Computing is hard enough, but the sophistication and proliferation of attacks on IT infrastructure, from the firewall moat surrounding the corporate network all the way down into the guts of the operating system kernel and deep into the speculative execution units on the physical processor, make the task of computing – with confidence – doubly difficult. …
Imagine, if you will, that your two biggest rivals were Intel and Nvidia, and that you had to fight a two front war to storm the datacenter. …
There are so many ironies in the hardware business that it is amazing that we aren’t covered in rust. …
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. …
With Intel having significant difficulties in ramping up its 10 nanometer manufacturing processes and not really talking much about its plans for 7 nanometers, there has never been a better time for its few remaining rivals in chip manufacturing to give their respective CPU and GPU customers and edge to carve out some market share in the datacenter and on the desktop, which helps cover the cost of being in the datacenter because it helps ramp advanced processes. …
It has been more than a decade since AMD was a force in computing in the datacenter. …
With choice comes complexity, and the Cambrian explosion in compute options is only going to make this harder even if it is a much more satisfying intellectual and financial challenge. …
If there is one thing that can be said about modern distributed computing that has held true for three decades now, it is that the closer you get to the core of the datacenter, the beefier the compute tends to be. …
Co-design is all the rage these days in systems design, where the hardware and software components of a system – whether it is aimed at compute, storage, or networking – are designed in tandem, not one after the other, and immediately affect how each aspect of a system are ultimate crafted. …
You can’t call them the Super 8 because the discount hotel chain already has that name. …
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