A few weeks ago ARM celebrated its partners shipping over 10 billion ARM based chips in 2013. As ARM makes a royalty on every IP license shipped, it was a banner year for the company. The bigger story was that the 10 billion in 2013 brought the cumulative total for ARM based processors to over 50 billion (note that these are discrete ICs, multiple cores within a single design are not counted multiple times). ARM's press activities were limited to talking about the big final number, but ARM has a pretty broad IP portfolio. What I wanted was a breakdown of where the 50 billion went, so I asked. What I got in response were tables of data. I was asked not to share specific...
Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay 32TB Rackmount NAS Review
Seagate's acquisition of LaCie in 2012 made quite a bit of sense as most of their product lines were complementary in nature. However, they had a bit of an...
31 by Ganesh T S on 3/14/2014The Intel Xeon E7 v2 Review: Quad Socket, Up to 60 Cores/120 Threads
Meet the new Xeon E7 v2, codenamed "Ivy Bridge EX". We've had the new processors in our labs for the past few weeks putting them to the test, using...
125 by Johan De Gelas on 2/21/2014Free Cooling: the Server Side of the Story
Servers that support higher inlet temperatures could significantly reduce or even eliminate the cooling costs of the data center. We received the 2U supermicro 6027R-73DARF that supports the latest...
47 by Johan De Gelas on 2/11/2014ARM and Partners Deliver First ARM Server Platform Standard
The demise of innovator Calxeda and the excellent performance per watt of the new Intel Avoton server were certainly not good omens for the ARM server market. However, there...
15 by Johan De Gelas on 1/29/2014It Begins: AMD Announces Its First ARM Based Server SoC, 64-bit/8-core Opteron A1100
Around 15 months ago, AMD announced that it would be building 64-bit ARM based SoCs for servers in 2014. Less than a month into 2014, AMD made good on...
122 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/28/2014Server Buying Decisions: Memory
We reviewed several types of server memory back in August 2012. You still have the same three choices—LRDIMMs, RDIMMs and UDIMMs—but the situation has significantly changed now. The introduction...
28 by Johan De Gelas on 12/19/2013Netgear Launches ReadyNAS 716 6-bay 10-GbE Desktop NAS
We reviewed the ReadyNAS 312 (one of the entry-level members) in Netgear's x86 NAS lineup last week. Netgear's ReadyNAS introductions this year were covered earlier in March. Today, Netgear...
10 by Ganesh T S on 11/18/2013Western Digital Updates My Cloud Lineup with 4-bay EX4
We had covered the launch of the Western Digital My Cloud platform last month. The unit available at launch was a single-bay version similar to the popular My Book...
6 by Ganesh T S on 11/12/2013Netgear ReadyNAS 312 2-bay SMB / SOHO NAS Review
x86-based NAS units targeting SMB consumers are usually of the 4-bay or more variety. However, there is a growing market for 2-bay high-performance units. Almost all major NAS vendors...
18 by Ganesh T S on 11/11/2013Intel's Xeon E5-2600 V2: 12-core Ivy Bridge EP for Servers
The core architecture inside the latest Xeon is typically a step behind what you find inside the latest desktop and notebook chips. A longer and more thorough validation is...
72 by Johan De Gelas on 9/17/2013Lenovo Announces New ThinkCentre AIOs and Desktops
Lenovo sent out word today that they’ve updated their ThinkCentre offerings, with four new models. The new models feature optional multi-touch screens, improved cable management, and new mounting options...
8 by Jarred Walton on 8/28/2013QNAP Partners with ZyXEL for Affordable 10G NAS Solutions
Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and datacenter operators are minimizing the footprints of their computing equipment using virtualization. Heavily virtualized environments require a good network backend (efficient IP-SANs...
15 by Ganesh T S on 8/15/2013IBM Offers POWER Technology for Licensing, Forms OpenPOWER Consortium
The CPU wars are far from over, but the battlegrounds have shifted of late. Where once we looked primarily at the high-end processing options, today we tend to cover...
32 by Jarred Walton on 8/7/2013The Impact of Disruptive Technologies on the Professional Storage Market
Over the past couple of decades, the server market has evolved from closed, proprietary, and most importantly extremely expensive mainframe and proprietary RISC servers into today's highly competitive x86...
60 by Johan De Gelas on 8/5/2013OCZ Announces ZD-XL PCIe SQL Accelerator SSD Solution
About a year and a half ago OCZ announced the acquisition of Sanrad, an enterprise storage solutions company with experience in flash caching. Today we see some of the...
26 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 7/23/2013June 2013 Top500 List Published: Xeon Phi Takes Top Spot
Kicking off this week is the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, one of the two major supercomputing/high performance computing conferences of the year. There will be several announcements...
16 by Ryan Smith on 6/17/2013Intel SSD DC S3500 Review (480GB): Part 1
We always knew that Intel would build a standard MLC version of its flagship S3700 enterprise SSD, and today we have that drive: the Intel SSD DC S3500.
54 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/11/2013AMD Opteron X1150 & X2150 "Kyoto": Kabini Heads to Servers
Last week AMD launched its Kabini APU for clients, a quad-core Jaguar based SoC with GCN graphics aimed at entry-level and mainstream ultraportable notebooks. In our review we found...
26 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 5/29/2013Inside AnandTech 2013: Power Consumption
Two of the previous three posts I've made about our upgraded server infrastructure have focused on performance. In the second post I talked about the performance (and reliability) benefits...
10 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/18/2013