Compute
Cache Is King
The gap between the performance of processors, broadly defined, and the performance of DRAM main memory, also broadly defined, has been an issue for at least three decades when the gap really started to open up. …
Articles by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Compute
Covering All The Compute Bases In A Heterogeneous Datacenter
Intel has spent more than three decades evolving from the dominant provider of CPUs for personal computers to the dominant supplier of processors for servers in the datacenter. …
Compute
The Inevitability Of FPGAs In The Datacenter
You don’t have to be a chip designer to program an FPGA, just like you don’t have to be a C++ programmer to code in Java, but it probably helps in both cases if you want to do them well. …
Cloud
On The Spearpoint Of FPGA And The Cloud
Sometimes markets need a particular technology and they are impatient for it, and sometimes technologies get ahead of the immediate needs of customers and their creators have to hang on until the time is right. …
HPC
The Supercomputing Efficiency Curve Bends In The Right Direction
Things get a little wonky at exascale and hyperscale. Things that don’t matter quite as much at enterprise scale, such as the cost or the performance per watt or the performance per dollar per watt for a system or a cluster, end up dominating the buying decisions. …
HPC
Doing The Math On Fractal HPC
At every key leap in processing capacity in high performance computing – and just rattling off more than two decades from teraflops through petaflops, and now on the verge of exaflops in two years or so – there has been this tension between custom-built systems that break through performance barriers and more general purpose machines based on more off of the shelf components that cost less and tend to be fast followers. …
Store
Gen-Z Memory Servers Loom On The Horizon
We have been waiting for a long, long time for the ionic bond between compute and main memory to be softened to something a little more covalent and therefore allow for more complex storage structures to be formed within systems and across them. …
Cloud
Urgent HPC Can Burst Affordably To The Cloud
One of the benefits of the public cloud is that it allows HPC centers to experiment and push the limits of scalability in a way they could never do if they had to requisition, budget, and install machinery on premises. …
Connect
Intel Declares A Truce Before Bus Wars Flare Up
A system is more than its central processor, and perhaps at no time in history has this ever been true than right now. …
Compute
The Other Way To Bring Arm CPUs To Servers
There are at least two – and possibly more – paths to make Arm processors competitive with the Intel and now AMD X86 incumbent processors in the datacenter. …