• Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance

  May 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Energy efficiency and operating costs for systems are as important as raw performance in today’s datacenters. Everyone from the largest hyperscalers and high performance computing centers to large enterprises that are sometimes like them are trying squeeze as much performance as they can from their infrastructure while reining in power consumption and the costs associated with keeping it all from overheating.

  Throw in the slowing down of Moore’s Law and new emerging workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the challenge to these organizations becomes apparent.

  In response, organizations on the cutting edge have embraced accelerators like GPUs and …

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• Memory And Logic In A Post Moore’s Law World

  March 22, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

  

  The future of Moore’s Law has become a topic of hot debate in recent years, as the challenge of continually shrinking transistors and other components has grown.

  Intel, AMD, IBM, and others continue to drive the development of smaller electronic components as a way of ensuring advancements in compute performance while driving down the cost of that compute. Processors from Intel and others are moving now from 14 nanometer processes down to 10 nanometers, with plans to continue onto 7 nanometers and smaller.

  For more than a decade, Intel had relied on a tick-tock manufacturing schedule to keep up with …

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• 3D Memory Sparks New Thinking in HPC System Design

  February 21, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  Whether being built for capacity or capability, the conventional wisdom about memory provisioning on the world’s fastest systems is changing quickly. The rise of 3D memory has thrown a curveball into the field as HPC centers consider the specific tradeoffs between traditional, stacked, and hybrid combinations of both on next-generation supercomputers. In short, allocating memory on these machines is always tricky—with a new entrant like stacked memory into the design process, it is useful to gauge where 3D devices might fit.

  While stacked memory is getting a great deal of airplay, for some HPC application areas, it might fall just …

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• Memory is the Next Platform

  October 10, 2016 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  A new crop of applications is driving the market along some unexpected routes, in some cases bypassing the processor as the landmark for performance and efficiency. While there is no end in sight for the CPUs dominant role, at least not until Moore’s Law has been buried along the roadside, there is another path—this time, down memory lane.

  Just as machine learning oriented applications represent the next development platform, memory appears to be the next platform for compute, especially with all the options coming down the pike. Phase change memory, memristors, resistive RAM, 3D XPoint, and others are on …

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• Baking Specialization into Hardware Cools CPU Concerns

  September 21, 2016 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  As Moore’s Law spirals downward, ultra-high bandwidth memory matched with custom accelerators for specialized workloads might be the only saving grace for the pace of innovation we are accustomed to.

  With advancements on both the memory and ASIC sides driven by machine learning and other workloads pushing greater innovation, this could be great news for big datacenters with inefficient legions of machines dedicated to ordinary processing tasks—jobs that could far more efficient with more tailored approaches.

  We have described this trend in the context of architectures built on stacked memory with FPGAs and other custom accelerators inside recently, and we …

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• Changing the Exascale Efficiency Narrative at Memory Start Point

  July 28, 2016 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  With this summer’s announcement of China’s dramatic shattering of top supercomputing performance numbers using ten million relatively simple cores, there is a perceptible shift in how some are considering the future of the world’s fastest, largest systems. That shift isn’t because the architectural bent the Chinese chose is new or revolutionary; it is that the old idea is resurfacing given greater pressures on energy reduction and real world application performance–and being demonstrated at scale.

  While one approach, which we will be seeing with the pre-exascale machines at the national labs in the United States, is to build complex systems …

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• Innovative Memory Server Knocks Analytics Systems into Balance

  February 26, 2016 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  As the shift in high performance computing has taken an efficient data-intensive supercomputing turn in recent years, fundamental rethinks in architecture are coming to the fore. IBM, Intel, and others are striving to create more balanced systems, but in the midst of larger efforts sits something quite unique—and possibly key to the future of processing data-intensive HPC workloads very quickly and efficiently.

  The key to this doesn’t veer far from common sense on the surface, but of course, implementation is something of a challenge. This is a task Peter Kogge (whom we spoke with earlier in the week about the …

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• The Myth Of In-Memory Computing

  February 19, 2016 Bobby Johnson

  

  These days when you talk to people in the tech industry, you will get the idea that in-memory computing solves everything. The story is that RAM has become so cheap that you can just stuff all your data in-memory and you won’t have to worry about speed any more. But it is just a myth. Companies that buy into this myth will almost certainly regret that choice in the near future.

  Like most myths, there is a kernel of truth in this story. Keeping all data in-memory works brilliantly for some applications, but not all. RAM is cheaper than it …

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• Steps Toward Programmability for Non-Volatile Memory

  December 9, 2015 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  Among the trends that we have been tracking over the course of the year, few others, outside of key processor developments, have attracted more attention than what is happening in the non-volatile memory space. Companies like Intel, with its 3D XPoint memory, IBM’s phase change memory, and HP’s memristor-based technologies are still out of general reach, but these additions will bring new levels of performance and efficiency to large-scale computing platforms in the years to come.

  While we tend to focus on the hardware and future implementation details around these forthcoming technologies, for developers, such innovations are viewed with some …

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• Automata Memory Processor Points to Future Systems

  December 3, 2015 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  For someone like Steve Pawlowski, who spent well over thirty years at Intel working on a wide range of processors for an even more striking array of platforms, it seems only natural to take a cautious view of entirely new approaches to data processing that require a fundamental rethink of computing hardware and software.

  While this generalization applies to those in the computing world who are suspicious about the actual future of any number of emerging technologies (quantum computers, for instance), there are other processor paradigms on the horizon that are meeting with similarly raised eyebrows. This is not so …

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