About Clairvoyance and Oracle

Andreas Stiller

(Translation of the German original in c't 16/10 by Marcel Sieslack)

The corporations are making good profits, new acquisitions change the landscape here and there, storage giant EMC² positions itself more strongly against Oracle and Co. and new architectures for the power-sensitive cloud computing sector are running (less) hot.

Paul, the clairvoyant squid from Oberhausen, Germany, would be a welcome addition to the teams of crystal ball experts at the market research institutes and financial institutions - for predictions on upcoming quarterly figures, for instance. Without Paul’s help, the human fortunetellers were a bit off the mark concerning Intel’s financial statement: 10.25 billion U.S. dollars of sales had been foretold, but in the end, it was 10.8 billion - with a spectacular profit of 2.9 billion. Things look good for AMD, too, though maybe on a lower level. The financial analysts project sales of 1.55 billion U.S. dollars, about the same as last quarter, which is 30 percent more than in the year-ago quarter. That should suffice for some nice black numbers again. So the upswing hasn’t stopped and Intel can happily continue to invest. Rumor has it, that the Californians are close to sealing a deal with Infineon. Intel intends to buy Infineon’s mobile chip branch for 1.1 to 1.4 billion dollars. This way, also ARM would probably make its way back into the Intel domain. Some left-over XScale ARM designs - from old times - are still lying around with the I/O processors, marked “Not recommended for new designs”. This could change with the Infineon chips and the Atom processors might soon get some serious in-house competition.

Untrue Rumors ...

So, processor wise, things will become a little more confusing. In the face of numerous Core i and Atom models, some doomsayers don’t see a place for the Celeron anymore anyway and, due to vague bits of information from the Far East, have already announced the death of the Celeron. Intel was indignant and responded immediately: “The rumor is not true, Intel has no plans to phase out the Celeron brand in 2011”, said Intel spokesman Barry Sum.

Other rumors from the Far East have not been disclaimed by Intel so far: names and specifications for the first Sandy Bridge processors, which are slated for the beginning of 2011, as reported by the Taiwanese website xfastest.com. The chips with the new architecture - 256 bit vector unit AVX, large loop stream detection buffer and many other improvements - will continue with the names Core i3, i5 and i7.

Meanwhile, also Oracle’s hardware division has been busy. Some new as well as a few updated Sun Fire systems with Intel Xeon 5600 (Westmere) and 7600 (Nehalem-EX) have been launched more or less quietly. During Sun’s times, this was very different; even the smallest server launches were celebrated extensively.

And while Oracle as a software company has acquired suitable hardware, the storage corporation EMC² - led by the proactive ex-Intel manager Pat Gelsinger - has chosen the opposite approach.

... and True Ones

EMC² is already offering servers with Nehalem processors in its Atmos cloud storage platform line. An extension to new servers with proprietary software for warehouse and cloud computing is in the air. Consequently, EMC² recently recruited the data warehouse specialist Greenplum and incorporated him into the newly created division “Data Computing Products Division”, which - as the name itself gives away - will probably not be limited to data warehouses and business analytics. With Greenplum’s massively parallel database as well as servers and storage systems optimized to this end, EMC² aims to catch more fish in Oracle’s waters - which still are a hunting ground for the veterans of old, IBM and HP, too.

Attuning server hardware and data bases or cloud computing with each other - with the primary goal of lowering the power consumption - is a task many smaller start-ups in Silicon Valley have dedicated themselves to. Schooner Information Technology, for instance, has optimized MySQL - which now also belongs to Oracle - for IBM x3650 M2 servers with a special appliance and SeaMicro Inc. has designed server clusters with 512 small Atom processors in a rack with 10 units. However, with special multi-core processors, there might still be much more potential - for instance with the TilePro64 chip from the start-up Tilera. This chip is still being produced in large 90-nm structures by TSMC, but it packs 64 cores. Recently, partner Quanta launched the SQ2 server for cloud computing equipped with eight TilePro64 processors (900MHz): 512 cores in two rack units that consume between 35 and 50 watts. According to Tilera, a rack with 12 SQ2 systems would equal the performance of a 100 of Intel’s current two-way systems, while only requiring 80 percent of the operating costs.

And then there’s Azul, whose Vega 3 processors with 54 cores have been especially designed for Java. Now, Azul has released a Java VM for x86-64 for the application with a hypervisor (currently KVM or VMware ESX server). Zing allows a comfortable migration of the Java software between the proprietary Vega systems and the x86 universe and, at the same time, serves as a counterweight to the monopolization by the giant Java kraken Oracle (Bea, Sun). And in case Azul fails with its processors, Zing would constitute a second foothold.

However, the real surprise among the power-saving server chips, has unfortunately failed to materialize. Like Ashlee Vance of the New York Times states in his respective blog entry, Sun had seriously planned to release its own x86 processor for this market sector. That was the reason why Sun had bought the tiny processor company Montalvo and recruited a few young talents from AMD. And yet, as it is common knowledge, nothing came of it; and then, Sun was acquired by Oracle. Until now, Oracle has not commented on this, but (almost) nobody believes that Oracle boss Larry Ellison would take such an adventurous course and mess with Intel - that’s more like something Pad Gelsinger at EMC² would do.