collective unconscious of the smarter planet

Wow! Interesting analysis - and crazy implications.

IBM is reportedly talking to Lenovo about selling its x86-based server business to Lenovo and the move would make a lot of sense.

If the talks, flagged in the Wall Street Journal and CRN, sound familiar that’s because Big Blue famously unloaded its PC business to Lenovo in a win-win deal. Lenovo went on to be one of the premier PC makers and IBM focused on software and services and got ahead of trends such as analytics.

To say the IBM’s PC situation then and today’s server state of affairs rhyme would be an understatement. You could argue the situations are the same thing. When IBM offloaded its PC unit, no one saw tablets coming. All IBM knew is that the margins stunk and it wanted higher value wares. The post-PC era was years away.

Fast forward to the server market, which is ripe for disruption. Server sales are doing ok. Companies will have to buy servers right? Of course they will—-for about another three to five years. The reality is servers are going in the following directions:

Specialization by workload. Think IBM’s PureSystems and Oracle’s Exadata efforts.

1. Commodity-ville on the x86 front. You can’t ignore that companies like Google and Facebook go right to white box makers for servers. That reality isn’t so hot for HP, Dell and IBM.
2. You need to own the silicon and intellectual property to really work the server business. IBM’s Power systems won’t go anywhere. Oracle has SPARC. Hewlett-Packard is going processor agnostic with Moonshot, a server line that appears to be innovative.
3. Fewer server buyers. As companies move to the cloud, demand for compute will only increase. The problem. Server makers will be selling in bulk to fewer customers and cloud computing farms. There will only be so many cloud providers. Enterprises large enough to roll their own data centers will be few and far between.

Now let’s talk timing here. The server market won’t unravel tomorrow. It won’t unravel in a few years. But Armageddon will occur and the clock starts ticking right about now.

Why? An enterprise that buys a server right now will start a tax depreciation clock that will run about three years. Once those three years are up and those assets depreciate, the CXO in charge will weigh the costs and benefits of the cloud vs. running a data center, server cluster or whatever. I’ll bet that in three years the cloud will win by a wide margin. Let’s face it—-the cloud is already starting to win and all you have to do is show up at one of Amazon Web Services’ customer powwows to know the writing is on the server rack.

On Thursday, I caught up with Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe. There’s a lot to like about Cycle Computing. First, the company is bootstrapped so there’s instant respect. Second, Cycle Computing is at the forefront of making high performance computing clusters for the masses. And third, Cycle Computing has top insurance and pharmaceutical companies as customers. Cycle Computing had massive customers from day one. In other words, Cycle Computing is the real deal, hooked up with Amazon Web Services and will enable a lot of science to happen just by democratizing HPC for smaller companies.

Stowe noted that Cycle Computing is starting to land manufacturing and engineering customers now for its HPC management software and cloud connections. In other words, this HPC for the masses is catching on. If you play this out, there will be fewer servers sold because folks will be using Rackspace, AWS or some other former hardware focused vendor.

Today, it’s big data and research compute driving Cycle Computing demand. Tomorrow every company will have the mathematic models and horsepower to simulate just about anything. You won’t buy your own servers for that computing power.

Stowe said servers will become like wheat fields not things you name. “Today servers are hugged, named and managers know their quirks. There’s an attachment. In the future server clusters will be more like wheat fields. You grow the wheat, reap and sow, eat and replant the seeds. There’s no attachment to the wheat,” said Stowe.

In other words, Stowe’s excellent analogy on servers and meeting compute demand translates into cloud farms and fields. Most companies are going to hit the brakes on new server buying as soon as the depreciation ends and new compute demand has to be met. Play this out and the profit margins on servers aren’t going to look so hot.

IBM sees all of the servergeddon scenarios developing and that’s why it’s ditching its commodity server business now. Let Lenovo, which has the scale and ambition to do the commodity server game, carry the ball from here and duke it out with HP and Dell.

Alternative database technologies - including NoSQL - are beginning to cut into Oracle’s revenues.

Something is seriously wrong in Larry Land. Oracle does not command absolute control like it once did. You can see this clearly with the earnings the company posted last week and the growth that startups like Datastax are witnessing as more customers seek alternative databases for online applications.

Until this past week, the extent of Oracle’s problems were not known. But there is a cut, a slight bleeding that’s now visible. But how deep is the cut? How much is Oracle really bleeding? That’s exactly the question analysts asked in a Reuters story after the earnings results:

“Data base revenue, which has been the cash machine of the company, has changed. There are now alternative databases, as well as the cloud,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “That pressure is still a tiny bleed, but it is out there and the question is – is it bigger than we think it is?”

We know this much. Oracle reported this week that new software licenses are down two percent. And that decline is in part reflected by the adoption of NoSQL databases offered by Datastax and a variety of other services that use in-memory technology and new SQL offerings at the database layer. Update: Of course, there are competitive forces at play with enterprise giants such as SAP, IBM and Microsoft playing their part. But it’s the startups that represent the core of the innovation.

The reason for the drop has more to do with the enterprise acceptance of online applications more than anything else, said Datatastax CEO Billy Bosworth in an interview last week.

That’s the truth. NEA Ventures Scott Sandell said to me at SXSW that CIOs are convinced to move their workloads but cloud security is still an issue.

That’s where companies like Datastax enter the picture. Datastax is built on Cassandra, a high performance, fault tolerant Apache open-source database technology.

Datastax, founded in April 2010, finished its first year with 26 employees. It ended 2012 with 100 employees. Bosworth expects to have 160 people on staff by the end of this year.

Customer growth has increased significantly. By the end of 2011, Datstax had 27 customers. One year later it had 270, with 20 from the Fortune 100.

Several dozen of those customers have moved either all or parts of their application off relational technology such as what Oracle provides.

When companies come to Datastax, they say the number one thing they need is security, Bosworth said. They are building from day one to avoid disaster scenarios.

Datastax, like other NoSQL providers, spans its database technology in a fully distributed way, across private data centers and the cloud.

Datastax differentiates by offering high performance at scale but without complexity.

How customers use Cassandra reflects on why Oracle growth has begun to stall. Often, customers will continue to use Oracle databases but will put it deeper in the backend. They will take another piece of the app and put it on Datastax.

Customers will build in a middle layer of services components that allows the app to decide which database to use for which workload.

Lighter Oracle workloads means less revenues, which we see reflected in the company’s earnings.

To counter this swarming hive of distributed systems, Oracle has taken the opposite approach, building out engineered solutions with their software running on big, new age mainframes. That strategy does not seem to be working very well. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems with plans to sell the hardware with its software.

Analysts tend to agree:

“The problem is, the growth of SaaS (software as a service) applications is undermining that strategy. When you subscribe to salesforce.com, you don’t need to buy a database, middleware or hardware,” said Patrick Walravens, an analyst at JMP Securities in a Reuters story last week.

Oracle has lost money every quarter since it acquired Sun for $5.6 billion. And there is little proof that companies are going to start using one company like Oracle for all their hardware and software needs. Instead, they will mix Oracle software on commodity systems. Or they may even go with the new open-source server technology coming out of Open Compute. They have plenty of other options, too. OpenStack, the open cloud effort, is growing fast, as is Cloudstack, the open-source cloud service now part of the Apache Foundation.

Datastax has its own challenges. It competes with Amazon Web Services and all the other NoSQL providers such as 10gen. The ecosystem is still quite young. Finding qualified people is a challenge. Developers need more education, a change in thinking for the new cloud approach.

But overall, it’s clear that Oracle really is starting to show the pains of being an aging innovator. The earnings show a slight cut. The question is how deep the cut is and how Oracle will respond to challengers like Datastax.

Positive press for OpenStack -

PayPal and eBay are yanking VMware software from some 80,000 servers and replacing it with the free and open-source alternative known as OpenStack, Boris Renski, OpenStack Foundation board member told Business Insider.

Renski is also a cofounder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultant company backed by Dell and Intel. Mirantis worked with PayPal on the project, he says.

PayPal used a set of tools from Mirantis called Fuel, a PayPal spokesperson told us.

Today Mirantis released Fuel for free to the public. (In geek speak: it was released under the open source Apache 2.0 license). It’s a collection of scripts and software that helps companies deploy OpenStack.

Initially, PayPal is replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this summer, Renski said. “The grand vision for project is, over time, they will replace all of their virtual infrastructure with OpenStack, not just PayPal, but PayPal and eBay, together,” Renski said. That’s about 80,000 servers across their data centers, he said.

PayPal has been a big supporter of Open Stack for a while. But this project is still dangerous territory for VMware, as PayPal could become an example of how other enterprise can replace VMware with OpenStack, too.

To be sure, enterprises are not dying to get rid of VMware, even to save money on software license fees. Most of them really love VMware’s software because it’s a reliable way to run lots of different applications on the same computer server.

But cloud wars are coming between different so-called “cloud operating” systems: VMware is up against OpenStack (backed by IBM, HP, Rackspace, Red Hat, others) and CloudStack (another open source project, backed by Citrix). 

Think of this like the desktop operating system wars: Windows vs. Macs vs. Linux.

The ultimate goal for most enterprises is something called a “hybrid” cloud. This means that a company will run some of its apps in its own data center (a “private cloud”) and some of them in a public cloud. They can easily move apps between the two.

More importantly, they can use multiple public clouds. If one provider has problems, they can  quickly switch to another.

Enterprises will have to choose their cloud operating system and the stakes are high. Enterprises will spend $80 billion on cloud computing by 2016, Gartner estimates.

So where does the biggest cloud player, Amazon, fit into all of this? Amazon is the reason for it all. These cloud operating systems rose to compete with it. The idea is to reassure enterprises that they if they choose an alternative to Amazon, they will have lots of cloud computing vendors to choose from, not just one.

Never heard of Quanta before — but they seem like somebody to watch in the server market.

It all started, Mike Yang says, with a conversation he had with Facebook’s vice president of technical operations in 2007 or 2008. Rather than source servers through a traditional vendor like IBM for its data centers, Facebook turned to Quanta.

Back then, Quanta didn’t sell servers directly to customers, it only built them for traditional server vendors who then put their name on them and sold them to customers. Fast forward a few years, and a majority of Quanta’s server revenue stems from direct deals — 65 percent in 2012, and a forecasted 85 percent this year. Now, it counts other large-scale server buyers such as Rackspace among its customers.

Yang, the man in charge of Quanta’s cloud computing business unit, beamed during an interview on Thursday as he spoke about how the company can directly offer energy-efficient and high-performance products for webscale customers and smaller ones, too. If the Taiwan-based hardware maker’s 85 percent forecast proves out, the company could become a more recognized supplier for cloud computing venues, further threatening old-line server vendors like Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

The company, with U.S. headquarters in Fremont, Calif., didn’t show projections of server revenues in dollars or server shipments in total but said it shipped 1.2 million server motherboards in 2012 and plans to ship at least 10 percent more — 1.32 million motherboards — this year.

Quanta appears to be on a roll with Quanta-brand direct server sales growth. At the same time as it’s doing custom jobs for webscale customers, it’s also promoting direct sales of other gear, including off-the-shelf storage and network appliances, to smaller customers through a subsidiary Quanta established last year, Quanta QCT.

The company has a few strategies in mind for shifting from an original-design manufacturer to a name brand in its own right, at least in servers. It sees full racks of equipment, under the Rackgo name, as a major seller this year. The Rackgo offering, which includes compute, storage and network appliances, can appeal to customers because there’s simply one company to go to when problems arise, Yang said.

And then, of course, there’s the Open Compute Project — the Facebook-led open-source hardware initiative that kicked off Quanta’s evolution as a direct server vendor. Quanta will come out with multiple products based on Open Compute specifications later this year, although exact timelines weren’t immediately available.

Next month, the company will open an office in Seattle in order to be closer to customers. Yang said Quanta has several customers in the area, although he declined to name them. Microsoft, which is building huge data center capacity for Windows Azure and its Live offerings, is a short drive from Seattle, in Redmond, Wash., and Seattle is much closer to Quincy, Wash., a hotbed of data centers, than the Fremont office. Quanta will add more U.S. offices for sales and service this year, Yang said.

Quanta is also opening up to the press, rather than silently working behind the scenes. That campaign started last year.

The company’s business model has undergone a sea change. If the upward trajectory keeps up and the server-market dynamics keep shifting in its favor, Quanta could become one of the stalwart name brands of IT technology.

Cisco is starting to put some more robust thought leadership behind their “internet of everything” idea.

Networking giant Cisco predicted Wednesday that as we move into a “fundamentally mobile and video” world, the “Internet of Everything” — which combines the so-called Internet of Things with the Internet used by people and their mobile devices — will create $14.4 trillion in value and boost overall corporate profits by 21%. All by 2022.

Those are some pretty big numbers, shared by Cisco executives at a press event in San Jose on Wednesday. But while the vision makes sense, quantifying the changes to be wrought by growth of the Internet of Everything seems, well, fairly abitrary. To say the least.

Rob Lloyd, Cisco President, Sales and Development, broke down the $14.4 trillion figure this way:

• $2.5 trillion in better asset utilization
• $2.5 trillion in employee productivity
• $2.7 in supply chain logistics
• $3.7 trillion in better customer experience.
• $3 trillion in enabling new innovations.

Those may seem easier to grasp, but when you’re talking in trillions over decade-long time frames, it’s very hard to put much credence in calculations like these.Perhaps we can start by seeing which industries benefit first and most dramatically. According to Lloyd, the top candidates include manufacturing, the public sector, energy and utlities, healthcare, finance/insurance, transportation and wholesale/distribution.

The Internet of Everything combines several trends, including the growth of connected devices, the increasing use of video, cloud computing, Big Data and the increasing importance of mobile apps compared to traditional computing applications.

Lloyd did lay out numbers to support the importance of the trends. But though these are also all giant numbers, connecting them to the $14.4 trillion figure still requires a leap of faith.

In terms of connected devices, he said, we’ve gone from 200 million in 2000 to 10 billion devices today, to a predicted 50 billion by 2020. On the mobile side, Lloyd said, 20 billion mobile apps were downloaded last year alone. By 2017, he added, two-thirds of mobile traffic will be video.

A good run-down of the Amazon cloud’s technical features and services.

Selling servers by the hour was a bold idea when the Amazon cloud business launched a few years ago, but it seems quaint compared to all the options for sale today. There are currently 21 products available on Amazon Web Services, and only one of them is the classic EC2 machine, an abbreviation of the full name, the Elastic Compute Cloud. The original S3 (Simple Storage Service) now has cousins like the Simple Workflow Service and SimpleDB, a nonrelational data store. Then there are odder innovations like Amazon Glacier, a very cheap storage solution that takes hours to retrieve the data. Yes, hours. Not milliseconds, not seconds, not minutes — but hours.

It’s impossible to summarize it all in a paragraph or even an article. Amazon Web Services would require a book, but that tome would be out of date by the time it was printed because the service changes quickly. The best news is that Amazon is constantly looking at costs and generally lowering prices as it finds a way to deliver the product for less. Some prices have gone up occasionally over the years, an effort to make the prices reflect reality.

Amazon has also found plenty of supporters. A number of big companies such as Netflix are proud of using Amazon’s servers, and plenty of startups are glad they didn’t need to set up their own data centers to reach for the gold ring of IPO riches. Some customers brag about spending $1 million or more a month, an amount that would be more than enough for most companies to justify setting up an in-house facility and team. Clearly, Amazon is delivering a whole lot of value.

A really interesting article by Intel for IEEE Xplore on the future of big data in the entertainment industry. Despite the entertainment focus, there are some good points about big data in general.

Google has opened the door to one of its data centers to Wired. Pretty amazing.

If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.

Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore—where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience.

This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.

The problem for would-be bards attempting to sing of these data centers has been that, because Google sees its network as the ultimate competitive advantage, only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside, a prohibition that has most certainly included bards. Until now.

Great analysis of Intel’s coming troubles - and what they’re trying to do to head them off.

When I first started writing about x86 CPUs Intel was on the verge of entering the enterprise space with its processors. At the time, Xeon was a new brand, unproven in the market. But it highlighted a key change in Intel’s strategy for dominance: leverage consumer microprocessor sales to help support your fabs while making huge margins on lower volume, enterprise parts. In other words, get your volume from the mainstream but make your money in the enterprise. Intel managed to double dip and make money on both ends, it just made substantially more in servers.

Today Intel’s magic formula is being threatened. Within 8 years many expect all mainstream computing to move to smartphones, or whatever other ultra portable form factor computing device we’re carrying around at that point. To put it in perspective, you’ll be able to get something faster than an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook or MacBook Air, in something the size of your smartphone, in fewer than 8 years. The problem from Intel’s perspective is that it has no foothold in the smartphone market. Although Medfield is finally shipping, the vast majority of smartphones sold feature ARM based SoCs. If all mainstream client computing moves to smartphones, and Intel doesn’t take a dominant portion of the smartphone market, it will be left in the difficult position of having to support fabs that no longer run at the same capacity levels they once did. Without the volume it would become difficult to continue to support the fab business. And without the mainstream volume driving the fabs it would be difficult to continue to support the enterprise business. Intel wouldn’t go away, but Wall Street wouldn’t be happy. There’s a good reason investors have been reaching out to any and everyone to try and get a handle on what is going to happen in the Intel v ARM race.

To make matters worse, there’s trouble in paradise. When Apple dropped PowerPC for Intel’s architectures back in 2005 I thought the move made tremendous sense. Intel needed a partner that was willing to push the envelope rather than remain content with the status quo. The results of that partnership have been tremendous for both parties … What once was the perfect relationship, is now on rocky ground.

The A6 SoC in Apple’s iPhone 5 features the company’s first internally designed CPU core. When one of your best customers is dabbling in building CPUs of its own, there’s reason to worry. In fact, Apple already makes the bulk of its revenues from ARM based devices. In many ways Apple has been a leading indicator for where the rest of the PC industry is going (shipping SSDs by default, moving to ultra portables as mainstream computers, etc…). There’s even more reason to worry if the post-Steve Apple/Intel relationship has fallen on tough times. While I don’t share Charlie’s view of Apple dropping Intel as being a done deal, I know there’s truth behind his words. Intel’s Ultrabook push, the close partnership with Acer and working closely with other, non-Apple OEMs is all very deliberate. Intel is always afraid of customers getting too powerful and with Apple, the words too powerful don’t even begin to describe it.

What does all of this have to do with Haswell? As I mentioned earlier, Intel has an ARM problem and Apple plays a major role in that ARM problem. Atom was originally developed not to deal with ARM but to usher in a new type of ultra mobile device. That obviously didn’t happen. UMPCs failed, netbooks were a temporary distraction (albeit profitable for Intel) and a new generation of smartphones and tablets became the new face of mobile computing. While Atom will continue to play in the ultra mobile space, Haswell marks the beginning of something new. Rather than send its second string player into battle, Intel is starting to prep its star for ultra mobile work.

Haswell is so much more than just another new microprocessor architecture from Intel. For years Intel has enjoyed a wonderful position in the market. With its long term viability threatened, Haswell is the first step of a long term solution to the ARM problem. While Atom was the first “fast-enough” x86 micro-architecture from Intel, Haswell takes a different approach to the problem. Rather than working from the bottom up, Haswell is Intel’s attempt to take its best micro-architecture and drive power as low as possible.

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In the middle of 2011 Intel announced its Ultrabook initiative, and at the same time mentioned that Haswell would shift Intel’s notebook design target from 35 - 45W down to 10 - 20W.

At the time I didn’t think too much about the new design target, but everything makes a lot more sense now. This isn’t a “simple” architectural shift, it’s a complete rethinking of how Intel approaches platform design. More importantly than Haswell’s 10 - 20W design point, is the new expanded SoC design target. I’ll get to the second part shortly.

There will be four client focused categories of Haswell, and I can only talk about three of them now. There are the standard voltage desktop parts, the mobile parts and the ultra-mobile parts: Haswell, Haswell M and Haswell U. There’s a fourth category of Haswell that may happen but a lot is still up in the air on that line.

Of the three that Intel is talking about now, the first two (Haswell/Haswell M) don’t do anything revolutionary on the platform power side. Intel is promising around a 20% reduction in platform power compared to Sandy Bridge, but not the order of magnitude improvement it promised at IDF. These platforms are still two-chip solutions with the SoC and a secondary IO chip similar to what we have today with Ivy Bridge + PCH.

It’s the Haswell U/ULT parts that brings about the dramatic change. These will be a single chip solution, with part of the voltage regulation typically found on motherboards moved onto the chip’s package instead. There will still be some VR components on the motherboard as far as I can tell, it’s the specifics that are lacking at this point (which seems to be much of the theme of this year’s IDF).

Seven years ago Intel first demonstrated working silicon with an on-chip North Bridge (now commonplace) and on-package CMOS voltage regulation.

The benefits were two-fold: 1) Intel could manage fine grained voltage regulation with very fast transition times and 2) a tangible reduction in board component count.

The second benefit is very easy to understand from a mobile perspective. Fewer components on a motherboard means smaller form factors and/or more room for other things (e.g. larger battery volume via a reduction in PCB size).

The first benefit made a lot of sense at the time when Intel introduced it, but it makes even more sense when you consider the most dramatic change to Haswell: support for S0ix active idle.

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Your smartphone and tablet both fetch emails, grab Twitter updates, receive messages and calls while in their sleep state. The prevalence of always-on wireless connectivity in these devices makes all of this easy, but the PC/smartphone/tablet convergence guarantees that if the PC doesn’t adopt similar functionality it won’t survive in the new world.

The solution is connected standby or active idle, a feature supported both by Haswell and Clovertrail as well as all of the currently shipping ARM based smartphones and tablets. Today, transitioning into S3 sleep is initiated by closing the lid on your notebook or telling the OS to go to sleep. In Haswell (and Clovertrail), Intel introduced a new S0ix active idle state (there are multiple active idle states, e.g. S0i1, S0i3). These states promise to deliver the same power consumption as S3 sleep, but with a quick enough wake up time to get back into full S0 should you need to do something with your device.

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With Haswell U/ULT parts, Intel will actually go in and specify recommended components for the rest of the platform. I’m talking about everything from voltage regulators to random microcontrollers on the motherboard. Even more than actual component “suggestions”, Intel will also list recommended firmwares for these components. Intel gave one example where an embedded controller on a motherboard was using 30 - 50mW of power. Through some simple firmware changes Intel was able to drop this particular controller’s power consumption down to 5mW. It’s not rocket science, but this is Intel’s way of doing some of the work that its OEM partners should have been doing for the past decade. Apple has done some of this on its own (which is why OS X based notebooks still enjoy tangibly longer idle battery life than their Windows counterparts), but Intel will be offering this to many of its key OEM partners and in a significant way.

Intel’s focus on everything else in the system extends beyond power consumption - it also needs to understand the latency tolerance of everything else in the system. The shift to active idle states is a new way of thinking. In the early days of client computing there was a real focus on allowing all off-CPU controllers to work autonomously. The result of years of evolution along those lines resulted in platforms where any and everything could transact data whenever it wanted to.

By knowing how latency tolerant all of the controllers and components in the system are, hardware and OS platform power management can begin to align traffic better. Rather than everyone transacting data whenever it’s ready, all of the components in the system can begin to coalesce their transfers so that the system wakes up for a short period of time to do work then quickly return to sleep. The result is a system that’s more frequently asleep with bursts of lots of activity rather than frequently kept awake by small transactions.