• Getting Logical About Cavium ThunderX2 Versus Intel Skylake

    May 16, 2018

    Any processor that hopes to displace the Xeon as the engine of choice for general purpose compute has to do one of two things, and we would argue both: It has to be a relatively seamless replacement for a Xeon processor inside of existing systems, much as the Opteron was back in the early 2000s, and it has to offer compelling advantages that yield better performance per dollar per watt per unit of space in a rack.

    The “Vulcan” ThunderX2 chips, at least based on the initial information that is available in the wake of their launch, appear to do …

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  • Sluggish Moore’s Law Doesn’t Impede Intel One Bit

    April 27, 2018

    The demand for compute is so strong among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that nothing seems to be slowing down Intel’s datacenter business. Not delays in processor rollouts due to the difficulties in ramping 14 nanometer and 10 nanometer processes as the pace of Moore’s Law increases in transistor density and the lowering of the cost of chips slows. Not what is a pretty substantial price increase that accompanies the core scale out and feature expansion in the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors. Not the credible competition from IBM, AMD, Cavium, and Qualcomm.

    The sun is shining on the datacenter, and …

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  • Argonne Hints at Future Architecture of Aurora Exascale System

    March 19, 2018

    There are two supercomputers named “Aurora” that are affiliated with Argonne National Laboratory – the one that was supposed to be built this year and the one that for a short time last year was known as “A21,” that will be built in 2021, and that will be the first exascale system built in the United States.

    Details have just emerged on the second, and now only important, Aurora system, thanks to Argonne opening up proposals for the early science program that lets researchers put code on the supercomputer for three months before it starts its production work. The proposal …

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  • How Spectre And Meltdown Mitigation Hits Xeon Performance

    March 16, 2018

    It has been more than two months since Google revealed its research on the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities in modern processors, and caused the whole IT industry to slam on the brakes and brace for the impact. The initial microbenchmark results on the mitigations for these security holes, put out by Red Hat, showed the impact could be quite dramatic. But according to sources familiar with recent tests done by Intel, the impact is not as bad as one might think in many cases. In other cases, the impact is quite severe.

    The Next Platform caught wind …

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  • HPE Brings More HPC To The DoD

    February 21, 2018

    Much of the focus of the recent high-profile budget battle in Washington – and for that matter, many of the financial debates over the past few decades – has been around how much money should go to the military and how much to domestic programs like Social Security and Medicare.

    In the bipartisan deal struck earlier this month, both sides saw funding increase over the next two years, with the military seeing its budget jump $160 billion. Congressional Republicans boasted of a critical win for the Department of Defense (DoD) that will result in more soldiers, better weapons, and improved …

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  • The Booming Server Market In The Wake Of Skylake

    December 1, 2017

    The slowdown in server sales ahead of Intel’s July launch of the “Skylake” Xeon SP was real, and if the figures from the third quarter of this year are any guide, then it looks like that slump is over. Plenty of customers wanted the shiny new Skylake gear, and we think a fair number of them also wanted to buy older-generation “Broadwell” Xeons and the “Grantley” server platform given the premium that Intel is charging for Skylake processors and their “Purley” platform.

    Server makers with older Broadwell machinery in the barn were no doubt happy to oblige customers and clear …

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  • Japan’s ABCI System Shows The Subtleties Separating AI And HPC

    October 12, 2017

    Governments like to spread the money around their indigenous IT companies when they can, and so it is with the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, or ABCI, supercomputer that is being commissioned by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. NEC built the ABCI prototype last year, and now Fujitsu has been commissioned to build the actual ABCI system.

    The resulting machine, which is being purchased specifically to offer cloud access to compute and storage capacity for artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads, would make a fine system for running HPC simulation and models. But that …

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  • Custom Server Makers Set The Datacenter Pace

    September 13, 2017

    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.

    Distributed computing, in its more modern implementation of frameworks running on virtual machines or containers – or both – is by far the norm, both in the datacenter and on the public clouds. You don’t have to look any further than the latest server sales statistics …

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  • The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging For Skylake Xeons

    September 1, 2017

    There is no question that Intel has reached its peak in the datacenter when it comes to compute. For years now, it has had very little direct competition and only some indirect competition for the few remaining RISC upstarts and the threat of the newbies with their ARM architectures.

    The question now, as we ponder the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors and their “Purley” platform that launched in July, is this: Is Intel at a local maximum, with another peak off in the distance, perhaps after a decline or perhaps after steady growth or a flat spot, or is this the …

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  • Drilling Down Into The Xeon Skylake Architecture

    August 4, 2017

    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. We also want to see what the new Xeon SP has to offer for HPC, AI, and enterprise customers as well as compare the new X86 server motor to prior generations of Xeons and alternative processors in the market that are vying for a piece of the datacenter action.

    That’s a lot, and we relish it. So let’s get started with a deep dive …

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