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.

Cray-Now-HPE Issues Network Performance Challenge – And Cooperation – With GPCNeT Benchmark

It happens all the time. There is a performance problem, and everyone blames the network. …

Cray-Now-HPE Issues Network Performance Challenge – And Cooperation – With GPCNeT Benchmark was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Taking A Deeper Dive Into Marvell’s “Triton” ThunderX3

Say what you will, but among the many vendors that have tried to break into the datacenter with Arm server chips, Marvell, by virtue of the hard work done by Cavium, which it acquired, and Broadcom, which sold its “Vulcan” design to Cavium when it exited the business, has been the most successful in terms of shipments and ecosystem. …

Taking A Deeper Dive Into Marvell’s “Triton” ThunderX3 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Brings An Architecture Gun To A Chip Knife Fight

For the past several years here at The Next Platform, as we have been pondering what IBM might do with the future Power10 processor, we have been feinting here and there with our analytical pen, trying to suss out precisely what Big Blue might be up to, particularly with the unique memory architecture that it has been working on for more than a decade. …

IBM Brings An Architecture Gun To A Chip Knife Fight was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Ticking And Tocking Of Intel’s “Ice Lake” Xeon SP

It has been a long time since Intel changed its manufacturing process – what it used to call a “tick” – and the microarchitecture and architecture of a processor design – what it used to call a “tock” – at the same time. …

The Ticking And Tocking Of Intel’s “Ice Lake” Xeon SP was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Staking The Claim For The Real DPU

As we all know well, the various elements computer architecture swing on their own pendulums, with consolidated being at the center and distributed being at the opposite ends of the arc. …

Staking The Claim For The Real DPU was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Tech Tricks That Make PCI-Express 6.0 And Beyond Possible

Multiplying things by two and putting them on a roadmap is easy, even if it does take a lot of courage to do that. …

The Tech Tricks That Make PCI-Express 6.0 And Beyond Possible was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Switch ASIC Thoroughbred Sprouts Wings To Attain Unicorn Status

It takes money to make money, and if you want to break into the switch ASIC business in the datacenter, even if you are a low-cost designer of such chips, you had better have some rich friends to help the business take off. …

Switch ASIC Thoroughbred Sprouts Wings To Attain Unicorn Status was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Datacenter Is The New Unit Of Compute, Open Networking Is How To Automate It

Datacenters have evolved from physical servers, to virtualized systems, and now to composable infrastructure where resources such as storage and persistent memory are disaggregated from the server. …

Datacenter Is The New Unit Of Compute, Open Networking Is How To Automate It was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Dollars And Sense Of Nvidia Paying A Fortune For Arm

Back in April, when we were talking with Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang about the datacenter being the new unit of compute, we explained that we were always disappointed with the fact that Nvidia did not bring its “Denver” hybrid Arm CPU and Nvidia GPU, previewed way back in January 2011, to market, and said further we really wanted Nvidia to redefine what a CPU is by breaking its memory and I/O truly free from its compute. …

The Dollars And Sense Of Nvidia Paying A Fortune For Arm was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Feeding The Datacenter Inference Beast A Heavy Diet Of FPGAs

Any workload that has a complex dataflow with intricate data needs and a requirement for low latency should probably at least consider an FPGA for the job. …

Feeding The Datacenter Inference Beast A Heavy Diet Of FPGAs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Balancing AMD’s Future On The Edge Of A Silicon Wafer

The hardest job at any chip designer that doesn’t actually own its own foundry – and maybe even those that do – is figuring out what wafer start commitment level to make for a new compute engine in the datacenter. …

Balancing AMD’s Future On The Edge Of A Silicon Wafer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Big Blue Should Start Believing In Big Iron Again

There isn’t really a systems business so much as a collection of them, all unique and all facing their own particular challenges. …

Big Blue Should Start Believing In Big Iron Again was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Tests Its Datacenter Teflon With 7 Nanometer Delay

There is such a thing as a string of bad luck, but we have always believed that luck is the residue of design, either good or bad. …

Intel Tests Its Datacenter Teflon With 7 Nanometer Delay was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

One Network Operating System To Rule Them All

Networks may not be the most expensive thing in the datacenter – they typically comprise about 10 percent to 15 percent of the cost of a distributed system, including cables, transceivers, switches, and routers – but they are without a doubt the most complex part of distributed systems. …

One Network Operating System To Rule Them All was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Get The Picture With Video Acceleration In The Datacenter

With all of us now learning to live, work, and learn from home, it is becoming apparent how critical video streaming is as a tool to support our new normal. …

Get The Picture With Video Acceleration In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Puffing Up Computational Fluid Dynamics On The Cloud

Huge dataset sizes and computationally intense demands of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workloads are motivating some organizations to seek highly elastic HPC solutions with enormous memory volumes. …

Puffing Up Computational Fluid Dynamics On The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.