One of the key strategic moves that AMD made when it architected its comeback in the datacenter was to beef up the compute, I/O, and memory on a single server socket while at the same time making that socket out of chiplets that were significantly cheaper to manufacture and integrate than a monolithic chip was to put into the same socket. …
For whatever reason, it takes a lot longer to case the commercial Ethernet switching and routing markets, which is dominated by datacenter and campus use cases, than it does for the server and storage markets. …
If The Next Platform is about anything, it is about chronicling the tectonic changes that affect the IT landscape. …
Businesses are judged quarter on quarter and year on year, but you have to look at the long haul and the flow of all business over time to really judge properly. …
Real growth in and recognition of the importance of high performance computing has been a long time coming. …
The server market is a multi-cylinder engine, with eight major hyperscalers and cloud builders all doing their thing almost independently of each other and of the economic conditions at large and the rest of the market being more subject to the waxing and waning of the economic tides. …
If you want to understand datacenter infrastructure and how the market for wares is changing, it helps to start with an absolute, top-down, all-encompassing view that brings together all server, storage, and switching revenues into a single bucket, eliminating the overlaps that occur when talking about these three different categories separately. …
Our increasingly networked and compute-intensive lives are driving the server business, and despite the cornucopia of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that spans the globe, the appetite for compute as expressed in shiny racks of servers or metal pizza boxes or an occasional tower sitting in a closet or under a desk continues despite the kind of consumption we have not seen since the dot-com boom. …
The appetite for compute capacity, and presumably also for storage and networking capacity, in the datacenter of the world might be waning in some sectors of the economy, but thanks to the voracious hunger of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and more than a few large enterprises that need to do more, not less, computing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, server sales are now consistently at the levels we saw way back in the Dot-Com Boom more than twenty years ago. …
Sometimes, to get the proper perspective, you have to take the long view. …
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