• Intel Melds Xeon E5 And E7 With Skylake

    May 4, 2017

    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.

    There is no global recession breathing down the IT sector’s neck like a hungry wolf here in 2017, eight years and seven chip generations later. But Intel is facing competitive pressures from AMD’s Naples Opterons, IBM’s Power9, and the ARM collective (mainly Cavium and Qualcomm at this point, but Applied Micro is …

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  • Intel Moves Xeons To The Moore’s Law Leading Edge

    April 28, 2017

    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. It turns out that Intel is not only going to close the gaps, but reverse them and put the Xeons on the leading edge.

    To be precise, Brian Krzanich, Intel’s chief financial officer, and Robert Swan, the company’s chief financial …

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  • Mapping Intel’s Tick Tock Clock Onto Xeon Processors

    April 27, 2017

    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. Moore’s Law is not just personal with Intel. It is business because Intel is a chip maker first and a chip designer second, and that is how it has been able to take over the desktops and datacenters of the world.

    Last month, the top brass in Intel’s chip manufacturing operations vigorously defended Moore’s Law, contending that not only was the two year cadence of …

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  • Xeon E3: A Lesson In Moore’s Law And Dennard Scaling

    April 6, 2017

    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.

    The Xeon E3 chips are illustrative particularly because Intel has kept the core count constant for these processors, which are used in a variety of gear, from workstations (remote and local), entry servers to storage controllers to microservers employed at hyperscalers and even for certain HPC workloads (like Intel’s own massive EDA chip design and validation farms). …

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  • Cineca’s HPC Systems Tackle Italy’s Biggest Computing Challenges

    March 16, 2017 Rob Johnson

    With over 700 employees, Cineca is Italy’s largest and most advanced high performance computing (HPC) center, channeling their systems expertise to benefit organizations across the nation. Comprised of six Italian research institutions, 70 Italian universities, and the Italian Ministry of Education, Cineca is a privately held, non-profit consortium.

    The team at Cineca dedicates itself to tackling the greatest computational challenges faced by public and private companies, and research institutions.  With so many organizations depending on Italy’s HPC centers, Cineca relies on Intel® technologies to reliably and efficiently further the country’s innovations in scientific computing, web and networking-based services, big data …

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  • Google Courts Enterprise For Cloud Platform

    March 10, 2017

    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.

    The company is going to have to take that same expansive and aggressive approach as it looks to grow in a highly competitive public cloud market that includes a dominant player (Amazon Web Services) and a host of other vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. That’s going to mean expanding its customer base beyond smaller businesses and startups and convincing larger enterprises to store their data and run their workloads on its ever-growing …

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  • How AMD’s Naples X86 Server Chip Stacks Up To Intel’s Xeons

    March 8, 2017

    Ever so slowly, and not so fast as to give competitor Intel too much information about what it is up to, but just fast enough to build interest in the years of engineering smarts that has gone into its forthcoming “Naples” X86 server processor, AMD is lifting the veil on the product that will bring it back into the datacenter and that will bring direct competition to the Xeon platform that dominates modern computing infrastructure.

    It has been a bit of a rolling thunder revelation of information about the Zen core used in the “Naples” server chip, the brand of …

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  • Naples Opterons Give AMD A Second Chance In Servers

    March 7, 2017

    There are not a lot of second chances in the IT racket. AMD wants one, and we think, has earned one.

    Such second chances are hard to come by, and we can rattle off a few of them because they are so rare. Intel pivoted from a memory maker to a processor maker in the mid-1980s, and has come to dominate compute in everything but handheld devices. In the mid-1990s, IBM failed to understand the RISC/Unix and X86 server waves swamping the datacenter and nearly went bankrupt and salvaged itself as software and services provider to glass houses. A decade …

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  • Mixed Signals From Server Land

    February 28, 2017

    With a new generation of Xeon processors coming out later this year from Intel and AMD trying to get back in the game with its own X86 server chips – they probably will not be called Opterons – it is not a surprise to us that server makers are having a bit of trouble making their numbers in recent months. But we are beginning to wonder if something else might be going on here than the usual pause before a big set of processor announcements.

    In many ways, server spending is a leading indicator because when companies are willing to …

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  • Skylake Xeon Ramp Cuts Into Intel’s Datacenter Profits

    January 27, 2017

    Every successive processor generation presents its own challenges to all chip makers, and the ramp of 14 nanometer processes that will be used in the future “Skylake” Xeon processors, due in the second half of this year, cut into the operating profits of its Data Center Group in the final quarter of 2016. Intel also apparently had an issue with one of its chip lines ­– it did not say if it was a Xeon or Xeon Phi, or detail what that issue was – that needed to be fixed and that hurt Data Center Group’s middle line, too.

    Still, …

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