Clearspeed Technology Share Discussion Threads

[hugepants] 10/5/2008 07:56

I wonder how low this will fall. There was 32p net cash at end december 2007.
There now should be around 27p-28p net cash per share if you factor in £4M cost cutting and modest revenue increase.
£20M raised at 100p in september (another £20M was raised at 205p in december 2005). Directors subscribed heavily in both placings so they must be hurting.
Still the drop looks relentless. A fall to 10p or thereabouts does look possible now.

[brwo349] 08/5/2008 14:34

Jeez!! I thought Id got in at the bottom at 26p. How much lower can this drop.

[sunworshipper] 08/5/2008 14:29

down again. buy at 10p soon

[orinocor] 07/5/2008 12:21

The trades showing as sells are actually buys

[judgement] 02/5/2008 08:03

After speaking to Farlegh the seller was probably so depressed about prospects, he counted himself lucky to get 10p!

[supernumerary] 01/5/2008 11:35

I don't think it's the presence of sellers so much as the absence of buyers, and there's no chance of them arriving now before either 10p or good news, whichever comes first.

He still spent £50K which is no mean sum. Management buy-out coming?

[peter peters] 01/5/2008 10:35

Not only that, but only paying 10p suggests he didnt really want them.

[hugepants] 01/5/2008 10:33

It looks like a bit of an own goal by Farlegh. His 500K buy at 10p knocked 30% off the market value of the 8M shares he already held. And what message does buying at 10p send out? Is that all he was prepared to pay.

[latifs100] 30/4/2008 08:13

oh.. dear, richard farlieghs investments not doing too well... same with oxonica.

[hugepants] 30/4/2008 08:08

Director buys 500,000 at 10p.
Also Celoxica(CXA) yesterday announced a massively dilutive subscription at 1p (current price 3p) for 200,000,000 shares at 1p to raise £2M

[supernumerary] 18/3/2008 10:32

Interested to see the reference to 'head up displays and holographic projection' in the report. This is one of the applications I posted about earlier, and it sounds to me as though they're working with Light Blue Optics - - who are trying to build a projector for mobile phones and PDAs. So far I know they've been able to show still images, but I believe their application is so compute-intensive they can't show movies from the phone. I think LBO's probably about a year behind their competition, but if they can make it work, it does have at least one real advantage in being speckle-free.

Importantly it would make a genuine mass market for CSD, and one their competition would have real trouble getting in to.

Otherwise, reads like the same old same old to me. Still waiting and watching, but pleased to see they're looking at new markets.

[tradx666] 14/2/2008 11:06

Sun breaks through supercomputer haze with Constellation
...finally comes into the light after delay

Tags: sun, ibm, supercomputer, chips

By Michael Kanellos

Published: Thursday 14 February 2008

Show related
articlesAfter a slight delay a new, somewhat unusual, supercomputer from Sun Microsystems will get formally unveiled next week.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (Tacc) at the University of Texas will dedicate a Constellation System from Sun on 22 February, said John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun, speaking at the company's global media summit. After Tacc, Sun hopes to start selling Constellations to more customers.

The linchpin of Constellation is the switch, the piece of hardware that conducts traffic among the servers, memory and data storage. Code-named Magnum, the switch comes with 3,456 ports, a larger-than-normal number that frees up data pathways inside these powerful computers.

Speaking in June, Andy Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group, said: "We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes. We have been somewhat absent in the supercomputer market in the last few years."

Sun had hoped to launch the Tacc system in October but it ran into a variety of technical problems. First, AMD delayed the Barcelona processors that go inside the computer. Fowler said: "We got a special run of chips from AMD to make our commitments." Sun will later release more standard Barcelona servers when the chips become available.

But it wasn't all AMD, Fowler said. Constellation also sports a new type of cable, invented by Sun, which comes with three connections per cable. Manufacturing these cables, and then snaking them around the Tacc to link up computers, proved tougher than expected, he said.

Technical glitches also popped up with the Magnum switch.

The Tacc system will provide a peak performance of around 500 teraflops, or 500 trillion operations per second, and can be increased. It will be made up of 82 Sun blade racks stuffed with servers, two petabytes of storage, said Fowler. The whole system will fit inside a mid-size conference room but provide more computing power than all of the supercomputers the US' National Science Foundation has today.

The architecture will also allow Sun, according to the company, to challenge IBM in the rankings for the world's top supercomputers. IBM has dominated the supercomputer rankings with a series of Blue Gene systems for the last several years.

[tradx666] 14/2/2008 09:38

taylor20,

Yep, it will mask all sorts of poor performance...

"I feel like we're strongly placed and on course to drive our HPC business to profitability," Beese said.

Frankly, given the market feedback I hear I can only guess that he is being highly optimistic....assuming of course it's anything more than wishful thinking!

Based on global HPC related rev's my guess is that they are still not achieving anything like 1% penetration/attach rates - depending on your point of view that is either a huge oportunity going begging or an indictment of their apparent lack of progress...

regards

T..

[taylor20] 05/2/2008 08:38

"Credit Crunch" seems to get the blame for everything these days.

[hugepants] 26/1/2008 12:27

CSD looks expensive to me compared with Celoxica which I hold. It just amazes me how some companies can throw so much at R&D and yet have so little in the way of revenues to show for it. I guess the argument is they are just waiting on the markets to mature and that its just a matter of being patient. Meanwhile the R&D expenditure, while not reflected in the balance sheet, should be reflected in the market cap.

Another one is Newport Networks capped at £2.2M with an estimated £2M cash and NTAV circa £7M. It has raised £45M in less than 4 years and spent £20M in R&D in the same period. Price collapsed the last month due to large seller. Nominal revenues but recent trading statmenets suggest 2 very significant contracts imminent.

[supernumerary] 21/1/2008 16:07

mdrans - understand. I did that with trk, but got so fed up watching it, sold even my sentimental stub in the end. No regrets, lol.

[mdrans1] 21/1/2008 15:43

Thanks techies,

My stake is now so small I am going to hang onto this one, just for the hell of it.

[supernumerary] 21/1/2008 13:55

mdrans1 - this is virtualisation of the operating system. The principles have been around for decades, it's just now getting applied to PCs and their primitive operating systems (mainframes have been doing this for years). Operating systems don't require the sort of maths capabilities that csd processors offer, so I'm afraid it's a complete red herring. Sorry.

[tradx666] 21/1/2008 13:14

mdrans1,

The potential benefits of virtualization are well known; the huge increase of overall system performance has made this possible. Msft's virtualisation technology is already in the wild see:



I can't easily see how a specialist application accelerator such as CSD produce would have a major role here (i/o, system bus etc all have to be available), but one can never say never, and given the increasing number of new cores being designed in now by the major chip vendors, I can't really see how it would be anything like cost effective..

Nice thought though!

regards

T..

[mdrans1] 19/1/2008 13:00

Here's a question for one of you techies .

There is an article in today's FT that talks about the potential for "virtualisation".




"Virtualisation lets companies run a number of tasks simultaneously on a single server by fooling each application into thinking it has sole use of the machine. In effect, it creates a number of "virtual machines" operating side-by-side on each computer - a money-saving ruse that has made it the hottest trend in datacentres.

Fewer than 5 per cent of today's corporate servers employ the technology, yet this has already been enough to drive VMware's revenues to an expected $1.3bn last year, up more than 80 per cent from 2006 and cementing its position as one of the fastest growing software companies ever.

In another similarity with Google, this eye-opening success has attracted the attention of a powerful adversary in the shape of Microsoft. The software giant has said it will include its own rival virtualisation software with its Windows server operating system, starting in the second half of next year."

My question is, could Clearspeed get in on the act ?

If you are going to have a number of virtual machines operating side-by-side on an existing server, an accelerator with low power demand might be a useful adjunct.

[supernumerary] 17/1/2008 12:06

sorry - I remembered you saying you'd closed, but not the reopen. Anyway, I won't wish you good luck, for the sake of the many holders, lol.

My comment on mobile displays is just that for a long time, portable phones and video ipods etc have been constrained by screen size - you can't really do anything much with a 2" display. That is about to be removed - the mvis display is HD and will throw up to a 100" diagonal in a dark room, with maybe 2 hours of battery life in the production item.

The kids who buy these things to project films on their bedroom ceilings and their friends' teeshirts will soon want to play games too. This needs processing power, but in a compact, low power consumption package. There's certainly a market there for somebody, and about 2 years to get ready for it.

csd has no advantages in either cost or performance over the competition, and will lose if they try to fight on those grounds.

[tradx666] 17/1/2008 11:52

super,

I did tell you, and yes I did. I can't see them finding any sort of market in mobile for them, but I would have to do some more research to understand what you are saying. In HPC it is a combination of factors, footprint,lower power costs (although bizarrely this was traditionally the least weighted factor in deciding upon the platform), the most important is the cost v performance issue, and the only way imho they can compete there is to reduce significantly the purchase costs.

regards

T..