We spend a lot of time in the upper stratospheres of computing among the hyperscale and HPC crowds here at The Next Platform, and the consistent theme across these two similar but often very different customers bases is that we need a new system architecture that provides better performance at a lower cost and in a lower thermal envelope and an expanded memory hierarchy that can help with those goals. …
The announcement this week by Intel and Micron Technology of 3D XPoint memory, which will sit somewhere between DRAM and NAND flash in future systems, has everyone thinking about the architectural, economic, and performance implications of emerging memory technologies in devices of all kinds – including those humming away in the datacenters of the world. …
It has been almost two months since Intel announced its blockbuster $16.7 billion deal to acquire FPGA maker Altera, which will allow the world’s largest chip maker to move from fixed function into programmable devices and potentially shake up the entire spectrum of computing, from handhelds all the way to datacenters. …
Not all upstarts are founded in the tech industry, and not all of them within the last decade, either. …
After many years of investment, Mellanox Technologies is reaping from the research and development that it has sown in the InfiniBand and Ethernet markets, pushing up bandwidth to 56 Gb/sec and now to 100 Gb/sec just as Intel’s “Haswell” Xeon E5 v3 processors – the dominant CPUs behind the machines cloud, hyperscale, and HPC datacenters – are ramping. …
The 25 Gb/sec Ethernet effort that was launched by Google and Microsoft a little more than a year ago, along with switch and adapter chip makers Broadcom and Mellanox Technologies and switch maker Arista Networks, continues to gather steam. …
It is hard to believe, but one of highest-growth markets that the IT industry has ever seen – the transition from bare metal machines to fully orchestrated virtual infrastructure that we have come to call clouds – is not rocketing up fast enough for the world’s largest chip maker. …
As was the case over seven decades ago in the early days of digital computing – when the switch at the heart of the system was a vacuum tube, not even a transistor – some of the smartest mathematicians and information theorists today are driving the development of quantum computers, trying to figure out the best physical components to use to run complex algorithms. …
Sometimes the old ideas are the best ones, but they sometimes get ahead of their time. …
IBM made no bones about it. After divesting itself of its System x server business, which it sold off to Lenovo Group, and its Microelectronics chip making division, which Big Blue paid Globalfoundries to take, the company said that 2015 would be a year of transition on many fronts. …
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