Cloud
AMD’s Epyc Return To The Datacenter Ring
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. …
Hyperscale
Cloud
Arista Runs Barefoot With Tofino Programmable Switch Chips
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. …
Cloud
The Server Boom Town Is Built On High Component Prices
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. …
AI
A Peek Inside That Intel Xeon-FPGA Hybrid Chip
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. …
AI
The Inevitability Of Death, Taxes, And Clouds
“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. …
Compute
It’s Called Distributed Computing, Even When It Shouldn’t Be
Success can be its own kind of punishment in this world. …
Cloud
Getting Logical About Cavium ThunderX2 Versus Intel Skylake
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. …
AI
Nvidia Hitting On All GPU Cylinders
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. …
AI
Tearing Apart Google’s TPU 3.0 AI Coprocessor
Google did its best to impress this week at its annual IO conference. …
Cloud
What Qualcomm’s Exit From Arm Server Chips Means
Broadcom may not have wanted to be in the Arm server chip business any more, but its machinations since it was acquired by Avago Technology two years ago have certainly sent ripples through that nascent market. …