If the hyperscalers are masters of anything, it is driving scale up and driving costs down so that a new type of information technology can be cheap enough so it can be widely deployed. The hyperscalers have invented so many new technologies that are synonymous with the second and third …
Well, that didn’t take long. In April 2020, Nvidia completed its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies for its InfiniBand and Ethernet switching, and a little more than five years and a GenAI boom later Nvidia has been crowned the leading revenue generator for Ethernet switching in the datacenter by …
“If you build it, they will come,” as we all learned from watching Field of Dreams two and a half decades ago. But sometimes, the numbers are so big that you need a good backstop in case the pitches are a little wild or have too much heat. And that …
Once a hyperscaler or a cloud builder gets big enough, it can afford to design custom compute engines that more precisely match its needs. It is not clear that the companies that make custom CPUs and XPUs are saving money, but they are certainly gaining control and that is worth …
Wouldn’t it be funny if Larry Ellison, who has become the elder statesman of the datacenter, had the last laugh on the cloud builders and model builders by beating them at their own game? That these upstarts invent this GenAI technology – much as IBM invented the relational database and …
It is beginning to look like that the period spanning from the second half of 2026 through the first half of 2027 is going to be a local maximum in spending on XPU-accelerated systems for AI workloads. And as the number and type of XPU accelerators is growing to fulfill …
If AI is to become pervasive, as the model builders and datacenter builders who are investing enormous sums of money are clearly banking on it to be, then it really goes have to be a global phenomenon. And as such, it will require global-scale computing that looms much larger than …
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Ever since Nvidia reported its most recent financial results, where company co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang said that there would be somewhere between $3 trillion and $4 trillion in spending on AI between now and the end of the decade, we have been on the prowl for any …
Broadcom turned in its financial results for its third quarter last night, and all of the tongues in the IT sector are wagging about how the chip maker and enterprise software giant has landed a fourth customer for its burgeoning custom XPU design and shepherding business. The word on the …
Sales of GPU-accelerated servers are still hurting margins at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as they are doing at all OEMs and probably the ODMs, too, but the good news is that they will be hurting less and less as sales of beefier and more profitable general purpose servers are on the …
It has taken nearly two decades and an immense amount of work by millions of people for high performance computing to go mainstream with GenAI. And now, we live in a world where AI servers crammed with accelerators account for half of the money spent on systems worldwide. There is …
There is no question that one of the smartest things that chip designer, packager, and manufacturing process manager Marvell Technology did was to shell out $650 million in May 2019 to buy Avera Semiconductor. In the long run, that acquisition may prove more important than Marvell’s $10 billion acquisition in …
For the Linux Foundation, this summer in part has been spent pulling in new projects aimed at building an open architecture around the quickly emerging world of agentic AI, the latest rage in the ever-expanding generative AI universe. In June, Google donated its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to The Linux Foundation, a …
Every OEM in the world has two choices. Choice One: Sell the Nvidia AI hardware and software stack and boost the top line while diluting operating income in their systems businesses. Choice Two: Get basically no AI revenues at all excepting an AMD deal here and there and, in the …
The expectations for GenAI are unreasonably high and the pressure on Nvidia is tectonic. As we listened to the call with Wall Street going over the financial results for Nvidia’s second quarter of fiscal 2026 with Jensen Huang, who the entire world now knows but who is co-founder and chief …
As we talked about a decade ago in the wake of launching The Next Platform, quantum computers – at least the fault tolerant ones being built by IBM, Google, Rigetti, and a few others – need a massive amount of traditional Von Neumann compute to help maintain their state, assist …
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