Compucon CPD Seminar
12 February 2014 Wednesday
Compucon House Albany

4:00 – 4:15pm Outside the Square: Not visible from Earth
4:15 – 5:30pm Hardware technologies for 2014
5:30 – 6:00pm Compucon system category review
6:00 – 7:30pm Wine and Cheese

NASA published an image of Saturn showing its North Pole and rings in full circle on 21 October 2013 as the Astronomy Picture of the Day.  Discover Magazine (Science for the Curious) nominated the same image as the Image of the Year in its January 2014 issue.  This image is rated highly because it cannot be seen by any instruments from Earth.  We will show this image to start the seminars for this year and reveal an amazing technology that we do not otherwise know but should better know as technology professionals.

There are several new hardware technologies for release this year such as NVM Express standard for SSD on PCIe, DDR4 and HMC for main memory, AMD Kaveri APU for Thunderbird, and PCIE-extender for high performance fabric.  Intel will continue to be the biggest technology supplier in the world for many years to come but it has not earned a place in this session for reasons to be explained in the session.  AMD is innovative in combining 32 ARM CPU cores into a new server CPU.  SSD is a rising star and continues to improve.  DDR4 may help address a major weakness of x86 computing but it may be the last iteration of DDR technology before memory cube kicks in.  An understanding of the above technology releases will allow us to continue practising our offer of FFP (fitness for purpose) and TCO (total cost of ownership) to our business clients throughout the year. 

There are 5 categories of Compucon Systems: Servers, Desktops, HPC Workstations, Small Factor systems, and Storage systems.  As far as desktop is concerned, we will continue to employ Process Workers, Knowledge Workers, and Specialists as the classes of user targets for design.  HPC Workstations are in the category of Specialists equipped for parallel computing.  We will not have enough time to do a parade of all product lines and will attempt to highlight special features of basic system models only and leave rack server and storage to a near future session.  We have 2 purposes intended for this session. The standard one is to reinforce understanding of FFP and TCO to maintain our hardware leadership position in New Zealand.  The special one is to reveal a new class of high value customers and to call for BEE and FEM among our peers.  The last 2 slides are important information.

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