Items tagged with data center
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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Facebook on Wednesday announced plans to build a new data center in Fort Worth, Texas. This will be the social network's fifth data center, with the other four located in Altoona, Iowa; Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. It will be one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world, as it will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy. To help make that possible, Facebook is constructing a 200-megawatt wind energy plant on 17,000 acres located about 90 miles away in Clay County. That's overshooting Facebook's needs, so spare energy will go into the local grid via Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corporation, and Starwood Energy Group....
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Google is coming back to the United States to build its next data center and the company has its sights on a coal plant in Alabama for the location. The data center (which is Google’s 14th, globally, in case you’re counting) will transform the aging Willow Creek power plant into a glistening installation that relies heavily (and eventually, completely) on renewable energy. Construction will begin early in 2016. The plant is expected to bring at least 100 new jobs to the area.Image credit: GoogleAs poetic as it might seem to put an environmentally-friendly data center on the site of a coal-burning power plant, it was the infrastructure that interested Google. “At Windows Creek, we can use the...
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As part of its commitment to achieving 100 percent renewable energy usage for its global footprint, Amazon this week announced that it has partnered with Community Energy to build and operate an 80 megawatt solar farm in Accomack County, Virginia. They'll call it Amazon Solar Farm U.S. East and expect it to generate around 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power each year beginning in October 2016. That's enough energy to power around 15,000 U.S. homes in a year. Amazon said it will be the largest solar farm in Virginia, but rather than use the energy it harnesses to power households, it will all go into the electrical grids that supply both current and future Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud...
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Microsoft is known for being a lot of things, but "open" is something that's found at the bottom of most hypothetical lists. However, the company has been willing to make some exceptions to that rule when either internal or both internal and external benefits can be seen, and we're seeing a new example of that with the company's latest move of joining the Open Compute Project. The OCP was founded in 2011 by Facebook with the intent of building a pool of great minds (and companies as a whole) to share their data center and server designs. The goal is to increase efficiency and support the kind of accelerating scaling-up requirements we're witnessing. Any company that partakes in this project benefits...
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Intel announced a pair of new products today designed to boost data center efficiency, shrink footprints, and allow for faster deployments. The first are new microservers based on the C2000 (codename: Avoton) Atom architecture. We've discussed the Bay Trail Atom core several times and Intel's plans for the technology in the mobile space, but moving the hardware into data centers is a key component of Intel's microserver strategy. Based on what we know of Bay Trail/Avoton, we expect it will offer significantly improved performance over existing S1200 Atom servers, thanks to multiple microarchitechtural improvements and the integration of a quad-core processor rather than dual-core + Hyper-Threading....
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VMworld 2013 kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, and some big names in big data are taking the opportunity to announce new products. Today, Kingston is touting its new SSDNow E50 SSDs, which are meant to be a more affordable alternative to the SSDNow E100 line. The SATA 3.0 solid-state drives come in 100GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. In general, the E50 drives are only a little slower than the E100s. For example, the 100GB models have random 4k read/write speeds of 27,000/82,000 IOPS (for the E50) and 55,000/83,000 IOPS (for the E100). The SSDNow E50 drives have DuraWrite write-reduction technology for longevity and RAISE, which reduces uncorrectable errors. If you’re at VMworld, you...
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Intel unveiled a number of new data center initiatives this week as part of its broad product strategy to redefine some of its market goals. In the past, Intel's efforts in this area have boiled down to giving customers more of what they wanted, where "more" was defined as higher clock speeds or more processing cores. That's not to imply that Intel didn't do a great deal of work on software optimization, compiler tools, or CPU fabric design -- it absolutely did -- but the pitches used to be simpler, and more hardware-focused. That's changing slowly, thanks to the growing difficulty of improving microprocessors at a rapid pace (on the one hand) and the popularity of low-power solutions on the...
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