When Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought supercomputer maker SGI back in August 2016 for $275 million, it had already invested years in creating its own “DragonHawk” chipset to build big memory Superdome X systems that were to be the follow-ons to its PA-RISC and Itanium Superdome systems. …
Makers of tightly coupled, shared memory machines can make all of the arguments they want about how it is much more efficient and easier to program these NUMA machines than it is to do distributed computing across a cluster of more loosely coupled boxes, but for the most part, the IT market doesn’t care. …
There is no question that Intel has reached its peak in the datacenter when it comes to compute. …
The “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel have been in the market for nearly a month now, and we thought it would be a good time to drill down into the architecture of the new processor. …
At long last, Intel’s “Skylake” converged Xeon server processors are entering the field, and the competition with AMD’s “Naples” Epyc X86 alternatives can begin and the ARM server chips from Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm and the Power9 chip from IBM know exactly what they are aiming at. …
We have been saying for the past two year that the impending “Skylake” Xeon processors represented the biggest platform architectural change in the Xeon processor business at Intel since the transformational “Nehalem” Xeon 5500s that debuted back in March 2009 into the gaping maw of the Great Recession. …
In the wake of the Technology and Manufacturing Day event that Intel hosted last month, we were pondering this week about what effect the tick-tock-clock method of advancing chip designs and manufacturing processes might have on the Xeon server chip line from Intel, and we suggested that it might close the gaps between the Core client chips and the Xeons. …
Chip maker Intel takes Moore’s Law very seriously, and not just because one of its founders observed the consistent rate at which the price of a transistor scales down with each tweak in manufacturing. …
If you want an object lesson in the interplay between Moore’s Law, Dennard scaling, and the desire to make money from selling chips, you need look no further than the past several years of Intel’s Xeon E3 server chip product lines. …
Google has always been a company that thinks big. After all, its mission since Day One was to organize and make accessible all of the world’s information. …
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