The Next Platform

We talk with Jeff Wittich, SVP at Ampere Computing, about what is going on with Nuvia and what it all might mean for the prospects for Arm servers in the datacenter and at the edge. And other stuff, of course... https://www.nextplatform.com//ampere-steams-ahead-with-ar/

Some inside insight on FPGA maker Achronix and their merger-driven IPO. How it went down, where the market is heading, and what's on their R&D horizon as a rare, standalone FPGA company... https://www.nextplatform.com//whats-next-for-fpga-maker-a/

Silicon photonics-based computing for large-scale analytics and AI/ML is on the horizon but four (solvable) technical hurdles are keeping momentum at bay. https://www.nextplatform.com//a-five-year-challenge-roadm/

As we said at the end of last year, Intel has to stop financial engineering and start engineering its future. With an engineer back at the helm, and one with a very long view of Intel, perhaps Gelsinger can get the company back on track. https://www.nextplatform.com//finally-the-right-pilot-at-/

2020 was the best year yet for Arm server chip and system sales and the prospects for an increasing share for Arm chips in servers are still good. But not for the reasons many of us expected--and not through the channels that once seemed so obvious... https://www.nextplatform.com//hope-springs-eternal-for-ar/

AI chip startup fatigue or not, Untether's server inference architecture using at-memory, SRAM dense architecture and a neat "rotator cuff" for slinging weights is worthy of comment... https://www.nextplatform.com//server-inference-chip-start/

The next leap in design productivity for semiconductor chips and the systems built around them will come from the fusion of fully integrated EDA computational tool flows + application of distributed, multi-core computing on a broader scale and ML/DL. https://www.nextplatform.com//machine-learning-for-future/

Everyone in the networking industry seems to fall into one of two camps: those that have used server-based routing software and those that have no idea such a thing exists. Now a solution called Free Range Routing (FRR) is taking over cloud and enterprise datacenters around the world and if you are in the latter camp, you’ve probably never heard of it. https://www.nextplatform.com//frr-the-most-popular-networ/

We might be seeing a bifurcation or even trifurcation of high performance computing organizations https://www.nextplatform.com//the-resurrection-of-cray-an/

AI chip startup SambaNova attached to two supercomputers at Los Alamos National Lab and Livermore Nat’ Lab to explore #AI #HPC integration & offload. Not a small experiment, complete systems attached to systems like Corona at LLNL with promising results https://www.nextplatform.com//national-lab-supercomputing/

With 10 Exaflops of FP16 performance and 200 PF peak for #HPC this European super announced today is a big win for science--and definitely Atos in Europe https://www.nextplatform.com//with-another-key-supercompu/

The move to integrating AI into current operations and finding its role in entirely new applications at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is similar to what we’re seeing among other large-scale enterprises. Before you roll your eyes and click away because you see something about enterprise AI, read on for just a moment. Because it’s not about the workload or even GPUs. It’s about all the various performance pieces that go along with that shift and what they mean for a larger view of enterprise systems in the more encompassing sense. https://www.nextplatform.com//seismic-shifts-ahead-for-bi/

The big difference between the A40 and the A6000 as well as the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3090 is that the former has passive cooling, as shown in the feature image at the top of this story, while the latter three devices have active cooling meaning ... https://www.nextplatform.com//nvidia-previews-ampere-kick/

TNP TV for this week: Guests include Google infrastructure lead Urs Hölzle, HPC + Arm guru, Simon McIntosh-Smith; Matt Kixmoeller on containers + flash in the datacenter; OpenPower Foundation president on opening Power arch. More for your weekend viewing - https://www.nextplatform.com//next-platform-tv-october-9-/

You can have a strategy, but you can't buy one... https://www.nextplatform.com//pondering-that-rumored-30-b/

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. https://www.nextplatform.com//ibm-jettisons-legacy-servic/

Nearly a full hour of in-depth conversation about future datacenter directions with Nvidia CEO and co-founder, Jensen Huang and The Next Platform's Timothy Prickett Morgan .https://www.nextplatform.com//one-on-one-with-jensen-huan/

So why are people so eager to use DPUs? First of all, it is more secure because the control plane can be separated from the dataplane within a system and across clusters of systems. The DPU also frees up capacity on the servers so they can get back to application computing. We are talking on the order of half of the cores on a system that has a lot of I/O and heavy virtualization, so the throughput goes up by 2X. So it is not just about counting the cost of the ... https://www.nextplatform.com//why-the-dpu-is-more-importa/