Within a year or so, with the launch of the “Grace” Arm server CPUs, it will not be heresy for anyone at Nvidia to believe, or to say out loud, that not every workload in the datacenter needs to have GPU acceleration. …
While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal, the fact that Nvidia and SoftBank were going to see a lot of regulatory scrutiny and IT market resistance is no surprise. …
Arm-based servers have had a somewhat checkered history that has seen many abortive attempts to challenge the X86 processor hegemony, but the firm appears bullish about its chances in the high performance computing (HPC) sector, where it believes its licensing model and the energy efficiency of its architecture give it an edge. …
Whenever one company buys another, every product line, every research project, and every employee is ultimately in play. …
The Graviton family of Arm server chips designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services is arguably the highest volume Arm server chips the datacenter market today, and they have precisely one – and only one – customer. …
Seismic processing cloud infrastructure provider, DUG, has enough combined compute power to grace the leading ten systems on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, with around 30 petaflops for seismic processing, full waveform inversion, petrophysics, and other HPC applications in oil and gas via many of its own software packages. …
While we are big fans of laissez faire capitalism like that of the United States and sometimes Europe — right up to the point where monopolies naturally form and therefore competition essentially stops, and thus monopolists need to be regulated in some fashion to promote the common good as well as their own profits — we also see the benefits that accrue from a command economy like that which China has built over the past four decades. …
There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week when it looked like AMD was changing its position a little bit on whether or not it would get back into designing and selling server chips based on the Arm architecture. …
While it might not happen anytime soon, traditional supercomputing could be in for a sea change with wider acceptance of lower-precision calculations. …
If the HPC and AI markets need anything right now, it is not more compute but rather more memory capacity at a very high bandwidth. …
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