Back in the late 1980s, while working in the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs, deep leaning pioneer, Yann LeCun, was just starting down the path of implementing brain-inspired machine learning concepts for image recognition and processing—an effort that would eventually lead to some of the first realizations of these technologies in voice recognition for calling systems and handwriting analysis for banks. …
The high ground in the server market used to be large-scale SMP and NUMA machines with 16, 32, 64, or 128 sockets all lashed together to make a big shared memory machine. …
The broader adoption of GPU acceleration for workloads in the traditional high performance computing segment and expansion in new areas such as deep learning are driving revenues and profits at graphics chip maker Nvidia. …
Low margins, an unpredictable cycle, expensive and ongoing research development efforts, a slavish commitment to processor upgrade timelines, and a market that will only ever grow so much—who wouldn’t want to be in the supercomputing systems business? …
Companies in the IT sector have a kind of inertia that is directly related to their revenue and profit streams, which are a measure of their influence in the IT supply chain and among customers. …
It has been more than a decade since Intel fielded its first credible processors aimed at four-socket machines, and it is no coincidence that makers of RISC and Itanium systems that used to enjoy high revenues and margins on big iron systems have been in decline since that time. …
Hewlett-Packard may not have created a business line dedicated to custom server manufacturing like rival Dell. …
The rollout of Power8 systems that IBM started last year is nearly completed as the company has put its largest Power E880 configurations into the field, giving an upgrade path to customers who had been using Power7 and Power7+ systems to run large databases and online transaction processing workloads and to others who are looking for more scalable machines to run in-memory databases and their applications like SAP’s HANA stack. …
The high performance computing market is about as tough as they come. …
Amazon Web Services may be the 800-pound silverback alpha-ape in the rapidly expanding cloud industry, seeing as how its infrastructure revenue is greater than its four closest competitors combined, but that hasn’t stopped its fast-growing challenger, Microsoft Azure, from beating its own chest and showing off its strengths. …
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