining Innovation for Smarter Computing in Data Centers.”
While chip design is focused on increasing speed and computing power, Brech said efficiency and cost control are the biggest concerns of the end customer now.
Brech said the chip industry is still focused on incremental increases in performance but the improvements we see in …
Continuing on our series on reducing the cost of semiconductor design and manufacturing, we interviewed Josh Lee, CEO of Uniquify, on the design services niche. Lee took mild exception on Gary’s Smith’s definition of the niche becoming a “wild west” of competition saying the combination of IP integration with services has created a mature industry that is competitive but also crucial to creating new products in absence of venture capital involvement.
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In the fourth installment of our Quest for the 10K chip series, We return to the last part of the interview with EDA Analyst Gary Smith to discuss the reemergence of design services and their role in reducing the cost of chip design. Smith believes the industry is headed toward a new generation of ASIC houses, and says the advantage of ESL is that it allows designs to be handed off at any number of various sign off points. Smith believes the design services segment is in for big growth in the coming years.
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ESL startup Esencia has been making noise about the changing of the guard in IC design as the industry moves from RTL to ESL. In this third part of our series on the Quest the the 10K Chip, Karl Kaiser, VP of engineering for Esencia, talks about Gary Smith’s view of the cost of IC design and where ESL can continually lower that cost.
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In part two of our Quest for the 10K chip series, EDA Analyst Gary Smith discusses the need for ESL, how it will reduce the cost of designs, and why the time is right for ESL to be implemented now. Smith says in the past, we’ve leveraged IP reuse as a way to solve our design challenges, but we are now seeing 100 block designs with 100 million gate counts; IP reuse alone will not solve these challenges. In this video Smith discusses what he sees coming next to solve these challenges.
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DIY Electronics
ProFPGA unveils FPGA prototype boards ProFPGA came out of stealth at the Design Automation Conference (DAC 2012) in San Francisco with a technology agnostic hardware system for developing FPGA prototype. ProFPGA is a spinoff from ProDesign Europe (http://www.prodesigncad.de), located in Germany. The system that can be used with Xilinx or Altera FPGAs and can be implemented with any commercially available development tool, including those from Synopsys, Xilinx or Altera.
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Electronic Design
IC design is focused on wrong problems By Lou Covey
Editorial Director
The semiconductor design industry is focused on the wrong problems, according to Brad Brech, distinguished engineer at IBM at the ISQED symposium in Santa Clara yesterday. Stating his position in the most diplomatic terms, that was the upshot of his talk on “sustaining Innovation for Smarter Computing in Data Centers.”
While chip design is focused on increasing speed and computing power, Brech said efficiency and cost control are the biggest concerns of the end customer now.
Brech said the chip industry is still focused on incremental increases in performance but the improvements we see in …
Green Tech
EXCLUSIVE- SLAC installs hyper efficient server By Lou Covey
Editorial Director
A hyper-efficient, high-performance data center was recently installed at a SLAC facility in Menlo Park, California that operates on an energy efficiency several orders of magnitude over the most efficient data centers in the world— and it fits on the back end of a pickup truck.
While most server racks operate on a ratio of 1W of cooling power to 3-4W of processing power, the system installed at SLAC operates at a 1 to 200W ratio. The system is a collaborative project between Intel, Emerson Network Power, Panduit, One Stop Systems, Inc., Smart Modular, Inc. and Clustered Systems…
Software
Automating embedded software testing with Electric Cloud The 2012 UBM Survey showed that, for the first time, QA engineers are becoming a significant portion of embedded software teams, and there is less concern about the quality of debugging tools for those teams, However, the size of those teams is, in general, dropping and concern for tool quality is still number one, all of which makes hitting schedules on time the greatest challenge for those teams.
According to Dax Harfang at Electric Cloud, those pressures are even greater in hardware-centric companies who would rather not make a large investment in software QA, especially smaller companies that may be …
Trend
Inside the hyper efficient server Lou Covey
Editorial Director
Yesterday we unveiled the hyper-efficient data server at SLAC installed by a consortium of companies. In today’s video we take a look at the unit itself and how it reaches the energy/compute performance levels that could change how data centers operate.
This article sponsored by Clustered Systems…
Venture Capital
Netherlands’ Brabant Region a one-stop shop for expansion, research Part two of an investigative series on European entrepreneurialism
By Lou Covey, editorial director
New Tech Press
In the previous report, we looked at opportunities in Poland as they continue the process of entering the European Union. This report goes west where the hub of EU entrepreneurism lies, The Brabant Province.
The Brabant province straddles the border of Belgium and the Netherlands. To the south it reaches into the Belgian capital city of Brussels the home of IMEC, arguably the leading nanotech research center in the world. To the north it comprises most of the Dutch southern communities and the …
