Intel Previews New Laptop Platform

Intel last week gave a quick preview of its next generation laptop platform, which could shake up the chipmaker's mobile offerings.
The company gave analysts and users a glimpse of the new platform, codenamed Calpella, at its fall Intel Developer's Forum (IDF) in Taiwan. Mooly Eden, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobile Platforms group, said during his keynote address at the forum that the platform focuses largely on energy efficiency and longer battery life.
Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at research firm Insight 64, said that if he was a hardware vendor, he'd be eagerly awaiting the 2009 arrival of Calpella. "It's a very different platform than anything they've done to date," he said. "When Calpella shows up, everything inside that laptop will be brand new."
The analyst explained that until now, Intel's laptop platforms have consisted of a CPU and a Northbridge chip, which holds the memory controller and the graphics chip. However, in Calpella, the memory controller has been moved onto the CPU itself. The graphics remain separate but will be packaged with the CPU, giving it better access to the memory controller and the CPU, he said.
"These are all good things," said Brookwood. "If I was a vendor, I'd be excited over this, but a little nervous because everything inside the platform is changing at the same time. With so many balls in the air, it's easy to drop one."
However, he added that since Intel is previewing the platform a year before it ships, most of his concerns are lessened.
The Calpella platform will be based on Intel's upcoming 45nm-based Nehalem architecture. The first Nehalem chips, which will be quad-core server chips, are expected to ship this fall. The rest of the Nehalem family -- desktop chips, dual-core, more quad-core and eight-core chips -- are slated to be released over the course of next year. Brookwood noted that the Nehalem chips for the laptop are scheduled to ship in the second half of 2009.
Intel execs showed off the first 8-core Nehalem chip at its Intel Developer Forum in August. A week before the forum, the chipmaker announced that it was naming the new family of chips Intel Core. The first Core chips to hit the market will get the added label of i7, making the full name Intel Core i7.
The Nehalem technology has a new modular architecture, which officials say will make it easier to scale from two to eight cores. The Core chips also are being designed to have two-way, simultaneous multithreading, use Intel's QuickPath interconnect, and have a three-level cache hierarchy.

Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/152781/intel_laptop_platform.html?tk=rss_news

Economy, more than Apple, leads to Windows laptop price drops

The dream of an $800 Mac notebook has been deferred. So what are Windows manufacturers going to do about it? Industry watchers predict they will keep cutting prices, but Apple is only part of the reason.
It’s mostly the economy.
Last week, the anticipated across-the-board price cuts for Apple’s new line of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops fell short of analyst and blogger predictions.
But Apple has amassed such a broad and loyal high-end buyer base that it can hang tight on prices and get away with it, perhaps even flourish, in an economy teetering on a recession.
Apple may be its own breed (this week it reported record quarterly sales for both Macs and iPhones), but still it seems logical to think that Apple’s decision not to budge on pricing, paired with an economy forcing tech buyers and consumers to be frugal, puts Windows OEMs in a great position to sell more units.
“There are more choices for Windows so this could hurt potential Apple buyers,” says J.P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester who covers consumer product strategy. “Ultimately, Apple’s decision not to cut prices could be a net win for Windows OEMs. They will be able to keep people who were on the fence about switching to a Mac.”
Gownder acknowledges that the economy is the main driver of Windows laptop pricing, but says that high-end laptops in the $1,500 to $1,800 price range from the likes of Toshiba and Sony will also stick to their prices.
“However, the middle and lower-end laptops from Hewlett-Packard and Dell will continue to see price drops as we head into the holiday season in an uncertain economy,” he says.
Indeed, data culled by technology research firm IDC (a sister company to CXO Media) shows that the average price of Windows laptops fell to $894 in the fourth quarter of this year, a 7 percent drop from the same quarter in 2007. IDC estimates that PCs will continue to see price cuts through next year, dropping another 9 percent to an average price of $810 by Q4 of 2009.
Doug Bell, a research analyst at IDC who covers the U.S. PC market, says that Windows OEMs are battling to hit the right price points for the holidays, mostly against each other.
“Windows laptop pricing is not too affected by Apple,” Bell says. Given that approximately 90 percent of the laptop market is Windows, the numerous OEMs are often differentiated by bells and whistles. “The prices are basically the same for all the OEMs, so they tend to push other features such as functionality, style, color, sexiness and other gimmicks,” Bell says.
“With tech buyers, it’s all about brand reputation,” he added.
Both analysts agree that inexpensive ultra-small notebooks in the $250 to $450 range, often called netbooks, are an emerging market that will benefit the most from lighter wallets and Apple’s high-end stance. Apple, after all, doesn’t make a netbook and doesn’t plan to.
Most of the Windows manufacturers have added at least one netbook, which offers a choice between an open-source operating system and Windows XP, to their lines. The most notable are from Lenovo and Acer.
Netbooks are so promising that the PC market is reportedly afraid that netbooks will soon hurt laptop sales.
Thursday, Microsoft expressed concern during its quarterly earnings call with Wall Street that Windows Vista sales were sluggish this quarter, despite 11 percent growth in PC shipments. Microsoft says this is largely due to the rising sales of netbooks running Windows XP Home or Linux.
One Microsoft watcher, blogger Joe Wilcox, states wholeheartedly that cutting prices is exactly the wrong thing for Windows OEMs to do.
Wilcox recently wrote on his blog, Microsoft Watch:
“Windows OEMs should follow Apple’s lead. Now is not the time to set off fire sales. Pricing panic now is sure to cost in margins and profits later on. By keeping firm, and even raising prices, Apple bets on a good holiday 2008 while leaving plenty of legroom for lowering prices if necessary. I would encourage Windows OEMs to do likewise. Slow October and early November sales can be recovered in December. It’s easy to panic with a short holiday selling season ahead. Black Friday is Nov. 28 this year. Panicky price cuts will be costly later.”
Playing Apple’s game on pricing would be a bold move for most Windows OEMs, but industry analysts don’t think it will happen.
“Windows manufacturers have to worry about buyers deferring a purchase until later, or sticking with Windows at all,” says Forrester’s Gownder. “So price cutting makes sense.”


Reference : http://www.macworld.com/article/136373/2008/10/laptopprices.html?lsrc=rss_main

The Missing Piece of the Virtualization Puzzle

I recently reviewed Scalent's V/OE, or Virtual Operating Environment, which is software that automates the provisioning of both storage and networking for server operating system images and virtual machines. V/OE also automatically deploys images of any guest OS to a VMware partition.

The result is an essentially liquid datacenter, in which server images are completely portable. You could move a server OS from a physical machine to a virtual machine, or from one virtual machine to another, and even back to a physical machine, all without ever having to copy files or change any settings manually. Each server needs to have a lightweight agent installed, but this has minimal impact on the system.

The Scalent system automatically changes the VLAN settings on the appropriate switch, the network settings on the server instance, the LUN masking and other storage settings, the VMware partitioning, and the virtual name of the HBA for the server instance.

[ See Logan Harbaugh's review of Scalent V/OE and other high-availability and disaster recovery solutions for virtualization environments, including DataCore SANmelody, Marathon Technologies' everRun VM, Stratus Technologies' Avance, and Vizioncore vRanger Pro. ]

Because storage replication features can be used to keep the boot-from-SAN images up to date in a backup datacenter, switchover time is very quick, limited to the time it takes the OS to boot from the new SAN image in the new location. This is typically faster than booting from a local disk.

The level of flexibility that Scalent offers, in terms of being able to run an OS instance either on hardware or virtual machine, is remarkable -- and especially useful in disaster recovery. Often with other failover systems, the two servers need to be identical to ensure that VMware drivers for CPU type, motherboard type, VMware partitioning, network settings, and capacity all match between the two. With Scalent, the backup server doesn't have to match the original.

Partnerships between storage vendors (such as NetApp, EMC, DataCore, FalconStor, and 3Par) and virtualization vendors (VMware, Citrix, Parallels, and Microsoft) promise similarly easy provisioning of guest OS images and storage. Other storage vendors are integrating backup and disaster recovery tools with VMware and other virtualization platforms to automate backups of VMDK files and the equivalents for other virtualization platforms.

These partnerships signify not only that virtualization has become a checkbox for many sales calls, but also that more critical applications are being virtualized. An increasing number of virtualization customers are feeling the need for rapid provisioning and disaster recovery and backup options.

VMware has announced that storage resource management capabilities will be included in its forthcoming Virtual Datacenter OS, due next year. VDC-OS will enable on-demand provisioning of storage in addition to memory and CPU resources. It will also support thin provisioning of VMFS volumes, which won't use the full size of a partition if there is nothing installed in it.

Nearly all of the major storage vendors have announced partnerships with one or more of the virtualization vendors. These partnerships can be a wonderful thing, but only if your storage vendor happens to have a deal with your virtualization vendor. The sooner these partnerships are no longer necessary, the better for customers. But to get to where any storage will work with any virtualization platform, a Storage Networking Industry Alliance standard will be necessary.

That will take a few years. In the meantime, you'll need to keep an eye on the alliances and proceed carefully.


For more IT analysis and commentary on emerging technologies, visit InfoWorld.com. Story copyright © 2007 InfoWorld Media Group. All rights reserved.


Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/152821/virtualization_storage.html?tk=rss_news