In modern system architecture, there is a lot of shifting pieces of systems software (particularly in the control plane) and often their workloads around between pieces of silicon to get better bang for the buck, to improve the overall security of the system, or both. …
It would be very difficult indeed to find a better general manager for Intel’s newly constituted Network and Edge Group networking business than Nick McKeown, and Pat Gelsinger, the chief executive officer charged with turning around Intel’s foundries and its chip design business, is lucky that Intel was on an acquisitive bend in the wake of its rumored failed attempt to buy Mellanox and Nvidia’s successful purchase of Mellanox a few months later. …
The network, once seen as little more than plumbing in the datacenter, is at the center of distributed IT operations. …
System architects are often impatient about the future, especially when they can see something good coming down the pike. …
Software is not actually eating the world, but it is absolutely smashing out of appliance-style boxes and creating a massive, interconnected overlay atop aggregations of very shiny and powerful hardware. …
It may have taken a while for the transition to 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec networking to take off in the datacenter, but this higher gear to switching is finally kicking in and delivering unprecedented bang for the buck in networks, and in fairly short order at least compared to sluggish pace that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet took getting into the datacenter. …
In the past several decades, data processing and storage systems could be architected from best of breed components, and the market could – and did – sustain multiple suppliers of competing technologies in each of the categories of compute, networking, and storage. …
The ink is barely dry on the PCI-Express 6.0 specification, which was released after years of development in January 2022, we hardly have PCI-Express 5.0 peripherals in the market, and the PCI-SIG organization that controls the PCI-Express standard for peripheral interconnects already has us all coveting the bandwidth that will come later in the decade with PCI-Express 7.0 interconnects. …
Like others in the datacenter infrastructure space, Cisco Systems has had a front-row seat to the rapid changes in enterprise tech, from the accelerating adoption of the multicloud model to the increasing decentralization of the IT environment, rippling out to the network edge. …
Marvell Technology is the latest chipmaker to join the emerging Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCI-Express) consortium, which is working toward an open interconnect standard for chiplet architectures. …
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