But the Acer Chromebook makes up for its quirks and drawbacks with its low price, retailing at just $199.99. The HP model is a bit more expensive, at $329.99 – no doubt due to its big screen, once again. That price tag could be HP's undoing, considering that a larger display is pretty much all the Pavilion has going for it over the other Chromebook models.Then again, although Google still hasn't released any hard figures on Chromebook sales, they may have the makings of a sleeper hit. The $249 Samsung Series 3 Chromebook – the most popular model to date – topped Amazon's list of bestselling laptops throughout the holiday shopping season, and as of Monday, the retail giant's own stock was sold out and they were only available through affiliate sellers at jacked-up prices. Other retailers have only just replenished their supplies.Given the overall misery in the PC market, any product with sell-through like that is bound to look attractive to laptop makers. Little wonder, then, that HP would release a Chromebook now – if only to say, "Me, too!"
Hard drive sales will take a nose drive in 2013, according to a report by the market analysts at IHS."Facing a relentless onslaught from tablets, smartphones and solid state drives (SSD), global hard disk drive (HDD) market revenue in 2013 will decline by about 12 percent this year," IHS reported in an email on Monday announcing its latest analysis."The HDD industry will face myriad challenges in 2013," wrote IHS storage-systems analyst Fang Zhang. "Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favor smartphones and tablets."In addition, said Zhang, as SSD prices continue to drop they'll take an increasing chunk of market share away from conventional hard drives, helping to drive down HDD revenues. IHS projects total HDD sales of $32.7bn in 2013, down from $37.1bn in 2012. Revenues are projected to shrink a bit further next year, down to $32.0bn.Those projections, of course, in no way, shape, or form mean that HDDs are going away anytime soon. As IHS notes, spinning storage still has a substantial advantage over SDDs not only in terms of cost-per-gigabyte, but also in per-unit capacity. As an example, they cite the five-plus-terabyte helium-filled HDD that Western Digital is expected to launch soon.
"While Seagate had a 50 percent share of the enterprise market last year," IHS writes, "the introduction by Western Digital of its new helium technology could catapult the manufacturer to the top at the end of 2013, dethroning Seagate in the process."IHS also points out that optical-drive manufacturers are facing their own challenges, what with laptop makers eschewing them in order to create slim Ultrabooks – even desktop PCs such as Apple's anorexic iMac line are saying farewell – and with consumers turning more to video streaming over DVDs and Blu-ray discs.Analysis Non-profit consortium CINECA has deployed what may be the greenest supercomputer in the world at its Bologna centre in Italy. Called Eurora, the new machine claims it can perform 3,150 megaflops per watt, compared to the 2,499.44 achieved by Green-500 king the Beacon supercomputer at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and University of Tennessee.
CINECA is owned by 57 Italian universities and other institutions, and has the largest computing centre in Italy.Eurora was built by Eurotech and is a prototype of its Aurora Tigon product range. The supercomputer consists of 64 nodes, each of which has two Intel Xeon E5-2687W CPUs, two Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU accelerator cards, an Altera Stratix V FPGA, 16GB DDR3 RAM and 160GB in solid-state storage.According to Eurotech, each node, similar in size to a laptop, is 30 times more powerful and 15 times more energy-efficient than a desktop PC. Each node is capable of 1,700 gigaflops per second.High energy-efficiency is achieved in various ways. The most obvious is water cooling. Each node is built like a sandwich: the main board is underneath, a water-cooled heat sink sits in the middle, and the accelerator boards are on top. RAM is soldered to the board rather than socketed. The power supply is 48 volts DC, minimising power conversion steps. Water heated by the system can be converted to energy for other purposes.
Underneath Eurora is a lot of pipework, leading to a pump and heat extraction unit. When you plug a node into the rack, it makes several fluid connections for cooling along with the usual electric connections, though Eurotech assured us that failsafe devices prevent the possibility of a spill. The metal of the heat sink is also effective in absorbing heat, allowing time for clean shutdown in the event of a pump failure.Behind all the green talk at the Bologna press event is another battle, though. Nvidia is fighting Intel for share of the hybrid computer market. A hybrid computer is one that combines traditional CPUs with accelerator boards packed with many simpler processing cores, all of which achieves more power-efficient parallel processing. This was a market Nvidia had almost to itself with its Tesla GPU boards, but Intel now offers its own Many Integrated Core (MIC) product, called Xeon Phi.Each Xeon Phi core is x86 compatible, which makes it more familiar to programmers - although Nvidia says that its Cuda C programming language for its own chips is now popular in its own right. After a long preview period, Xeon Phi is now generally available.
“We’re very competitive in performance,” Intel multi-core evangelist James Reinders told us. “We have higher performance bandwidth. We have the best power efficiency. But programmability is the key. Because it is x86-based and we boot Linux on the cards, you can run whatever you want there.”Nvidia says its GPUs are more power-efficient, but given that Beacon topped the Green 500 with a Xeon Phi machine, the advantage cannot be overwhelming.It turns out that Eurora will be a key test for Nvidia’s solution versus that from Intel. Eurora is called a prototype because it will be used for a future tender, planned to begin in 2014, for a new CINECA supercomputer.Eurora itself will use Xeon Phi coprocessors as well as the Nvidia K20 GPU accelerators, this being a feature of the Tigon nodes. Each node supports either chip family, and one can be replaced with another. Currently Eurora has 128 K20 boards, since the Xeon Phi is not yet ready in the right small-form factor, but in a few months half those K20s may be replaced with Xeon Phi, or alternatively Xeon Phi nodes may be added, depending on what budget is available to CINECA.
“We have to go through a public tender. We cannot prefer a particular technology, we have to be open, because we are investing public money,” says CINECA’s Carlo Cavazzoni. “We need to test the technology in order to collect our own data, based on our own workload. From what we have seen up to now, the Kepler card has advantages in terms of pure performance, and Intel MIC on programmability. It is by far more easy to port an application for Xeon Phi. But this is a long story in HPC [High Performance Computing].”Might CINECA’s eventual tender include both Nvidia and Intel accelerator boards, like Eurora? “It is easier to manage a solution based on a single technology,” says Cavazzoni. “Probably at the end we have to choose.” Samsung laptops will no longer be irreparably destroyed when their users try to boot Linux on them, kernel chieftain Linus Torvalds made certain today.The brainboxes down at Ubuntu-maker Canonical penguinery issued a warning over the incompatibiity and have been tackling the nuclear bug that destroyed the whole Samusung laptop after just a single attempt to boot Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10.Reports from distressed owners detailed how the laptops would completely corrupt and black out after attempts to boot Ubuntu in UEFI mode. Samsung laptops in the 300E5C, NP700Z5C, NP700Z7C and 530U3C series were affected.
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