AMD gets a lot of credit for creating Accelerated Processing Units that merge CPUs and GPUs on a single package or on a single die, but Intel also has a line of chips Core and Xeon processors that do the same thing for workstation and server workloads. …
Networking chip maker Cavium is one of the ARM server chip upstarts that is taking on Intel’s hegemony in the datacenter, and is probably getting the most traction among its ARM peers in the past year with its ThunderX multicore processors. …
The personal computer has been the driver of innovation in the IT sector in a lot of ways for the past three and a half decades, but perhaps one of the most important aspects of the PC business is that it gave chip maker Intel a means of perfecting each successive manufacturing technology at high volume before moving it over to more complex server processors that would otherwise have lower yields and be more costly if they were the only chips Intel made with each process. …
Servers are still monolithic pieces of machinery and the kind of disaggregated and composable infrastructure that will eventually be the norm in the datacenter is still many years into the future. …
We have often opined that ARMv8 processors would struggle to meet Intel Xeon chips head-on until they got a few microarchitecture revisions under their belts to improve per-core performance and until they narrowed the manufacturing gap to 14 nanometers or 16 nanometers, or perhaps even 10 nanometers. …
The “Broadwell” generation of Xeon processors debuted a month ago, and now that the basic feeds and speeds are out there, customers are trying to figure out what to buy as they upgrade their systems and when to do it. …
Absorbing a collection of new processing, memory, storage, and networking technologies in a fast fashion on a complex system is no easy task for any system maker or end user creating their own infrastructure, and it takes time even for a big company like Oracle to get all the pieces together and weld them together seamlessly. …
Hyperscalers and cloud builders are different in a lot of ways from the typical enterprise IT shop. …
With machine learning taking off among hyperscalers and others who have massive amounts of data to chew on to better serve their customers and traditional simulation and modeling applications scaling better across multiple GPUs, all server makers are in an arm’s race to see how many GPUs they can cram into their servers to make bigger chunks of compute available to applications. …
The IT industry spends a lot of time obsessing about Moore’s Law and whether it is alive well or heading for the old folks home. …
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