Items tagged with data center
Up until today, there had not existed a solid state driver controller that takes advantage of the PCI Express 5.0 specification. That just changed, however, with Marvell's introduction of the Bravera SC5, the industry's first SSD controller to support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe 1.4b, to potentially double the performance of PCIe 4.0 SSDs. That claim comes by way of the bandwidth that PCIe 5.0 affords. In terms of raw speed, PCIe 5.0 doubles the transfer rate from PCIe 4.0 from 16GT/s to 32GT/s (that's GigaTransfers per second). That translates to around 4GB/s per lane, so in a x16 configuration, we're looking at around 64GB/s of unidirectional bandwidth, or 128GB/s. No consumer platform supports PCIe...
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AMD nearly doubled its revenue in the first quarter of 2021 compared to a year ago, earning more than $3.4 billion, up 93 percent compared to its Q1 revenue last year. The same goes for its net income, which jumped 94 percent year-over-year to $555 million. Further, a significant chunk of AMD's earnings came from more than doubling up its data center revenue. "We had outstanding year-over-year revenue growth across all of our businesses and data center revenue more than doubled. Our increased full-year guidance highlights the strong growth we expect across our business based on increasing adoption of our high-performance computing products and expanding customer relationships," AMD CEO Dr. Lisa...
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During its GTC 2021 keynote today, NVIDIA unveiled a new product for high performance computing (HPC) clients, its first-ever data center CPU called Grace. Based on Arm's architecture, NVIDIA claims Grace serves up 10x better performance than the fastest servers on the market currently, for complex artificial intelligence and HPC workloads. To be clear, though this is NVIDIA's first data center CPU, it is not intended to compete head-to-head against Intel's Xeon lineup and AMD's EPYC processors. NVIDIA made a point to say this, noting it continues to provide full support for all big iron server CPUs, including x86, Arm, and Power architectures. Instead, Grace is more of a niche product, in that...
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Intel is launching its first server products built using its advanced 10nm manufacturing process today: the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. For example, core counts have been significantly increased; Intel 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors feature up to 40 cores per processor versus 28 cores with 2nd gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of total system memory, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 connectivity per socket, for more bandwidth, higher...
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How do you make high bandwidth memory (HBM) even better? Lower for the price, for one. But aside from that, infusing it with artificial intelligence (AI) processing power is a surefire way to make HBM even more attractive for certain market segments, and that is precisely what Samsung has done—it has developed the world's HBM with AI processing power, and is calling it HBM-PIM (processing in memory). "Our groundbreaking HBM-PIM is the industry’s first programmable PIM solution tailored for diverse AI-driven workloads such as HPC, training and inference. We plan to build upon this breakthrough by further collaborating with AI solution providers for even more advanced PIM-powered applications,"...
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Say it ain't so, NVIDIA. It looks as though Quadro branding for its professional GPUs is being thrown out the window, as the company is adopting new nomenclature for its Ampere-based solutions. The company today announced the RTX A6000, which is the replacement for the current-generation Quadro RTX 8000 and RTX 6000 GPUs based on Turing architecture. We first got word of the RTX A6000 back in late September, where we learned that it would have a "full" GA102 GPU with 10,752 cores and 48GB of VRAM. Those specs have been confirmed today by NVIDIA, along with the fact that it's using 16Gbps GDDR6 on a 384-bit memory bus. For comparison, the “true flagship” GeForce RTX 3090 enthusiast...
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It is fair to say that the CPU market has been highly influenced by tech giants such as AMD, Intel, and others over the last few decades. Could one up and coming company help to shake up this market? NUVIA recently raised $240 million USD in their second round of funding. The company is actively working on creating their own CPUs and SoCs. NUVIA Inc. was founded in February 2019, and it was able to raise $53 million USD during its first round of funding in November of that year. Shortly afterwards they were able to open offices in Austin, Texas, and Toronto, Ontario. The most recent round of funding witnessed the participation of multiple capital and investment groups, but was led by Mithril...
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NVIDIA built a thriving company on a mountain of graphics processing units (GPUs) mostly aimed at gamers, but its focus has since expanded into other segments. Notably, NVIDIA is coming off a record high in quarterly data center revenue—it reached $1.14 billion during the first quarter of its fiscal 2021, which is up 18 percent sequentially and a whopping 80 percent year-over-year. It is the first time NVIDIA's data center division hit the $1 billion mark for a quarter. Equally impressive, NVIDIA managed the feat both in light of COVID-19, which is disrupting businesses across the globe, and without the benefit of Ampere, it's next-generation GPU that only became official last week. "NVIDIA...
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A chip design startup founded by a trio of former Apple semiconductor architects just raised $53 million in funding. The company is called NUVIA and it hopes to make a splash in the data center by "reimagining chip design to deliver industry-leading performance and energy efficiency." Should Intel and AMD be worried? That remains to be seen, and will depend on NUVIA's ability to execute its vision. The data center is where the big money in chip design is at, though, and it is currently dominated by Intel's Xeon processors. Meanwhile, AMD is making a spirited run with its latest generation EPYC processors, and NVIDIA has a stake as well, with its GPU accelerators. Competing with established heavyweights...
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AMD is on a roll with its Zen CPU and Navi GPU architectures, the former of which is proving particularly compelling to customers across the board. Intel still dominates in overall semiconductor sales, but AMD is not exactly playing second fiddle, or at least it's trying not to. In what could be a major boost to AMD's bottom line, there is speculation that Google may migrate its cloud data centers to EPYC hardware. Bear in mind that the data center is the real high stakes battlefield for AMD and Intel, where margins are much higher compared to desktop and laptop products. AMD is on the cusp of introducing the world's first 7-nanometer x86 data center CPU, a next-gen EPYC product line based on...
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Kingston has been a dedicated stalwart of the memory, storage, and peripheral markets for many years. The company’s products target virtually every type of user, from entry-level first-time PC builders to seasoned sysadmins. The products we’ll be showing you here today, the Kingston DC500R and DC500M solid state drives, target the latter type of user, in need of reliable, high-capacity SSD storage for enterprise and data center applications. At first glance – of both their physical design and specifications -- the Kingston DC500R and DC500M drives appear to be similar. The ‘R’ variant, however, is geared for read-heavy workloads, while the ‘M’ variant...
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Graphics specialist NVIDIA on Monday announced it is acquiring Mellanox, a maker of high performance computing (HPC) chips, for $125 per share in cash. That values the deal at around $6.9 billion, making this NVIDIA's biggest transaction since it was founded two and a half decades ago. Mellanox is a major player in the data center space. The company pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology that is commonly used in HPCs found in data centers, and is a major supplier of end-to-end Ethernet solutions. "The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s data centers," said Jensen Huang, founder and...
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AMD has managed to reassert itself in the enthusiast computing discussion, thanks to its current gen Zen CPU and, to a lesser extent, Vega GPU architectures. Between Ryzen and Threadripper, there are now many compelling non-Intel options for power users. This also applies to the server side of the equation as well, and though Intel still dominates the landscape, AMD's EPYC server processors are gaining ground. It's a slow climb for sure, but AMD is now in a position where it can chip away at Intel's lead. And that is precisely what it is doing, according to Spiceworks, a professional network for the information technology (IT) industry headquartered in Austin, Texas. As it stands, a whopping...
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NVIDIA knows how to make an entrance, that's for sure. The GPU maker stole the spotlight at Gamescom last month by unveiling its hotly anticipated GeForce RTX graphics cards with real-time ray tracing support, which will ship later this month. In the meantime, NVIDIA just announced another product at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Japan, the Tesla T4. The Tesla T4 is a burly accelerator built for data centers that will enable the next wave of AI-powered services. It's based on NVIDIA's Turing GPU architecture and is being billed as the most advanced inference accelerator ever built, with NVIDIA claiming up to 40X better low-latency throughput compared to Intel's Xeon Gold 6140 CPU. Click...
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Intel shares fell more than 8 percent in early morning trading on Friday, even though the company's earnings results for the second quarter beat out estimates with record revenue of $17 billion, up 15 percent year-over-year. That enabled Intel to nearly double its profit to $5 billion, versus $2.8 billion the same quarter a year ago. Nevertheless, investors seem more concerned about Intel giving up market share in the data center to rival AMD than posting record earnings. While still a dominant force with its Xeon line, Intel is now seeing increased competition from AMD's Zen-based Epyc processors. Whether investors are overreacting is up for debate—Intel's Data Center Group (DCG) increased...
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Samsung is laying claim to having the highest capacity NVMe solid state drive on the market, an 8-terabyte model based on the ultra-thin Next-Generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF). As is often the case when it comes to technological firsts in storage, the new 8TB NVMe NF1 SSD is not a consumer drive, so don't expect to pick this thing up for your gaming PC, as cool as that might be. Instead, it's optimized for heavy data analytics and virtualization applications in next-gen data centers and enterprise environments. The new drive features 16 of Samsung's 512-gigabyte (GB) NAND flash memory packages. They're each stacked in 16 layers of 256-gigabit (Gb) 3-bit V-NAND chips, resulting in the world's...
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Intel is on a mission re-imagine the memory and storage hierarchy, and it's attempting to do that with its 3D XPoint technology, which we have seen manifest in various Optane Memory products. Now we can add one more to the list—Intel is bringing its 3D XPoint technology to server DIMMs with the introduction of Optane DC, a type of persistent memory that will take residence in data centers. "Intel Optane DC persistent memory represents a new class of memory and storage technology architected specifically for data center usage. One that we believe fundamentally breaks through some of the constricting methods for using data that have governed computing for more than 50 years," Intel said....
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Apple is happy with the Trump administration new tax policies that will allow it to bring a massive stash of cash that's been stuck overseas back to the U.S. Apple has announced what it plans to invest in when that massive stockpile is back in America (other than possibly buying Netflix). The company will concentrate on three areas with the investments where it says there will be the greatest impact on job creation. The areas include direct employment by Apple, spending and investment with Apple domestic suppliers and manufacturers, and fueling the "fast-growing" app economy. Apple notes that new investments along with its current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers is...
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NVIDIA recently updated the End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) for its software, and some customers are fuming over the change. The "disturbance in the force" comes from an update in language in the EULA, which adds, "No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted." That language was specifically inserted to prevent customers from using GeForce and TITAN-based graphics cards in commercial data centers. While GeForce and TITAN GPUs are often built from the similar architecture to NVIDIA’s data center-oriented Tesla GPU accelerators, they were not designed for use in such environments. However,...
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Intel's semi-pivot from a PC-centric operation to one that is focused on the data center, machine learning and self-driving cars is paying off, and in a big way. The Santa Clara chipmaker announced record earnings per share of $0.94 during the third quarter, a 36 percent jump versus the same quarter a year ago. It also collected $16.1 billion in revenue en route to a $4.5 million profit from a product lineup that Intel CEO Brian Krzanich called its strongest ever. "We executed well in the third quarter with strong results across the business, and we're on track to a record year," Krzanich said. "I’m excited about our progress and our future. Intel’s product line-up is the strongest it has ever...
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Seagate is a bit late to the helium party, but this week announced its first 10TB enterprise-class helium-filled 3.5-inch hard drive. Although they have yet to reach retail shelves (neither brick and mortar or online), e-commerce giant Alibaba and smartphone darling Huawei are currently sampling the drives. Western Digital/HGST has fielded helium-filled hard drives since 2013, so it’s quite odd that Seagate waited this long to bring its offering to the table. With that being said, Seagate claims that it has emerged with a 10TB device that has the “industry’s lowest power and weight” profiles. We already know the cost-saving benefits of reduced power consumption, but the latter point is also quite...
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We all recognize that backing up data is important, but do you have backups for your backups? A single scheme isn't always enough, and if you think uploading your valuable documents to the cloud is all the protection you need, think again. Some users are finding that out the hard way after one of Google's data centers was affected by four successive lightning strikes. Google says the incident occurred on August 13, 2015, which is when lightning exacted its wrath on the local utilities grid that powers the company's European data center. There was a brief loss of power to the data center's storage system that's used for what Google dubs the europe-west1-b zone.To keep users' data safe, Google...
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