NEWS&ANALYSIS
the
buzz
SUPERCOMPUTERS
Cray offers
low-cost system
CRAY THIS WEEK WILL ANNOUNCE
the general availability of the XD1
supercomputer, a system that
runs Linux and
is powered by
Advanced Micro
Devices’ Opteron processors.
Pricing will start at less
than $100,000—quite an
adjustment for a company
whose only previous product, the
X1, sold for $1 million to $100
million to the high end of the
supercomputer market.
Cray moved in this direction
in February when it purchased
OctigaBay, which was building a
platform designed to reduce I/O
bottlenecks in high-performance
environments. The self-monitoring,
self-healing XD1 uses this
direct-connect architecture,
where processors are directly
connected to one another and
memory. This architecture offers
30 times greater bandwidth
and lower latency than clustered systems, officials said.
The Cray device will be chasing a new leader in the contest
to be the fastest supercomputer.
Last week, IBM announced that
one of its Blue Gene supercom-
Cray’s XD1 has
high bandwidth and low latency.
puters had reached a sustained
peak of 36.01 trillion calculations
per second—or 36.01 teraflops—
besting the previous record of
35.86 teraflops. —Jeffrey Burt
WORKPLACE
Motorola plans
to cut 1,000 jobs
MOTOROLA THIS WEEK ANNOUNCED
plans to eliminate 1,000 jobs, resulting in a pretax charge of $50
million in severance benefits.
Some layoffs are related to the
company’s decision to spin off
its semiconductor unit, Freescale
Semiconductor, this year.
Separately, Motorola this week
sold $218 million in its shares of
Nextel Communications and Nextel Partners. Motorola now owns
approximately 6.9 percent of
Nextel Communications, compared with 7.5 percent before the
sale, and .5 percent of Nextel
Partners. —Carmen Nobel
WIRELESS
Cingular plans
to sell subsidiary
CINGULAR WIRELESS LAST WEEK
announced plans to sell its
Cingular Interactive subsidiary
to affiliates of Cerberus Capital
Management, a New York fund
manager. Financial terms of the
deal were not disclosed.
The sale includes the 10-yearold Mobitex network, which once
served as the primary data pipe
for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry service. Most new BlackBerrys run on more modern highspeed cellular networks such as
CDMA1X and GPRS. Cingular
Wireless sells a BlackBerry service that runs on GPRS/EDGE
(Enhanced Data rates for Global
Evolution) networks. Cingular
Interactive still serves some 25
percent of the world’s BlackBerry
users, said Cingular Interactive
officials. Cingular Wireless will
retain all direct e-mail customers
and will continue to purchase data
services from Cingular Interactive
for its Mobitex corporate e-mail
services. —Carmen Nobel
DATABASES
Microsoft releases
Report Packs
PUSHING THE IMPORTANCE OF BUSI-
ness intelligence in its database
environment, Microsoft announced new SQL Server Report
Packs for its Exchange Server
and Business Solutions CRM at
its Professional Association for
SQL Server Conference in Orlando, Fla., last week. Available
via free download, the packs offer
customers templates of commonly used SQL Server Reporting
Services reports that can be modified for reporting needs.
Microsoft confirmed at PASS
that Reporting Services Builder, the
self-service ad hoc query tool for
building reports acquired through
its purchase of ActiveViews in
April, will be featured as part of
SQL Server 2005 Beta 3, due later
this year. In addition, Microsoft
said Data Transformation Services
will be called SQL Server Integration Services and has been
bolstered for SQL Server 2005
Beta 3 with new BI capabilities
that let customers integrate data
sources from any location.
—Brian Fonseca
BY THE NUMBERS
Worldwide PC spending forecast
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Spending in ($) billions
200
Why was [disclosure of] a leaky pipe in the
public interest a year ago, and now it’s an
Osama bin Laden issue? This was clearly
a political decision.
Brian Moir, a lawyer representing the eCommerce & Telecommunications User Group in Washington, on changes to FCC disclosure rules
20 e W E E K n O C T O B E R 4 , 2 0 0 4
190
180
170
160
150
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
Source: IDC’s Worldwide Black Book Query Tool, Version 2
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