Mellanox got its start as one of the several suppliers of ASICs for the low latency InfiniBand protocol that was originally conceived as a kind of universal fabric to connect all devices in the datacenter. …
The line between Intel’s high end desktop, midrange workstation, and low end servers has always been a blurry one, and changing the naming conventions on its products has not really changed the Intel strategy one bit. …
The server market has been spoiling for a fight for so long that it is hard to remember a time when there was intense competition across multiple processor vendors and architectures. …
If Andy Bechtolsheim, the chief technology officer at datacenter switching upstart Arista Networks, wanted to design ASICs to try to take a bigger piece of the switch pie – or more precisely, thought that this was a good idea at all – rest assured, Arista would be spending money engineering its own chips and fighting for capacity at the four remaining foundries that have advanced processes. …
On the face of it, if you just look at the top level numbers, the server market is booming like we have not seen since the recovery in the wake of the Great Recession for a few quarters here and there between late 2009 and early 2011. …
Last week at the Fujitsu Forum in Tokyo, Lisa Spelman, who is general manager of Xeon products and Data Center Marketing at Intel, did a soft announcement of the hybrid Xeon CPU-Arria 10 FPGA hybrid chip that the company has been talking about for years and that is now available to selected customers. …
“Death and taxes” is a phrase that is usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin from a quote in a 1789 letter: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Public cloud computing providers didn’t exist back in the days of Franklin, but if they did, they would have no doubt made the list. …
Success can be its own kind of punishment in this world. …
Any processor that hopes to displace the Xeon as the engine of choice for general purpose compute has to do one of two things, and we would argue both: It has to be a relatively seamless replacement for a Xeon processor inside of existing systems, much as the Opteron was back in the early 2000s, and it has to offer compelling advantages that yield better performance per dollar per watt per unit of space in a rack. …
Even if Nvidia had not pursued a GPU compute strategy in the datacenter a decade and a half ago, the company would have turned in one of the best periods in its history as the first quarter of fiscal 2019 came to a close on April 29. …
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