September 21st, 2006

AMD Global Vision Conference roundup

Posted by Dan Farber @ 10:07 am

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General

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I put together a photo gallery from my visit to the AMD Global Vision Conference this week, and bundled all the blog posts together in one spot. While there were some commercials for AMD’s products and technologies, especially the new Torrenza Initiative, the majority of the conference was smart people talking about important issues, from education and the far reaching impact life science research to innovation and the future of entertainment. Check it out. One of the highlights from the event was performances by Meninos do Morumbi, a music troupe from Brazil that has helped thousands of children in Sao Paulo turn their lives around.

September 20th, 2006

AMD opens up crown jewels with Torrenza Initiative

Posted by Dan Farber @ 10:11 pm

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Management

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At the AMD Global Vision Conference today, Marty Seyer, senior vice president of the commercial business unit, touted the Torrenza Initiative, which he said would enable the development and deployment of application-specific co-processors and other chips that work alongside AMD64 processors in multi-socket systems. First revealed in June, Torrenza basically opens up AMD’s crown jewels–Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technology–to OEMs, providing a standard socket that can be applied to many kinds of tasks.

Marty Seyer explains how Torrenza will provide OEMs with new opportunities to differentiate their products.

Seyer was joined on stage by representatives from Fujitsu Siemens, Cray, IBM and Sun, who provided endorsements for Torrenza as an open initiative that will spur innovation.

"It’s not something we thought of when we created the technology," AMD CEO Hector Ruiz told me. "It will be viral, and it’s the most significant technology we have ever made. I can see the person in a garage benefiting and exploiting our billion dollar investment. There are literally hundreds of thousand of things to do [with the technology]."

AMD hopes to foster a vibrant ecosystem of custom silicon around its platform via Torrenza, extending the life of servers and allowing OEMs to differentiate their products via the common socket, as well as saving R&D costs.
 
Joseph Reger, CTO of Fujitsu Siemens said his company is already using the Torrenza socket to connect two 2-socket servers, turning them into a 4-way, or 8-core SMP. "I am a fan of the x86,  but is most important architectures stifle innovation to some extent. If you open it up sufficiently, you can put significant innovation in there," Reger said. 
  
Jan Silverman, senior vice president of corporate strategy and business development at Cray, plans to use the Torrenza socket to build a petaflop supercomputer with 24,000 Opteron sockets that will take a custom multithreaded processor, dropping the price per socket from about $127,000 to $10,000 per socket.

IBM is designing a supercomputer, code named Roadrunner, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that uses Cell processors as an accelerator to the Opteron, said Dave Turek, vice president of Deep Computing.  Here is IBM’s description of Roadrunner:

Designed specifically to handle a broad spectrum of scientific and commercial applications, the supercomputer design will include new, highly sophisticated software to orchestrate over 16,000 AMD Opteron processor cores and over 16,000 Cell B.E. processors in tackling some of the most challenging problems in computing today. The revolutionary supercomputer will be capable of a peak performance of over 1.6 petaflops (or 1.6 thousand trillion calculations per second).

The machine is to be built entirely from commercially available hardware and based on the Linux operating system. IBM System x 3755 servers based on AMD Opteron technology will be deployed in conjunction with IBM BladeCenter H systems with Cell B.E. technology. Each system used is designed specifically for high performance implementations.

Designed also with space and power consumption issues in mind, the system will employ advanced cooling and power management technologies and will occupy only 12,000 square feet of floor space, or approximately the size of three basketball courts.

"The architecture allows us to bring together a consortium of players to develop software for accelerators," Turek said. "Frankly, I don’t know what I would have done with the Cell processor if this didn’t come along."

It remains to be seen if Torrenza becomes a Trojan Horse that brings the AMD and the Opteron deeper into enterprises, at the expense of rival Intel. AMD and its partners will learn as they go, and will likely be surprised by what developers bring to market for the Torrenza socket. On the software side, some work will need to be done to offload workloads to the appropriate processors in a straightforward and consistent way.

September 20th, 2006

Robert Rodriguez: Digital film making evangelist

Posted by Dan Farber @ 2:19 pm

Categories: AMD Global Vision, Entertainment, General

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Film director Robert Rodriguez is living proof of how technology is reshuffling the Hollywood deck. At AMD’s Global Vision Conference, the Austin-based filmmaker discussed his anti-Hollywood digital film making credo and technology focus and previewed a clip of his new movie, "Planet Terror," which is due in theaters on April 6, 2007. The movie is part of a double feature that will be shown along with Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” which are together are know as Grind House. "It’s a throwback to lurid entertainment using high tech to make a low budget looking movie," Rodriquez said. The clip indeed looked like a lurid low budget movie from the 1970s, but with the violence, gore and language of today’s edgy films.

"The industry is so behind what is happening. When you get outside of that you can come up with new ways to do things," Rodriquez said.
Desktop film making technology is taking the creative process out of the hands of the studios and putting it into the hands of people outside the studio, he added. For example, if he needs to shoot at night and in the rain with shiny pavement and cars, it only requires a green screen. The rest is digitally layered in, saving actors from getting wet and lowering the cost to deliver a product to theaters. With digital technology, he can see what will appear on the screen immediately and have the capability to manipulate the bits on the fly. He is an evangelist for digital film making and talked about how he was influenced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and how he has infected other directors, like Oliver Stone, with the high-definition digital video bug.

Rodriguez, 38, started making movies in his back yard when he was 12, and produced his first feature film, El Mariachi, in 1992 for $7,000. "Now I could make it for $70 bucks," he estimated. Digital technology is at the core of Rodriquez’s Troublemaker Studio. "Technology can help you create happy accidents–you are writer, director, photographer, sound mixer. It’s not that I am better than anybody…I just know I will make it wrong in all the right ways that will charm people make it human and not make it feel manufactured. The technology makes it possible."  Rodriquez said he has been mixing his own movies in his garage since Spy Kids 2. "Technology has gotten so fast, it’s waiting for me [to catch up]," he concluded.

September 20th, 2006

What makes us tick

Posted by Dan Farber @ 11:14 am

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General

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Quote of the day: Speaking at AMD’s Global Vision Conference, V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and a professor with the psychology department and neurosciences program at the University of California, San Diego, was talking about the assymetry of the brain–the left hemisphere is more conformist and the right more of a devil’s advocate. His distilled version of what makes us tick: "All human nature rises from the push-pull antagonism of the two brain hemispheres." Combine that with the strands of DNA competing for survival and you have the dynamic underlying all of human history.

September 20th, 2006

Wal-Mart CMO: Amazon is meaningless to us

Posted by Dan Farber @ 7:30 am

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General, Web Technology

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John Fleming spent five years running Walmart.com before taking on the job as chief marketing officer for all of Wal-Mart, which has 6,500 stores, more than 60,000 U.S. suppliers, 176 million in-store customers every week and 1.8 million employees worldwide. However, Walmart.com is merely a small blip in the over picture. Speaking at AMD’s Global Vision Conference, Fleming said that his former roost is more of tool to drive loyalty than a key engine of commerce. Despite the fact that Walmart.com generates a fraction of Amazon’s annual revenue, Fleming said the rival online superstore is "meaningless" to Wal-Mart, which generates over $300 billion in revenue year–compared to Amazon’s $10 billion. With online accounting for less than one percent of revenue Wal-Mart can treat cyberspace as marketing tool.

Fleming said that his experience at Walmart.com taught him the value of the customer experience, such as placing buying guides on the relevant product pages rather than on a front door. He is taking those lessons into the physical stores. "We are taking the same thought process into the stores, with layouts, adjacencies and navigation," Fleming said. "We have a TV network in store, an in the past we ran ads to give cusomers information. Now we are moving the TVs to the shelves and have specific product information that relates to what customers are doing in their shopping experience."  He added, "Time is the currency for customers. Stores can be chaotic. We are finding ways to improve the [shopping] experience using the online channel."

September 19th, 2006

Scott McNealy reveals the biggest challenge on the planet

Posted by Dan Farber @ 5:46 pm

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General, Web Technology

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Quote of the day: Scott McNealy, current chairman and former CEO piñata at Sun (pictured below with AMD Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz at the AMD Global Vision Conference:

"Who’s who, what’s what and who gets access to what is the biggest challenge on the planet today."

As usual, McNealy has a way a capturing hyperbolically one of the truisms at the intersection of technology and society. In 1999 called consumer privacy issues a red herring, proclaiming that "you have zero privacy anyway…get over it." The planet has many challenges, and although I wouldn’t put digital identity management at the top of the list, it looms large as a barrier to fulfilling the promise of the Internet.

September 19th, 2006

Dr. James Watson reflects on DNA research in the 21st century

Posted by Dan Farber @ 2:52 pm

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General

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One of the highlights of AMD’s Global Vision Conference was an interview Paul Saffo conducted with Dr. James Watson, who along with Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA more than fifty years ago. In this new century, the full fruit of the Watson-Crick discovery is being unleashed in a life sciences revolution. Watson, who at 78 serves as Chancellor of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, was full of vigor and humor. “At 78, I have probably lost 25 IQ points, so I sort of live off the past,” he quipped. Watson doesn’t use a computer or email, but he is well aware of how technology has impacted DNA sequencing and the practical application of his discovery.  

Watson also proclaimed that he finds it very boring to be with dumb people. “You just go where the excitement is,” he said. On the other hand, he doesn’t necessarily look down on ‘dumb’ people. It may not be their fault that they aren’t clever–their genetic code may limit their capacity to dazzle Dr. Watson. 

Watson said that this century will be marked by the coming together of biology and psychology. “The biggest challenge is the human brain, which is psychology,” Watson said. “It may take us a century. We don’t know when we will know how information is stored on the brain.”

He expects over the next 10 to 15 years that we will be able to read human genetic messages. “It will be profoundly interesting to understand why people behave differently and have different capabilities,” Watson said.  “We can dissect the essence of schizophrenia, bipolarism and autism to find out how the brain doesn’t work. The essense of schizophrenia is the brain can’t function. You are seeing the essence of stupidity. The same systems tweaked slightly the other way will be the essence of intelligence. We can find out why some people can play piano better than others—just a better brain, you have to be bright to play Rachmaninoff. My goal would be in ten years everyone with a mental disease would get DNA diagnosis first.”

Watson was asked if there is a dark side to using DNA analysis to identity mental disease. Speaking from personal experience, Watson said, “We made so many mistakes in raising our child who is [mentally] compromised.”

He half-jokingly said that unsuccessful psychopaths are in prison, and the successful ones are in temporary employment agencies. “We could study metabolism and see developmental defects,” Watson said. “It’s not a choice to be a psychopath.”  He went on to say that bad luck and rolls of the genetic dice play a role in how people exist in society. “What if a person is born evil? What do you do? I don’t know. We may get to a point of realizing that some of our problems are due to our genes not working correctly, and that some people don’t fit into society the way they would like.”

Watson also said that he had given his DNA to several companies who say they plan to sequence it. “They can publish the whole thing, except any identifier of Alzheimer’s disease. Since you can’t do anything about it, I would rather have the illusion that I am not going to get it.”

He didn’t have kind words for those in power: “We are being run by rich trash without regard for the truth or reality,” he said. Like Lance Armstrong, Watson believes that more focus needs to be placed on curing cancer.  The easiest thing [in the next ten years] would be to stop cancer. We should have a real war on cancer, and we don’t have one now.” He also suggested that researchers focus more on asking why most people don’t get cancer, and finding the natural inhibitors.

Watson was asked for his opinion on the potential to delay the aging process. "It’s been pretty successful through plastic surgery," he joked. On a more serious note, he added, "Unless we deal with Alzheimers, the country won’t benefit from our living much longer."

September 19th, 2006

Latest update on Negroponte's $100 laptop

Posted by Dan Farber @ 10:35 am

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General, Government, Mobile, Open Source, Personal Technology, Web Technology, Wired & Wireless

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After by master of ceremonies, futurist Paul Saffo, noted that I was blogging at the AMD Global Vision Conference–to ensure that speakers didn’t say anything too controversial–Nicholas Negroponte took the stage to evangelize his One Laptop per Child non-profit, which got its first seed funding from AMD and the laptop uses a 500 MHz AMD processor. I covered Negroponte’s $100 laptop here in May.

Negroponte charted his history in trying to use technology to circumvent the challenges of educating children. “Education is a common denominator to making the world a better place,” he said. He is focused on primary education, the children for whom you could put a Playstation, Nintendo or Xbox in front of them and they’d throw away the manual and just start using it. “We need to build an education system that uses something that is seamless in a child’s life,” Negroponte said. Of the estimated one billion children in the world, 50 percent live in remote areas. “If a child is lucky, they go to school for two-and-a-half hours per day,” Negroponte said. “Teachers have a sixth grade education. They often don’t come in [to teach]. In one country, unnamed, one third of the teachers never show up.”

Negroponte showed the latest update of the $100 laptop (which will cost more than $100) and an image of a prototype power generator for the unit (above). Units will be available later this year for testing, and he hopes to deploy 5 to 10 million laptops in 2007 and 50 to 150 million in 2008. The anticipated price for the 2007 model is $138, going to down to $100 by the end of 2008 and getting to $50 in 2010, Negroponte said.
 
Most families in the countries target in the first wave don’t have the funds to pay for the laptops, but Negroponte said that governments will foot the bill. Governments are already spending hundreds of dollars per year per child on education. For about $1 per year in connection charges and $30 for the machine, prorated over five years, it’s miniscule compared to what they are spending today on education, Negroponte explained. He expects to sell laptops on eBay for $450, allow for a $350 tax deduction and using the surplus to buy machine for needy children.

He pointed to the state of Maine, which provide anecdotal evidence that a laptop for every child can work wonders. When the idea was proposed, about 80 percent of teachers were against it. A few years into the program, which was driven by then governor Angus King, not one teacher is against it, Negroponte said, and truancy has gone to zero, which is a stretch.

Negroponte also said he was feeling a lot of negative energy from competitive forces. He didn’t stay around long enough for me to ask him what companies or agencies are trying to mess with his plan to have a connected laptop for every child in the world within the next five years. You have to wonder why anyone would be against such a plan, but with hundreds of millions of laptops in play, even cheap ones, money and politics are always in play.

September 19th, 2006

Second Life plays AMD vs. Intel

Posted by Dan Farber @ 7:20 am

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General, Hardware Infrastructure, Personal Technology, Web Technology

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During a session exploring Second Life at the AMD Global Vision Conference, Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka (pictured below) outlined the basics of the virtual world, which he said attracted 750,000 users in August and is growing at 15 percent per month. Unfortunately for AMD, Ondrejka said that his company has switched from AMD dual core Operton’s to Intel’s new Core Duo chips, which he said have a superior CPU/$ ratio, including the cost of power to run servers. However, he threw AMD a bone, saying that he was looking forward the quad-core AMD chips, which aren’t due until mid-2007.

I asked AMD CTO Phil Hester when he would get Second Life back in the fold. He acknowledged the horserace, and noted that Second Life’s benchmarks are atypical–100 percent utilization on a 24×7 basis. Hester hopes that Ondrejka will take a look at the new Rev F Opterons, which add new AMD-V virtualization technology and Double Data Rate (DDR2) memory. Intel also has hardware virtualization and is FB-DIMM (fully buffered dual inline memory modules), a sequel to DDR2 that provides higher capacity.

Ondrejka, of course, likes the competition between AMD and Intel. It pushes the technology, drives up performance in Second Life’s 250 square miles of virtual world and lowers the cost to deliver the bits.

September 19th, 2006

Lance Armstrong leads off AMD's Global Vision Conference

Posted by Dan Farber @ 6:27 am

Categories: AMD Global Vision, General, Government, Web Technology

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This week I am attending AMD’s Global Vision Conference at the posh Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. The agenda is focused on innovations and global impacts, and features a diversity of speakers, including DNA co-discoverer James Watson, Dreamworks’ mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, Wal-Mart CMO John Fleming, Sun chief scientist John Gage, Lenovo Chairman Yang Yuanqing, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, Google research director Peter Norvig, VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenbaum, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik, futurist Paul Saffo. and of course, AMD Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz. That’s just a sample.

The conference opened with Lance Armstrong, who’s cycling and cancer foundation work have been supported by AMD. It was Armstrong’s 35th birthday and two weeks away from the 10th anniversary of his diagnosis of testicular cancer.  He noted that the National Cancer Institute’s budget has been cut for the first time in 35 years, despite the fact the 600,000 people are year in the U.S. lose their lives to cancer. “We spent in seven months in Iraq what was spent on cancer research in last 35 years,” Armstrong said. One-third of those lives could have been saved if there were access to care and information.

“We know what to do but we don’t do it. While 80 percent of cancer patients do research, only 4 percent have access to information in their place of treatment,” Armstrong said. “We want every treatment center to have a broadband connection to the Internet.” He noted that empowering patients with information may not be what doctors want, given how a patient armed with information could require much more engagement from the medical establishment.  Electronic patient records is another area that needs investment, Armstrong said, pointed to all the records that are now underwater post-Katrina.   
 
One way in which Armstrong hopes to have an impact in fighting cancer is through political action, starting with those who wear the now famous yellow wristbands. So far, 61 million “Live Strong” wrist bands have been distributed. At the outset, Armstrong and Nike Chairman Phil Knight, the source of the yellow bands, didn’t think that the item would have any impact. “We want to take the audience of 60 million people and capture 5 to 10 percent who say that [fighting cancer] is their fight. My dream is to put together 3 or 4 million people–today we have 2 million people.” And, those 2 million can be reached and galvanized instantly via the Internet. “With the 2008 election we will ask a lot of questions, and I look forward to effecting change on a global level. I think we can chip away and let the people of America know it is a priority for me,” he said.

During a Q&A at the end of his remarks, Armstrong was asked about performance enhancement supplements. “The idea of performance enhancing is a tricky term,” Armstrong said. “Vitamin C, a great team, a nap, altitude sleeping are performance enhancing. There are deadly dangerous drugs we should be rid of.” Monitoring athletes 24×7 is the only way to deal with the problem, he added. “No drug can clear the body in 24 hours. If an athlete declares where they are, that is the way to police them.”

Armstrong was not complimentary of Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency.  Recently Pound claimed that disclosures of positive tests for banned substances by former teammates of Armstrong hurt the seven-time Tour de France champion’s reputation.  
 
In a recent New York Times story, Armstrong stated, "Some of us are born with 4 cylinders, and some of us are born with 12.” He obviously believes has the 12 cylinders and said that his battle with cancer made him mentally tougher, while competitors resorted to doping to get an edge. Whatever the case, Armstrong has a new mission that is more far important than any of his cycling career or any controversies surrrounding it: "[Fighting cancer] is the only thing bigger than seven Tour de France victories."