Each time that the United States has figured out that it needed to do export controls on massively parallel compute engines to try to discourage China from buying such gear and building supercomputers with them, it has already been too late to have much of a long term effect on China’s ability to run the advanced HPC simulations and AI training workloads that we were worried would be enabled by such computing oomph. …
When Arm Holdings, the division of the Softbank conglomerate that designs and licenses the core component of the processor architecture that bears its name, launched its Neoverse revamping of the Arm architecture for the datacenter and the edge last October, the company put the architecture on a strict annual cadence and promised to deliver 30 percent performance increases at the system level with each generation. …
Arm chip designers who make processors for mobile devices, such as Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm, that do not have pre-existing server businesses have been skittish about entering the server fray with heftier versions of their Arm chips for datacenter compute. …
Microsoft announced Azure Stack at its Ignite event in September 2016 and soft-launched Azure Stack at its Inspire event in July, when it announced that the private cloud solution was available for customer orders. …
So, who was the biggest revenue generator, and showing the largest growth in sales, for servers in the final quarter of 2016? …
The server cycle has some long waves that are not always in phase with each other, and that is generally a good thing. …
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