Thursday, September 16, 2010

Future of Apple Mac will be powered by ARM chip in 2012.

Apple's phenomenal success with iPhone later iPad and complete focus on iOS and putting OSX into back-burner, acquiring two of ARM startups/companies are some of the symptoms Apple is showing that it is planning planting ARM based processor into OSX hardware.
The real highlight is Apple TV, it is moved away from Intel to Arm based A4 chip. Recent release of ARM A15 (Eagle) Multicore chip is real highlight. Couple of working NVidia Tegra mulit-core chip (though it is not A15 based) tablet tells that ARM 15 is right choice for Apple's Mac portfolio. The good thing is ARM A15 is multi core which can be scaled from single to many. Apple was not afraid of moving from IBM PowerPC to Intel, same thing would happen once again from Intel to ARM A15 chip. My guess is 2012 Mac line would be refreshed with ARM based Apple's own chip.

In between, Apple may try AMD with its fusion chip.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

EC2 local-ip vs public-ip

In EC2 there are 2 ips and 2 hosts ---
running ec2metadata
displays instance descriptions and 4 items (Actually 2, is very important to setup inter cluster

1) local-ipv4: <<>>
2) public-ipv4: <<>>

Other 2 are 3) local-hostname: <<>> 4) public-hostname: <<>>

local-ipv4 is the one used to other Ec2 instance.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

ARM vs Intel vs AMD

Yesterday ARM unveiled Coretex A15 (aka Eagle) design press news is here . This news sounds really good to me. ARM is inserting itself into x86 server territory (already Google is looking for low cost low powered processer technology esp ARM into its Data center and Facebook also interested in this direction).

So what really a problem with x86?, initially google mastered and proved we don't need Xeon level processor for running its software, its tested and proved commodity hardware based approach is good to run great business with enough redundancy and innovative architecture. So for every data center, one of the biggest problem is power consumption this is where ARM is great at it.

So when Google and Facebook moved to ARM and ARM is a great king at Mobile and intel would have stiff competition from ARM which should have been from AMD.

There are other issues like software compatibility but looking at the datacenter and Linux domination, it is not tough for Linux/Unix guys moving to ARM and Windows would eventually going to support ARM.

Intel is not sitting idle either and looking at Sandy Bridge and it is ability to master its process technology (32 nm to 22 nm plan) so ultimately it is a good news for customer.