21 Sep 2007 14:11
Rackable Systems used the Intel Developer Forum to introduce its ICE Cube, a new modular data centre.
One such Cube was parked outside of the conferenece, which started on Tuesday and ended on Thursday in San Francisco.
One ICE Cube can contain up to 11,200 processing cores or up to 4.1PB (petabyte) of storage.
Rackable Systems chief executive Mark Barrenechea stands inside an ICE Cube, which is contained inside a standard 40 feet by eight feet ISO shipping container.
An ICE Cube can be designed, built and delivered in a matter of weeks and can house up to 1,400 of Rackable Systems' Eco-Logical rack-mount, DC-powered servers or storage systems. The servers use Intel Xeon chips.
The mobile ICE Cubes are designed to provide flexibility for rapid expansion to areas where traditional data-centre facilities are unavailable, cost-prohibitive or cannot otherwise capitalise on alternative energy sources.
Sebastian Thurn, the professor overseeing Stanford University's Junior project brought the driverless car to IDF.
Junior, which uses radar to detect obstacles it must avoid, is competing in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Urban Challenge. The competition is scheduled for 3 November.
Intel is among the car's sponsors.
Onboard the driverless car are blade computers with Intel Core 2 Duo processors and rack-mountable systems with Intel Core 2 Quad processors.
Laser rangefinders mounted on the top and side of the vehicle spin more than 10 times per second, bouncing light off surrounding objects and giving the car the information it needs to avoid obstacles.
A monitor inside the car offers a visual representation of the information the vehicle is receiving from its sensors. It shows the read-outs of the radar and laser rangefinders, with Junior at the centre of the image on the second floor of a building in San Francisco.
The main laser rangefinder, a RIEGL LMS-Q120 Lidar mounted on the roof of the 2006 Volkswagen Passat wagon, keeps a watch for obstacles immediately in the vehicle's path and allows the vehicle to determine lane markings from differences in brightness on the ground.
An emergency fail-safe "kill button" is mounted prominently on the side of the vehicle for quick shut-off in case of unauthorised actions, malfunctions or "robo-rage".
The inside of the vehicle has been left largely unchanged, aside from another fail-safe "kill button" and basic controls to switch individual tasks from computer control to human operation.
The car is emblazoned with the logos of its sponsors and supporters.
In the rear of the vehicle sits the computing gear that manipulates the vehicle and its information. Most of the hardware is consumer-grade electronics available at any computer store.
This is a whole wafer of Intel Penryn chips, set to come out this year.
Penryn chips are made on the 45nm (nanometre) process, which means the chips are smaller and faster than current chips built on the 65nm process.
This Stoakley platform motherboard will go inside servers. It includes a 45nm quad- or dual-core chip and a lot of memory. Stoakley-based servers are set to ship towards the year's end.
Bonetrail is another motherboard platform for the 45nm generation of chips.
Here is a side view of Skulltrail, a gaming platform. This will go into boxes for hard-core gamers.
Here is a motherboard showcasing the X38 chipset, which goes into high-end PCs.
This is another, very colourful, demo motherboard.
Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, set high expectations for the Nehalem processor family that will begin shipping in 2008.
Sun used IDF to show off an as-yet-unannounced server with four quad-core Intel processors.
John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, said the system, which is 3.5 inches thick, has all of the memory, backup systems and storage that competitors' servers do, but is half the height.
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, speaking on Tuesday, reminisced about the chipmaker's history and projected that Moore's Law has another 10 to 15 years of life in it.
Intel announced that USB 3.0 will transfer data 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0 technology. USB 3.0 uses both copper and optical connections and probably will arrive in devices in 2009 or 2010, according to Gelsinger.
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