At Its Heart, IBM Remains A Systems Company

We have argued, even a decade and a half before The Next Platform was founded, that no one would ever move all of their IT infrastructure to a utility, what we now call a public cloud. …

At Its Heart, IBM Remains A Systems Company was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE And AMD Bag The Big Supercomputer Deal Down Under

Speaking very generally, investment in capability-class supercomputers by national governments tends to scale with gross domestic product. …

HPE And AMD Bag The Big Supercomputer Deal Down Under was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Networking: Not Just A Bag Of Parts

What is the hardest job at Intel, excepting whoever is in charge of the development of chip etching processes and the foundries that implement it? …

Intel Networking: Not Just A Bag Of Parts was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel To Amp Up Security With “Ice Lake” Xeon SP Servers

Security is one of those necessary things that should not be an afterthought, but often is, and ideally is so invisible that it doesn’t get in the way of applications and the infrastructure it runs on. …

Intel To Amp Up Security With “Ice Lake” Xeon SP Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It Takes Geological Patience To Change Datacenter Storage

Moving from an HPC center or a hyperscaler to work on enterprise software has to be a frustrating experience. …

It Takes Geological Patience To Change Datacenter Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Previews Ampere Kicker To Turing GPU Accelerator

We are still digging through the content coming out of the GTC 2020 fall conference and would be remiss if we didn’t talk a bit about the “Ampere” A40 and A6000 GPU accelerators that Nvidia is previewing. …

Nvidia Previews Ampere Kicker To Turing GPU Accelerator was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pondering That Rumored $30 Billion AMD Acquisition Of Xilinx

You can have a strategy, but you can’t buy one.

Nothing illustrates this principle more than the networking buying binges that both Intel and AMD went on nearly a decade ago, which did not really amount to much in the end but which made some sort of sense in the middle of it all happening. …

Pondering That Rumored $30 Billion AMD Acquisition Of Xilinx was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Jettisons Legacy Services To Focus On Hybrid Cloud

Today, the Gerstner era of International Business Machines is over, and the Krishna era is truly beginning, as Big Blue is spinning out the system outsourcing and hosting business that gave it an annuity-like revenue stream – and something of an even keel – in some rough IT infrastructure waters for two over decades. …

IBM Jettisons Legacy Services To Focus On Hybrid Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

One On One With Jensen Huang: Nvidia, The Platform Company

While a lot of ideas are ancient, some are relatively new and can come from only a modern context. …

One On One With Jensen Huang: Nvidia, The Platform Company was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why The DPU Is More Important Than The CPU For Nvidia

If you are fairly new to the IT racket, you might be under the impression that the waves of integration and disaggregation in compute, networking, and storage that swept over the datacenter in recent decades were all new, that somehow the issues of complexity and cost did not plague systems of the past. …

Why The DPU Is More Important Than The CPU For Nvidia was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

With “Crossroads” Supercomputer, HPE Notches Another DOE Win

When you come to the crossroads and make a big decision about selling your soul to the devil to get what you want, it is supposed to be a dramatic event, the stuff that legends are made of. …

With “Crossroads” Supercomputer, HPE Notches Another DOE Win was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It’s Back To The Future For Omni-Path InfiniBand

People in the modern era sometimes forget that networking predates the rise of Cisco Systems and the commercialization of the Internet. …

It’s Back To The Future For Omni-Path InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Betting On Mass Customization In A Post Moore’s Law World

If you wanted to wrest control of datacenter compute as embodied mainly in the Xeon SP processor away from Intel, there are a number of approaches that you might take. …

Betting On Mass Customization In A Post Moore’s Law World was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Era Of Big Memory Is Upon Us

If you reduce systems down to their bare essentials, everything exists in those systems to manipulate data in memory, and like human beings, all that really exists for any of us is what is in memory. …

The Era Of Big Memory Is Upon Us was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Now Nvidia Is Armed To The Teeth

Companies with high stock valuations are a bit like the central banks of major countries. …

Now Nvidia Is Armed To The Teeth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Necessary For Adtech Then, Even Moreso For Enterprise Now

Like other technologies, a lot of the databases in use in the world are born out of necessity because some other database hit a performance, capacity, or latency wall – or sometimes all three at the same time. …

Necessary For Adtech Then, Even Moreso For Enterprise Now was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Server Hunger Is Stronger Than Economic Uncertainty

The appetite for compute capacity, and presumably also for storage and networking capacity, in the datacenter of the world might be waning in some sectors of the economy, but thanks to the voracious hunger of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and more than a few large enterprises that need to do more, not less, computing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, server sales are now consistently at the levels we saw way back in the Dot-Com Boom more than twenty years ago. …

Server Hunger Is Stronger Than Economic Uncertainty was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Memory Area Network At The Heart Of IBM’s Power10

It must have been something in the cosmic ether.

Apopros of nothing except the need to fill a blank page with something interesting back when we were analyzing IBM’s second quarter financials and considering the options that Big Blue has with the “Cirrus” Power10 systems it will be launching about a year from now, we did a thought experiment about what it would mean if IBM started to believe in big iron machines again. …

The Memory Area Network At The Heart Of IBM’s Power10 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Making HCI Hay While the Sun Shines

Whenever enterprise server buyers are shopping, they are not just comparing the possible options on the market today against each other. …

Making HCI Hay While the Sun Shines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Local Maxima Ascension Of Datacenter At Nvidia

When we said thirteen weeks ago that we thought that Nvidia’s datacenter business would be its largest operating division before too long, we didn’t think it would only take a quarter to do that. …

The Local Maxima Ascension Of Datacenter At Nvidia was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.