One of the key strategic moves that AMD made when it architected its comeback in the datacenter was to beef up the compute, I/O, and memory on a single server socket while at the same time making that socket out of chiplets that were significantly cheaper to manufacture and integrate than a monolithic chip was to put into the same socket. …
While the minimalist server processor — and the microserver concept that was based upon it — did not take over the datacenters of the world, there are still some workloads that can fit in modestly powered single-socket CPUs just fine. …
Sponsored If you have a hundred or a thousand machines that you want to work in concert to run a simulation or a model or a machine learning training workload that cannot physically be done by any one single machine, you build a distributed systems cluster and there are all kinds of known tools to manage the underlying server nodes, to create the overarching computing environment, and to then carve it up into pieces to push work through it. …
While we are big fans of distributed computing systems here at The Next Platform, we never forget our heritage in big iron. …
The system world would have been a simpler place if InfiniBand had fulfilled its original promise as a universal fabric interconnect for linking all manner of devices together within a system and across systems. …
Enterprises large and small that depend on Hewlett Packard Enterprise to build their systems and certify them for an absolutely enormous amount of software and support them during a long life in the field should send Thank You notes to the venerable systems maker. …
Ever since Nutanix, the first virtualized server-storage smashup, dropped out of stealth in 2011, we have been watching with great interest to see if this hyperconverged infrastructure would take the world by storm. …
UPDATE: One of the reasons why Intel spent $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA maker Altera six years ago was because it was convinced that its onload model — where big parts of the storage and networking stack were running on CPUs — was going to go out of favor and that companies would want to offload this work to network interface cards with lots of their own much cheaper and much more energy efficient processing. …
For whatever reason, it takes a lot longer to case the commercial Ethernet switching and routing markets, which is dominated by datacenter and campus use cases, than it does for the server and storage markets. …
If you are a designer of chips based on the most advanced processes available from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and your roadmap is based on the company’s continuing progress and prowess in pushing Moore’s Law to the limit, then not only is the future in your roadmaps being pushed out, but you are going to have to pay more for whatever chips you are making now and, we suspect, the chips you are depending on for your business in the future. …
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