Compute

Future Systems: Can Exascale Revive AMD?

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.

Enterprise

Scaling The Growing System Memory Hierarchy

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.

Connect

Mellanox Rides Bandwidth Hunger Wave

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.

Compute

Google Sees Long, Expensive Road Ahead For Quantum Computing

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.