'Broadwell'-based chip to help Intel challenge low-power rivals

Intel has updated its road map with a new, low-power server chip to help it ward off competition from Calxeda and other makers of low-power chips.

The new chip will be based on Broadwell, a microarchitecture to be introduced next year as the successor to Intel’s Haswell design. But this processor will be a system-on-chip, setting it apart from Intel’s other Xeon server products.

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SOCs combine several components onto a single chip to reduce power consumption and space requirements. In the server market, they’re often used in micro-servers, a type of low-power server used for large-scale, online workloads.

Intel already offers SOCs in its Atom family of chips, but Atom has its own microarchitecture. The new chip announced Monday will be Intel’s first SOC that uses the same microarchitecture as its more powerful Xeon chips.

Intel roadmapIntelIntel’s roadmap for low-power server chips, presented Julu 22. It shows the upcoming Broadwell SOC straddling the Xeon and Atom families.

“With this new product, we’ll be delivering the best of both worlds: high performance and high density,” said Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s data center and connected systems group, at an Intel event in San Francisco.

She didn’t give a name for the new chip but said it will ship next year. It will be manufactured on a 14-nanometer process and include integrated I/O, networking, and application accelerators, Bryant said.

The chip essentially allows Intel to straddle the gap between its current Atom processors, which focus on low power consumption, and its Xeon processors, which are tuned for higher performance but use more electricity.

“They’re trying to cover the whole market. They’ve decided it’s better to have a little bit of overlap than to have any gaps,” said industry analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64.

The chip comes at a time of heightened competition in the server market. Rivals such as Calxeda and Advanced Micro Devices are building low-power SOCs using designs from UK chip architecture company ARM, and the new chip from Intel is its latest response to that trend.

Intel didn’t say on Monday if the new chip will be branded as a Xeon or an Atom. Its place between the two product lines could create some confusion for customers, Brookwood said, though he thinks Intel will eventually decide on Xeon.

It’s not the only chip Intel has for low-power servers. The company recently began shipping a Xeon E3 processor based on the Haswell core, and versions of that chip based on Broadwell are expected next year. They will be “general-purpose” Xeons, as opposed to SOCs specifically for low-power, high-density systems.

In its Atom family, Intel will begin shipping a new chip later this year code-named Avoton, based on a new chip core known as Silvermont. Compared with the current Atom core, Avoton will offer “a 3x improvement in power at the same performance level, or a 5x increase in performance at the same power,” according to Bryant.

“Also with Avoton, we’re adding ethernet functions and accelerators for various workloads,” she said.

Avoton will be manufactured using a 22-nanometer process. It will be followed next year by Denverton, a similar chip but manufactured on a 14-nanometer process. The numbers refer to the dimensions of circuits printed on the chips, and smaller numbers generally mean faster, lower-power transistors.

MTV's The Challenge: Rivals II First-Look: Exes CT Tamburello, Diem Brown Reunite

The new season of MTV's The Challenge: Rivals 2 will present 32 new and familiar faces with a whole new slew of challenges starting on Wednesday, July 10. But one thing that will undoubtedly remain the same?

The season -- shot in Thailand -- will be filled with plenty of drama between ex-lovers, longstanding enemies, and new and old players.

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"It was old school kids versus new school kids," newcomer Theresa Gonzalez told Us Weekly. "From the very beginning it was a battle of veterans and us rookies."

"There was a lot of judgment going into it because we'd seen each other on TV before," Jemmye Carroll told Us (the Mississippi-bred reality star was previously on Real World: New Orleans). "It was one big mosh pit."

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And a rowdy one at that! In an exclusive preview clip from the season, the guys partner up with their rivals in a challenge that forces them to literally cling onto one another for dear life. While one half of each pair hangs by a rope several feet over a huge body of water, their partner leaps at them from increasingly long distances on a pier.

"If I'm going to get the opportunity to repeatedly run into him as hard as I can and squeeze him as hard as I can, I'm going to go ahead and strap the ginger up," resident bad boy CT Tamburello says in the clip, referring to partner Wes Bergmann.

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"Unnecessary," Wes shoots back, later telling the cameras, "I really don't feel all that happy about having CT run into my arms, but it is what it is. It's therapeutic, and we're gonna work this sh-t out."

"CT and I have the longest relationship of anyone in the house and it didn't start well from day one," Wes told Us Weekly. "So now it's going into a decade of us going country to country, not getting along."

The series will also see CT reuniting with ex Diem Brown, who finished up chemotherapy for her second bout of ovarian cancer just two weeks before filming the show, which will make for a "roller coaster" ride of a season, according to Brown.

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"I really wanted to come back because I never wanted cancer to take away an opportunity and I wanted to feel passionately alive, to jump off buildings and be as active as other girls," she told Us. "I had a hard time feeling normal. …I started realizing I have a lot more battle scars from the second time with cancer that I didn't realize."

"Putting yourself in this show, a lot of your insecurities are brought to the forefront," she added. "There were some deja vu moments."

MTV's The Challenge: Rivals 2 will premiere on MTV on Wednesday, July 10 at 10 p.m. EST.

Hulu Owners Call Off Sale, Instead Pledging to Invest to Take On Rivals

The three companies that mutually own Hulu — 21st Century Fox, the Walt Disney Company and NBCUniversal — said Friday that instead of selling the pioneering streaming video Web site, they would make a new investment of $750 million and use Hulu’s technology to compete against other online distributors like Netflix. The announcement represented an anticlimactic end to months of sale speculation and disappointed bidders like DirecTV, that were prepared to pay about $1 billion for the site.

The Web site’s owners concluded, according to a person with close ties to the negotiation process, that the “equity value in the long run outstrips the sale value.”

“The future of Hulu is bright, and if the future of Hulu is bright, then we should hold onto it,” Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney, told reporters at the Allen & Company media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Mr. Iger said that the decision had nothing to do with the bids for the video service, calling them “good, solid offers.”

Speculation about the fate of Hulu has hung over the conference, an annual gathering of top media and technology companies normally known for the deals that emerge from lunches and quiet meetings held at the mountain resort. Mr. Iger had been seen huddling with Chase Carey, the president of 21st Century Fox, during the conference.

Mr. Carey checked out of the resort shortly before the Hulu decision was made public. But the company’s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, was still there, and he told reporters afterward that he was “very pleased.”

The decision to stick together was made, he said, after getting Hulu’s operators — meaning Fox and Disney — on “the same page.” Seemingly casting some blame in Disney’s direction, Mr. Murdoch added, “I was always on that page.”

The companies have clashed repeatedly over Hulu for years; meanwhile, the third owner, NBCUniversal, has been a silent partner since being acquired by Comcast in early 2011. (At that time the government barred Comcast from being involved in Hulu’s business affairs, for fear that it would try to impose restrictions on Hulu to protect its core cable business.)

Hulu’s board explored a sale once before, after receiving an unsolicited bid in mid-2011, but decided to call off that sale a few months later.

For 21st Century Fox and Disney, holding onto Hulu keeps them intimately involved in the future of streaming video, a field dominated by Netflix and Amazon. The companies had little to say on Friday about how their decision to keep the site will affect the site’s tens of millions of monthly users. Currently, Hulu has a free Web site, with streams of TV episodes supported by advertisements, and a subscriber-only part of the site, called Hulu Plus, with a greater number of episodes.

While the free site is not going anywhere anytime soon, the companies might further emphasize Hulu Plus, according to people at the companies who spoke on the condition of anonymity while discussing confidential conversations. Its owners have visibly started moving down that path by placing limits on the number of shows that are streamed free the day after they are shown on television.

What the companies are almost certain to do, these employees said, is seek to turn Hulu into an industrywide “TV Everywhere” service. “TV Everywhere,” the concept that cable and satellite subscribers should be able to stream shows and channels whenever and wherever they want, has been talked about for years as a way to retain subscribers — and counter the threat from Netflix — but programmers like Fox, and distributors like DirecTV, have struggled to make it a reality.

The owners believe Hulu could help by becoming a hub for “TV Everywhere,” perhaps by adopting a login system that verifies cable and satellite subscribers’ identities and then serves up programming for them. This would be bad news for households that use the site to avoid paying for cable, but potentially good news for the people who do pay, because it would provide broader on-demand access to the hundreds of television shows that are hard to find online now.

Hulu will also continue to increase the number of original shows that it commissions, in a strategy similar to that of Netflix, which has gained attention for expensive shows like “House of Cards.” Skepticism abounded on Friday about how competitive Hulu can really be, given Netflix and Amazon’s deep pockets. But much of the $750 million infusion of cash announced by Hulu’s owners on Friday will be spent on program acquisition and program development, according to people at the companies. The money will also be spent on marketing and technology.

Some participants at the Allen & Company conference this week questioned whether Disney and Fox ever truly intended to sell Hulu, and instead used the sales process to establish a value for the video service.

DirecTV, believed by some to have been the front-runner in the bidding this summer, declined to comment on the owners’ decision not to sell. So did Time Warner Cable, which had proposed that it become a minority owner of the site alongside the other owners. Bloomberg reported late Friday that the cable company remained in talks with the owners about acquiring a stake, and said that a deal could be reached by the end of July. ga

Rivals: Google should be regulated like telcos and electricity companies

Companies who have been assessing Google’s planned remedies to anti-competitive practices called on the European Commission on Tuesday to reject them and to consider regulating Internet search.

 

Google has been under investigation by the Commission since November 2010 after rivals accused the search giant of setting its algorithm to direct users to its own services by reducing the visibility of competing websites and services. It was also accused of content-scraping and imposing contractual restrictions that prevent advertisers from moving their online campaigns to rival search engines.

 

On April 25 Google proposed specific measures to address these complaints and rivals and interested parties were invited by the Commission to “market test” them. That testing period ends on Thursday.

 

However, Michael Weber, CEO of Hot Map, said the testing period had not been long enough. “You cannot do a serious scientific study in one month,” he said. Weber and others asked the Commission for a two- to three-month extension, but were only granted four extra weeks.

 

Weber was unimpressed with Google’s remedies and said that a formal statement of objections from the European Commission’s antitrust department would have been better than the current negotiations.

 

Google has proposed to label its preferred links to its own sites in search results. But publishers say that this will mislead consumers into thinking these were somehow tailor-made results for search queries and interests, thereby causing even greater harm to competition.

 

Google also proposes to include links to rival search engines for specialist restaurant search results that generate revenue for Google. Google’s paid-for services would be separated from general search and treated more like advertising.

 

Finally, Google has agreed to remove exclusivity provisions from all future contracts and any legacy advertising contracts and will offer tools to prevent Web scraping by allowing content owners to opt out.

 

But many complainants who met in Brussels on Tuesday to present their position on the remedies said that search is such an important Internet tool that it should be regulated like a telecommunications or electric utilities.

 

“Everyone relies on it,” said Weber. “Unfortunately no one planning the digital single market thought that a single company would control access to the Internet.” Google has 95 percent of the search market in the E.U.

 

Thomas Vinje, legal counsel and spokesman for FairSearch Europe, which represents some of the complainants, said that in putting Google’s remedies forward for market testing, the Commission made clear that it thought they were “palatable” and “worthy of discussion.” But he, too, called on the Commission to reject the remedies.

 

Many complainants said the remedies don’t go far enough since they won’t apply to redirected searches to new top level domains such as .fly or .hotel.

 

Others thought that the remedies wouldn’t make much difference to Google anyway. “Google will exploit the loopholes. Look at what they do with regard to tax,” said Kate Sutton, commercial director of Streetmap.

 

Meanwhile hundreds of publishers and their trade associations wrote an open letter calling on Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia to reject Google’s draft remedies completely.

 

“As a minimum requirement, Google must hold all services, including its own, to exactly the same standards, using exactly the same crawling, indexing, ranking, display and penalty algorithms,” said one of the signatories, Helmut Heinen, president of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers.

 

Feedback from the market test will be taken into account in the Commission’s final analysis. However, it is the Commission that Google’s remedies must satisfy, not any other party involved. If a solution isn’t found, the Commission could still fine the company up to 10 percent of its annual global revenue.