SANTA CLARA—There's an old story about a distinguished thinker—in some tellings, it's Bertrand Russell, in others, it's William James—who is confronted by a little old lady after a lecture on the nature of the cosmos. The woman objects to the scientist's description of star systems and galaxies, proclaiming that in fact, the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle.

The scientist laughs and asks, "So what is the turtle resting on?" Another turtle, comes the confident reply. And what is that turtle standing on? "Oh, it's turtles all the way down," the little old lady says.

ARM CEO Simon Segars has his own variation of the turtle theory, only it's a lot more rooted in observable reality. And instead of turtles, it's ARM-based computer chips, which he believes will one day go "all the way down" —managing data every step of the way, from inside the servers powering the cloud, through networking and communications hardware, and out to mobile devices, embedded systems, and IoT devices on the edge of the network.

I had a chance to catch up with Segars this week at the ARM TechCon developer conference, where, during his keynote address, he rallied the troops with a call for a new wave of "invisible technology" which will make our homes smarter, our cars safer, our digital communications faster and more secure, and bring the power of computing to more parts of our lives, as unobtrusively as possible.

What he didn't talk about much was mobile, the market segment ARM has famously conquered over the past decade. The U.K.-based firm's processor architecture is used in chips powering the vast majority of smartphones and tablets which have been sold around the world.

AMD will be developing an exascale node architecture using its own Heterogeneous System Architecture-based APUs.

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said Wednesday that the company intends to start building chips for servers using the processor architecture it has refined for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Mollenkopf, pictured, was speaking at an analyst event in New York. He said Qualcomm was "in a unique position" to take advantage of cutting-edge semiconductor fabrication processes in order to sell its products into the data center for the first time.

But it will be awhile before Qualcomm has any server chips to sell, said Mollenkopf, whose comments were first reported by Barron's.

"The high end of the smartphone and the tablet really are starting to merge with what would be feasible in the data center," the site quoted the Qualcomm chief as saying. "It will take us awhile to build this business, but we think it's an interesting business."

Barron's didn't offer many more details about Qualcomm's presumptive plans to develop server chips, but it's probably safe to assume the company is eyeing ARM-based processors like several other companies looking to challenge the dominance of the x86 architecture in the data center.

Eight years ago, author and business strategist Fred Reichheld published The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. In it, he detailed the meaning of "bad profits," or a company that is making money while its reputation goes down the tubes.

It happens for a number of reasons: Misleading prices, poor customer service, or bad products. Customers feel marginalized, misled, and mistreated. As Reichheld says, "bad profits are about extracting value from customers, not creating value."

When it happens, customers can do two things: say nothing, or say something negative about the company. Only a lucky few brands actually get recommended by their customers.

Reichheld, working for consulting firm Bain & Company, helped create a metric to quantify this phenomenon. It's the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. It measures exactly how people feel about a business by asking one question: "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

Here at PCMag we do regular surveys for our Readers' Choice Awards and Business Choice Awards. In every questionnaire, we ask our readers that very question about the companies behind the products they use. Now, just in time for your holiday shopping, we've finished up the surveys and can share with you the tech companies most recommended by fellow readers, based on their NPS numbers.

Intel on Monday introduced its 14-nanometer Xeon D family of microserver processors, bringing System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capabilities to the company's Xeon line of datacenter products for the first time.

The first Xeon D products are the quad-core Xeon Processor D-1520, priced at $199, and the eight-core Xeon Processor D-1540, priced at $581. Both new SoCs are available today. More than 50 new systems using Xeon D chips are currently being designed by Intel OEM partners, with about three-quarters of those developing network, storage, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems.

Intel said Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Quanta Cloud Technology, Sugon, and Supermicro are among the companies designing microservers based on Xeon D.

The first Xeon D processors have industry-standard x86 cores and support two 10GbE Intel Ethernet ports, as well as supporting I/O such as PCIe, USB, SATA, and more, Intel said. The Xeon D-1520 and D-1540 support "up to 128GB of addressable memory" while only drawing 20 watts of power to operate, according to the company.

"The growth of connected devices and demand for more digital services has created new opportunities for information and communication technology," Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, said in a statement. "By bringing Intel Xeon processor performance to a low-power SoC, we're delivering the best of both worlds and enabling our customers to deliver exciting new services."

Facebook this week unveiled a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) server solution based on Intel's new 14-nanometer Xeon D processors for "heavily parallelizable workloads" in the data center.

Facebook introduced its SoC microserver platform, code named Yosemite, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in San Jose, Calif., where the social network also announced open low-level motherboard management software for BMC processor-based systems called OpenBMC.

The Yosemite SoC platform is at the heart of a newly designed server card code named Mono Lake, which can support up to four independent servers. Facebook collaborated with Intel "for over 18 months on Yosemite," according to a news report from the OCP Summit.

Facebook has helped develop micro-server SoCs in the past—in addition to using Intel's x86-based processor technology, the company has been working on data center solutions based on ARM's 64-bit instruction set.

Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, said Intel's new Xeon D line should prove attractive to big Web companies like Facebook.

SANTA CLARA—Applied Micro showed up at ARM TechCon with a new 64-bit ARM processor called HeliX, an embedded chip aimed at market segments like networking and communications, imaging, storage, and industrial systems.

"With the growth of I/O needs in switches etc., in storage with bigger Hadoop-type clusters, there's just pull here for 64-bit. Even for those apps that don't need the memory it's still nice having the tool set," said Applied Micro's Pat Patla.

The first HeliX series, which Applied Micro plans to ship by year's end, features 2.0GHz embedded processors with four and eight cores, 4-8MB of L3 cache, two channels of DDR3-1600 memory, 10-gigabit Ethernet support, plenty of PCIe 3.0 lanes, and support for two SATA 3.0 and two USB 2.0 I/O ports. First-generation HeliX chips are being manufactured at 40nm and will have TDPs ranging from about 20 to 30 watts, according to the company.

Things get even more interesting in 2015, when Applied Micro plans to roll out second-gen, 28nm HeliX chips which will include parts with up to eight cores and power draws as low as 8W, enabling fanless designs, according to Patla.

Applied Micro also made news ahead of the ARM Tech Con developer conference being held here this week, teaming up with Hewlett-Packard on the first commercial release of a 64-bit ARM-based server. HP's ProLiant m400 cartridge for its Moonshot server framework packs an Applied Micro X-Gene System-on-a-Chip (SoC) and runs Canonical's Ubuntu operating system.

Applied Micro and Hewlett-Packard have teamed up to release the first commercially available 64-bit ARMv8 server, the ProLiant m400 cartridge for HP's Moonshot server framework.

The new server is based on Applied Micro's X-Gene System-on-a-Chip (SoC) and runs Canonical's Ubuntu operating system. Designed for primarily for Web caching workloads, the ProLiant m400 provides power, cooling, and space savings compared with traditional rack servers to the tune of an "up to 35 percent reduction in total cost of ownership," according to HP.

"ARM technology will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges. HP's history, culture of innovation, and proven leadership in server technology position us as the most qualified player to empower customers with greater choice in the server marketplace," Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Servers and Networking business, said in a statement on Monday.

HP also announced the availability of the ProLiant m800, a 32-bit ARM-based server cartridge that is also intended for the Moonshot 1500 chassis, pictured above. The m800 is "optimized for real-time data processing of high volume, complex data such as pattern analysis." Both the ProLiant m800 and m400 extend the reach of HP's "Project Moonshot" initiative to introduce a radical new infrastructure framework for scale-out data center installations supporting Web hosting, cloud computing, search, general-purpose databases, logging, and other fast-growing "big data" activities.

But it's the ProLiant m400, pictured at right, which is the real milestone release. ARM's 64-bit instruction set has been used in consumer devices like Apple's iPhone for more than a year, but it's taken a bit longer for the first server products to hit the market. Along with Applied Micro, Advanced Micro Devices and the now-shuttered Calxeda were the main drivers of 64-bit ARM-based computing for the data center in recent years.

Advanced Micro Devices has had the sort of week that might make a computer chip company wonder if Murphy's Law was running the show instead of Moore's Law.

AMD CEO Lisa Su's spilling the beans about the month Microsoft plans to release Windows 10 was the most glaring misstep by the company. It was also by far the least worrisome, though we'd hate to have been the recipient of whatever choice words Redmond sent AMD's way over that goof.

AMD reported its first-quarter earnings last Thursday. Given Intel's own news earlier in the week that PC revenue was down considerably in the quarter, it was expected that the smaller chip firm would have struggled as well. But whereas Intel managed to boost its net income 3 percent from the year before on the strength of booming server chip sales, AMD stumbled to a $137 million loss, a major disappointment after the company managed a profit in the first quarter of 2014.

What's more, Su had some rather stunning news for investors who've perhaps become accustomed to the company's financial ups and downs, but expect AMD at least maintain a puncher's chance against rivals like Intel and Nvidia.

But AMD's client processor sales have been slipping and it's not clear whether the company's next-generation "Carrizo" chips will do much to turn things around any time soon. Su told investors she expected the PC market to "remain a challenge as our OEM customers and channel partners focus on carrying lean inventories based on the uncertain market conditions."

After several false starts, hyper-converged infrastructure developer Nutanix on Friday finally completed its IPO.

And, in a time when tech IPOs have not been doing well, Nutanix's IPO stands out for a surprising opening day success.

Nutanix, which by many accounts is the leading hyper-converged infrastructure vendor, late Thursday priced its IPO at $16 per share, which was a considerable jump from the $11.00 to $13.00 a share it had been expected to offer when it filed its fifth amendment to its S-1 last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

[Related: 23 Powerful Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Products]

Investors like what they saw in Nutanix, which trades on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol NTNX. The company's share prices opened Friday at $26.50 per share and closed at $37.00. Prices held at that level in after-hours trading.

NetApp is in the process of rolling out a "hard deck" program and other changes to its channel program, targeting accelerated growth in the storage vendor's small and midsize business market.

A "hard deck" in channel terms is a program in which a vendor sets aside a certain number of customers or potential customers, typically its largest, as targets for either its direct sales team or direct sales working with partners, and leaving the rest to be handled exclusively by solution providers.

CRN first reported on NetApp's hard deck plans early this month.

[Related: NetApp Bets Big On Cloud, All-Flash Storage Capabilities At NetApp Insight Conference]

For NetApp, the hard deck is defined as a line just below NetApp's top 1,000 accounts, said Scott Strubel, vice president of NetApp's Americas partner organization.

View a mobile-optimized version on Apple Newsroom

Deloitte Introduces New Apple Practice to Help Businesses Design & Implement iPhone & iPad Solutions

Apple and Deloitte will also collaborate on the development of a new service offering from Deloitte Consulting called EnterpriseNext, designed to help clients fully take advantage of the iOS ecosystem of hardware, software and services in the workplace. The new offering will help customers discover the highest impact possibilities within their industries and quickly develop custom solutions through rapid prototyping.

“We know that iOS is the best mobile platform for business because we’ve experienced the benefit ourselves with over 100,000 iOS devices in use by Deloitte’s workforce, running 75 custom apps,” said Punit Renjen, CEO of Deloitte Global. “Our dedicated Apple practice will give global businesses the expertise and resources they need to empower their mobile workforce to take advantage of the powerful ecosystem iOS, iPhone and iPad offer, and help them achieve their ambitions, while driving efficiency and productivity.”

“As the leader in digital transformation strategy, Deloitte is an ideal partner that brings a team of Apple-dedicated strategic advisors to help clients truly revolutionize how they work using iOS, iPhone and iPad,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone and iPad are transforming how people everywhere get work done. And through this partnership, we’re able to help even more businesses tap into the incredible capabilities that only the Apple ecosystem can deliver.”

EnterpriseNext from Deloitte Consulting will provide businesses with expertise spanning more than 20 industries, and offers customers: 

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Have no fear channel partners, the "C" in VCE is staying intact. Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins and Dell CEO Michael Dell shook hands and pledged their allegiance to their VCE alliance and its $3 billion Vblock business in a face-to-face video interview.

"Everywhere I go our customers have asked, ‘What's the commitment to Vblock?'" said Robbins in a one-on-one sit-down with Michael Dell posted on YouTube by Dell EMC. "From our perspective it drives UCS, it drives our Nexus portfolio, it drives our ACI portfolio -- so we are committed. … We both feel like our customers and our partners can continue to invest with confidence."

Michael Dell said, "As Dell Technologies, we couldn't be more excited about our future together with Cisco."

[Related: CRN Exclusive: Michael Dell On A Rival's Failed Bid To Buy EMC, HPE's Attempts To Recruit EMC Partners And ‘Channel Day' At Dell Technologies]

With Dell's $67 billion acquisition of EMC closing earlier this month, Cisco is striving to reassure partners and customers that VCE – a joint venture formed by Cisco and EMC in 2009 -- will continue as Dell, which has its own server portfolio, takes control of EMC. Richardson, Texas-based VCE's flagship Vblock product line is a $3 billion business with more than 3,000 systems installed, which includes Cisco's server and networking technologies.

View a mobile-optimized version on Apple Newsroom

Siri Comes to Mac with All-New Capabilities for the Desktop

Siri on the Mac can help send messages and email, find documents, look up information, search a user’s photo library, adjust system preferences and more. Users can also drag and drop Siri results into documents or pin them into their Today view for later reference. Universal Clipboard allows users to copy content from an app on one Apple device and paste it into another app on a different Apple device. With iCloud Desktop and Documents users can now access the files on their Desktop from iPhone and iPad. And Auto Unlock lets users automatically log into their Mac when they are wearing an authenticated Apple Watch®.

Apple Pay on the web makes the online shopping experience in Safari® more convenient and secure than ever. Shoppers can now click the Apple Pay button at checkout on nearly 300,000 participating websites, including 1-800-Flowers, Gilt, Instacart, Lululemon, Warby Parker and more, and then complete their purchase with Touch ID® on iPhone 6 or later or with Apple Watch. Users’ credit or debit card information is not shared with online merchants and strong encryption protects all communication between a user’s device and Apple Pay servers.

Photos introduces Memories, which highlights favorite and forgotten moments in users’ photo libraries by automatically creating curated collections of occasions like birthday parties or family vacations. Photos uses advanced computer vision to identify faces, objects and scenes in your images, so photos can be searched by who and what is in them. An all-new Brilliance editing tool brightens dark areas and pulls in highlights to make photos look richer and more vibrant.

Other great new features in macOS Sierra: 

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Hyper-converged infrastructure developer Nutanix is making yet another run at an IPO, according to a new S-1 filing.

In the fifth amendment of its S-1, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, Nutanix said it expects to sell up to 16.1 million shares of Class A common stock at between $11.00 and $13.00 per share.

At the upper end of that range, the IPO would bring Nutanix, which has applied for listing on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol NTNX, a total of $209.3 million.

[Related: 23 Powerful Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Products]

Nutanix in its April amended S-1 filing did not list a price-per-share or an estimated amount to be raised in an IPO. In its December 2015 original S-1, Nutanix did not list an expected IPO price, but said it expected to raise about $200 million.

Surveying The Server Scene

Dell made gains while Hewlett Packard Enterprise saw steep year-over-year declines but retained its position atop the revenue mountain in the global server market in the second quarter, according to research firm Gartner.

Worldwide server revenue declined nearly 1 percent year over year in the second quarter, but shipments grew 2 percent over the same time as x86 servers continue to gain traction in the market, Gartner said.

Dell capitalized on the strength of the x86 market, moving into the top spot in server shipments for the quarter, displacing HPE. HPE, despite declines in both revenue and shipments, held its position as the top server vendor by revenue for the quarter. Cisco Systems' revenue results were flat year over year. IBM, which sold its x86 business to Lenovo in late 2014, claimed a 9 percent revenue market share.

Still, while the battle between Dell and HPE rages, Chinese manufacturers Lenovo, Huawei and Inspur made significant shipment gains in the quarter. Click through to see five key stats from Gartner's second-quarter worldwide server report.

Apple is breaking from tradition with the sale of its new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus phones in that it won't disclose first-weekend sales numbers.

In years past, Apple has proudly touted the number of sales during phone launches.

Last year, Apple sold 13 million new smartphones during the first three days the 6S and 6S Plus came to market.

In a statement, Apple said it is at a point where initial sales are governed by supply, not demand, so the numbers are no longer representative of the phones' popularity.

This week Dell partners got their first glimpse of the new channel program they can expect following the company's acquisition of EMC in a letter from the company.

Channel partners Wednesday get their first official look at the changes Dell Technologies is making to its partner program as it races to establish a new, integrated program by the beginning of its next fiscal year.

Details about the program began to emerge as soon as Dell completed its $58 billion acquisition of EMC last week. The changes were generally well received by partners, who said the company has done a good job of listening to the channel and taking action to ensure partners are treated fairly.

“Partners were concerned about the unknown, and we wanted to make an extremely clear statement that there will be no unknowns,” Marius Haas, Dell COO and president of commercial solutions, told CRN in an exclusive interview. "[We're telling partners that] the investments you made, the relationships you’ve established, we’re going to help you with those accounts to ensure business continuity for our customers, our partners and ourselves.”

[Related: CRN Exclusive: Dell Makes Ambulos North America Channel Chief, Assembles New Top Sales Teams]

A letter detailing immediate changes was sent to partners Wednesday.

Veritas Technologies on Tuesday went on the offensive against a wide range of storage competitors, from EMC to SimpliVity, saying those vendors stand in the way of the kind of digital transformation that customers need -- and some are already undertaking.

Veritas executives told customer and channel partner attendees at this week's Veritas Vision conference that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is the only company that can help with that transition given that it is the only software-only storage vendor with the enterprise experience to do so.

The comments came after Veritas unveiled a new information platform it said would make it easy for customers to protect and manage their data with full compliance with company policies.

[Related: First Veritas Vision Confab Since 2004 Highlights New Info Management Platform, Red Hat Partnership]

Veritas executives were especially critical of Dell and EMC. Indeed, Veritas on Tuesday took out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal (see photo) with the headline, "There's a special place in Dell reserved for hardware."

Choosing an enterprise cloud platform is a lot like choosing between living in an apartment building or a single-family house. Apartment living can offer conveniences and cost-savings on a month-by-month basis. Your rent pays the landlord to handle all ongoing maintenance and renovation projects — everything from fixing a leaky faucet to installing a new central A/C system. But there are restrictions that prevent you from making customizations. And a fire that breaks out in a single apartment may threaten the safety of the entire building. You have more control and autonomy with a house. You have very similar choices to consider when evaluating cloud computing services.

The first public cloud computing services that went live in the late 1990s were built on a legacy construct called a multi-tenant architecture. Their database systems were originally designed for making airline reservations, tracking customer service requests, and running financial systems. These database systems feature centralized compute, storage, and networking that served all customers. As their numbers of users grew, the multi-tenant architecture made it easy for the services to accommodate the rapid user growth.

All customers are forced to share the same software and infrastructure. That presents three major drawbacks:

With its inherent data isolation and multiple availability issues, multi-tenancy is a legacy cloud computing architecture that cannot stand the test of time.

The multi-instance cloud architecture is not built on large centralized database software and infrastructure. Instead, it allocates a unique database to each customer. This prevents data co-mingling, simplifies maintenance, and makes delivering upgrades and resolving issues much easier because it can be done on a one-on-one basis. It also provides safeguards against hardware failures and other unexpected outages that a multi-tenant system cannot.