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Thousands Of Jobs Lost, Very Quietly, At IBM

Luke Plunkett — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:30:00 +0000

An estimated 4000 IBM employees have been laid off in the last week, as the company adjusts to the current way of the world. Why do we care? Because IBM make a lot of stuff.

If you own a 360, IBM made the Xenon chip that runs it. If you own a PS3, IBM helped make the Cell that power’s Sony’s machine. And IBM made the Broadway chip that runs the Wii.

The job cuts were designed to spur recent profits at the company, which are actually up 10% in recent weeks. Which is good news for shareholders, but for the 4000 sacked? At least if the company was going down the drain there’d be something more reasonable to blame.

IBM quietly cuts thousands of jobs [Associated Press]

IBM: World of Warcraft Is Good

Brian Ashcraft — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:20:00 +0000

It’s a seesaw. Somedays playing World of Warcraft is good, good, good. Somedays it’s bad, bad, bad. What about today?

Today, David Laux, global executive in charge of games and interactive entertainment at IBM, tells us that WoW makes good human beings. This is in the wake of job recruiters avoiding WoW players.

Here are some nice things Laux says about Wow:

The game produces tremendous leadership skills among players. It teaches you how to evaluate risk, build teams for specific tasks and it also teaches individuals not to over react if they are not selected for a specific task.

This David Laux guy seems more like a glass-is-half-full kinda guy.

Gaming is good for you [BBC]

How Do The Xbox 360 & PS3 Compare To The World’s Fastest Supercomputer?

Logan Booker — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:00:05 +0000

Pandemic PS3 coder Tony Albrecht already has a unique unit of measurement, called the “Tony”, for explaining the differences in processing power between the major consoles. He even went so far as to break it down for the less technically-minded.

Now, I think Tony units are great. Albrecht however felt a deeper understanding of where the consoles sit on the grunt scale was required, so he went and compared the latest generation of gaming platforms with the planet’s fastest supercomputer – the IBM Roadrunner. His findings are fascinating:

For its processors its using 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips all feeding off of 98 terabytes of memory and is running Red Hat Linux.

Yup, you heard right, this baby is running off of what is effectively 12,240 souped up PS3s.

Tony goes on to say that the Roadrunner consumes one watt for every 437 million calculations, making it “incredibly energy efficient”. This isn’t exactly something the PS3 can boast about.

Albrecht also went to the trouble of figuring out the processing power of the “Xbox 1040″ and “PS4″, based on previous consoles and supercomputers. He reckons 4-8GB of RAM and 64, or even 128, processors is not out of the question (the 360 has three and the PS3 eight). Hit the link below to see Tony’s full analysis, which includes pictures, graphs and, if you’re brave, strings of numbers.

Parallel future [Seven Degrees of Freedom] [Pic]

PS3’s Cell Processor Powers World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Mike Fahey — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:40:00 +0000

The United States’ nuclear stockpile in Los Alamos will soon be monitored by a powerful computer made out of parts you might have in your living room – the PlayStation 3’s Cell processor. Nicknamed the Roadrunner, the IBM-built supercomputer is comprised completely of off-the-shelf components, including nearly 7,000 dual-core AMD Opteron processors and almost 13,000 Cell processors. The machine can process more than one thousand trillion calculations per second, making it twice as fast as the world’s current fastest computer, IBM’s Blue Gene.

If only we had had access to this sort of technology back in 1983. The movie WarGames would have been so much better. “Would you like to play a game? How about Resistance: Fall of Man?”

IBM unveils fast new computer for US Energy Dept. [Newsday.com]

Double Fusion CEO Shreds His Way To The Top

Flynn De Marco — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:00:00 +0000

President and CEO of Double Fusion, Jonathan Epstein put all the other GDC rock gods to shame this week at IBM’s Guitar Hero Competition. Epstein won the $US 1,500 grand prize with his face melting rendition of Eric Johnson’s White Cliffs of Dover. According tho the short press release, you can challenge Epstein to an epic battle of the bands by going to Double Fusion’s website. I went there myself and didn’t really see a place to sign up per se, but I suppose an email will do nicely. Just don’t count on wrestling that $US 1,500 from him. I think the title will be the best you can hope for.

IBM Launching Educational MMO For Teens

Maggie Greene — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:30:33 +0000

In an attempt to convince high schoolrs that math and science are cool (hey guys, they’re not beating down the door to history classes, either), IBM is launching a new, free to play MMO called PowerUp that will challenge players to solve problems involving solar, wind, and hydropower before the environment of a fictional planet is destroyed by mounting crises. Of course, there’s more:

IBM international foundation president Stanley S. Litow said, “Innovation is the key to competitiveness in today’s globally integrated economy, but just when we need it to skyrocket, interest in math and science has been declining in the United States. American competitiveness demands more interest in math and science by students. Virtual worlds and 3D are an unexplored resource in education. We asked our best researchers to incorporate the use of this technology into traditional educational curriculum.”

We’ll see how popular this experiment winds up being, but I’m sure we’ll see more of the same in the future. The game is launching today, and you can find details at the game website.

IBM Announces Environmental Learning MMO For Kids [Worlds In Motion]

45nm Cell Means Cheaper PS3

Mike Fahey — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:00:14 +0000

From 90mm to 65mm to 45mm – IBM has announced details on a smaller, more efficient version of the Cell BE processor, which of course is the brains inside every shiny new PlayStation 3. IBM will soon migrate from the 65nm process currently used to manufacture the chips to their next generation 45nm high-k process, which results in a Cell that requires 40 percent less power, reducing cooling costs while a smaller die means higher yields and a lower overall cost. This gives Sony a choice – reduce the price of the system to increase their install base or just ride the cheaper process for awhile to work up a little profit. Also interesting to note is that once again the shrink comes with no performance tweaks, with IBM citing the need to maintain gaming software operation. In other words, IBM’s Cell division is Sony’s little bitch.

IBM shrinks Cell to 45nm. Cheaper PS3s will follow [Ars Technica]

This Is What The PS3 Can Do To Your Brain

Luke Plunkett — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:30:00 +0000

IBM and The Mayo Clinic have teamed up to open a research facility, which they hope will bring about advances in the field of medical imaging, and in particular to things like CT scans. At present, it can take a doctor hours to look over a set of scans, which in some cases can endanger a patient’s life. It’s hoped that by using the PS3’s Cell chip they can not only create 3D images of a patient’s brain much faster, they can also then compare those to earlier 3D images in only minutes, a feat which once took hours. Pretty neat, considering the Cell was built to, you know. Play games. The Mayo Clinic’s chairman Bradley Erickson says this is not the first time games tech has been used to aid medical science. In addition to their current research using the Cell chip, Erickson says that “other games technology”, including high-end graphics cards, are often used in medicine, particularly in the field of imaging.
IBM, Mayo Clinic team up to improve medical imaging [Computerworld, via io9]

Xbox 360 Could Get 32nm Chips By Late 2009

Mark Wilson — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:40:08 +0000

IBM made a major announcement today that they will be offering 32nm chips to their partners in the second half of 2009. This would mean that, yes, the Xbox 360 could get even smaller chips than the 65nm “Falcon” CPUs..or the rumoured 45nm upgrade. We’re talking power savings of 45% and speed boosts of 30% over IBM’s last generation of hardware…it’s flat-out better technology that will reduce the propensity of overheating drastically, and maybe even make way for a smaller console.

So it will be interesting to see if Microsoft opts to go with 45nm chips (available next year) and then 32nm chips, or ends up skipping one of these technologies. Most of us probably won’t know the difference—actually, most of us will know the difference—but only because we’re obsessing about it here.

IBM, partners in 32nm device surge [via tvg]

IBM Announces Business “Game” Innov8

Mark Wilson — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:20:47 +0000

Of all companies who develop software, we didn’t wake up this morning expecting to hear about a new “serious game” from IBM. Called Innov8 (see what they did with the clever phonetics?), universities around the world have access to download the title to better educate students. So what exactly is the game? We can’t quite tell. It looks like The Sims meets some theoretical Office Tycoon. But the goal is to “develop a combination of business and information technology (IT) skills.” While it’s sure to be at least a small plug for IBM technological solutions and we generally prefer watching our Sims peeing themselves over developing networking solutions, it might beat reading textbooks. Was anyone out there part of 30 university beta?

IBM announces new video games to teach business skills [gamingnexus]