A long time ago, when we first started The Next Platform, Urs Hölzle, then senior vice president of the Technical Infrastructure team at Google, told us that to gain a 20 percent improvement in price/performance it would absolutely change from the X86 architecture to Power architecture – or indeed any other architecture – and even for one generation of machines. …
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been an early and enthusiastic supporter of alternate processor architectures outside of the standard Xeon X86 CPUs that comprise the vast majority of its revenues and shipments, particularly with Arm server chips starting in 2011. …
This time last year, Arm server CPU startup Ampere Computing provided a roadmap running out through 2023 describing its future products, aimed at demonstrating its commitment to the idea of Arm server chips. …
There is a likelihood that we could see both British chip designer Arm Holdings and one of its server-focused startup adherents, Ampere Computing, go public this year, as indicated by recent rumors of the first and news from Ampere itself this morning that it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering. …
Wouldn’t it be funny if Google ends up being the stalwart supporter of the X86 architecture among the hyperscalers and cloud builders? …
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. …
Historically, the largest organizations in the world – the Global 2000 plus the biggest national government and academic research institutions – have always had the most complex data processing needs. …
There is no question that that the combination of Nvidia and Arm Holdings would have been a powerful one in the datacenter. …
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. …
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