We said it from the beginning: There is no way that Meta Platforms, the originator of the Open Compute Project, wanted to buy a complete supercomputer system from Nvidia in order to advance its AI research and move newer large language models and recommendation engines into production. …
There are a lot of things going on in the datacenter and campus interconnect markets, but one of the weirder things we observe from the most recent market data coming out of IDC about the Ethernet portion of this market is that it is like a country music record being played backwards. …
When system architects sit down to design their next platforms, they start by looking at a bunch of roadmaps from suppliers of CPUs, accelerators, memory, flash, network interface cards – and PCI-Express controllers and switches. …
If the datacenter is the computer – and it certainly is for hundreds of companies comprising somewhere well north of half of server sales worldwide – then the Ethernet fabric, consisting of switches and routers, is the backplane of that computer. …
Variety is not only the spice of life, it is also the way to drive innovation and to mitigate risk. …
With each passing year, the phrase “The network is the computer,” coined in 1984 by John Gage, director of research and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, becomes more and more true. …
If there is a recession underway – and we are not convinced that there is even a little bit – then the Ethernet switch market did not get the memo. …
It is tough to get excited about mature markets that grow at a steady rate unless it happens to be the most profitable part of the market. …
It is perplexing to us that the world’s largest distributor of client and server operating systems and also the creator of the Linux-based, open source SONiC network operating system – that would be Microsoft with its Windows and Windows Server franchises – did not see the benefit or the need to commercialize SONiC and lead the open networking revolution. …
The hunger for more compute and storage capacity and for more bandwidth to shuffle and shuttle ever-increasing amounts of data is not insatiable among the hyperscalers and large cloud builders of the world. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform