Items tagged with server
AMD's rise back to prominence in the high-end CPU space has been partly (wait for it)...EPYC. That of course refers to AMD's efforts on the server side of the equation, where its EPYC processors are posing a formidable challenge to rival Intel's stronghold on the market. Little by little, however, AMD has been chipping away at Intel's dominance in the server sector, and that is likely to continue through at least 2020. That's because somewhere around the bend lurks AMD's EPYC "Rome" refresh. As with everything else, EPYC is making a transition to a 7-nanometer manufacturing process, and as it applies to Rome, AMD recently previewed an unreleased 64-core/128-thread EPYC processor beating an pair...
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Facebook's services including its main website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp all suffered massive outages this week that left millions around the globe unable to connect. Facebook was quiet on the outage at first, only stating that a DDOS attack did not cause the outage. With Facebook offering no real insight into what caused the outage, speculation ran rampant. Possible causes for the outage were said to be an issue with an undersea cable or a BGP routing leak from a European ISP to a major transit ISP. The possibility that a BGP leak caused the outage was quickly ruled out. Facebook has now stepped up and offered the reason for the outage: it was all due to a server misconfiguration....
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AMD has been on the attack in the CPU war over the last several months as its Ryzen consumer CPUs and EPYC server CPUs continue to put pressure on Intel. We recently talked about the surge in EPYC server CPU sales forcing Intel to cut prices on its Xeon parts to better compete. While the current EPYC processors are doing very well, some benchmarks have surfaced that are allegedly from an upcoming EPYC 7nm "Rome" server processor. The benchmarks alleged to be from the chip were posted over at Chiphell, and the results are claimed to be from an engineering sample Rome server processor. AMD has previously confirmed it would sample Rome in the second half of 2018. You can see the benchmark results...
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It almost feels inevitable that once a technology company grows to a massive size, the pursuit of designing its own chips is likewise inevitable. Case in point: Facebook, which follows many other technology companies - such as Google - in building its own chips to accelerate its business. Starting m earlier this year, Facebook began hiring chip engineers, but the specifics of what the company is working on isn't entirely clear. Its latest hire, Shahriar Rabii, comes from Google, where he worked on the Pixel's Visual Core chip. He's now going to work under Andrew Bosworth, who's in charge of Facebook's VR and AR efforts. Considering what Facebook's business revolves around, it seems extremely...
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Intel has rolled out new SSD storage solutions that are specifically aimed at the data center market. The new SSDs fall into the Intel SSD DC P4510 Series and use 64-layer TLC 3D NAND. The construction of the SSDs allows end users to do more per server, support broader workloads and deliver more space-efficient capacity. Intel wrote, “The P4510 Series enables up to four times more terabytes per server and delivers up to 10 times better random read latency at 99.99 percent quality of service than previous generations. The drive can also deliver up to double the input-output operations per second (IOPS) per terabyte. The 1 and 2TB capacities have been shipping to cloud service providers (CSPs)...
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Baidu isn’t a huge name here in the U.S., but in China, it is a behemoth internet search provider. Baidu isn’t all about search though and much like Google, it has fingers in lots of pies including artificial intelligence (AI). Baidu and AMD have announced a partnership that will see the firm deploying single-socket AMD EPYC platforms for its ABC Datacenters. ABC stands for AI, big data, and cloud computing services. The single socket EPYC platforms will be used by Baidu to optimize and deliver storage and computer services to customers. AMD notes that Baidu plans to roll out expanded use of EPYC processors in global datacenters during the first quarter of 2018. "By offering outstanding...
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It feels a little weird to write about performance results for AMD's EPYC processors and not have to tie the word "leak" into it. As we covered just last week, AMD has finally unleashed its hugely anticipated EPYC processor line for the server market, and to say it's long overdue would be a gross understatement. There is no doubt that Ryzen is important for AMD's desktop aspirations, but EPYC is hugely important for its chance to steal back enterprise market share from Intel. Today, we get a glimpse of some of what EPYC can deliver, as some results have hit SiSoftware's Sandra repository. The EPYC model tested was AMD's current top-end, the 7601, which boasts 32-cores, 64 threads, and perhaps...
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Today marks the launch of AMD's EPYC family of processors for data center servers. Based on the company's Zen microarchitecture, it has become abundantly clear that AMD was targeting the lucrative data center market first and foremost with its new CPU architecture and the highly scalable Naples platform that leverages it. Of course Zen scales well for client/consumer desktop applications, as we've seen with AMD's successful Ryzen processor launch. However, the data center is near and dear to the AMD's heart, due to significantly higher chip pricing and better profit margins; not to mention the explosion of the cloud, from software as a service-built platforms like Amazon AWS, to AI, and big data...
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We wrote last month about Intel's plans to overhaul its Xeon lineup, in effect forcing us to forget everything we ever knew about its current model naming convention. When the new Skylake-SP Xeons are released, they'll be separated by a simple medal-based ranking system: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and the baller-sounding "Platinum" edition. Today, we learn about what some of those chips are going to bring to the table. It looks like the "Intel Xeon Platinum 8176" chip is going to be one to drool over in the server space, as it delivers an impressive 28 cores (56 threads with Intel HyperThreading), which is 4 more cores than the current top-end Xeon offers (E7-8894 v4), though still a few shy from...
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Last week, Microsoft made a surprise mention that it had been working with Qualcomm to bring Windows Server to ARM, a tidbit that no doubt sent many into a frenzy. At Intel, we wouldn't be surprised if a little bit of anxiety was felt. From a consumer or enterprise standpoint, Windows Server on ARM could sound like an interesting route to take. Well, as it happens, Microsoft didn't announce that Windows Server was going to become available for ARM. Instead, the company has been using WS on ARM internally, and as for now, that's not going to be changing. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley verified this through a bit of prodding, with Microsoft explicitly stating that this interesting OS release is for...
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We've no doubt all been there: we click the "Send" button on an email, and before we realize what just happened, it's too late. That email and its potential embarrassment is out of your hands. While it's one thing to accidentally send an email too early, or reply all when you shouldn't have, it's an entirely different story when you accidentally email up to 1.2 million people at once. Oh - and if that's not bad enough, imagine taking down an entire email system as a result! That's just what happened to the National Health Service in the UK, as an IT contractor sent a test email to the agency's 1.2 million employees - something that didn't go unnoticed. If you've ever been involved in an...
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With Intel finding itself inside most of the world's consumer PCs and enterprise servers, it's begun making a massive push on making sure its chips wind up in all other devices - those that most of us regular folk don't think about. We're talking "edge devices" and "fog computing" hardware. "Edge devices" are those that connect all of our devices, so they can include routers, switches, and so forth. "Fog computing", by contrast, acts as decentralized resource management. An example of fog computing can be seen in Windows 10, which has the ability to serve updates to other PCs in a household or business. It's "fog" because it hovers around the given area, rather than "cloud", which would require...
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We wrote a couple of days ago about a huge treasure trove of alleged NSA-derived exploits that were hitting the market. That gold mine was accessed by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers, and it's been said that their source was Equation Group, which is believed to be an extension of the NSA. At that time, there was no proof that any of the exploits contained in the collection were still valid. Quickly, some noted that a few of the targets were already patched, leading the rest of us to believe that the entire collection came a bit too late. However, anyone who thought that might have to back it up a wee bit, as Cisco has today confirmed that one of the exploits contained within that collection...
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NVIDIA has just announced that its first-ever DGX-1 deep-learning server has found a home, and it couldn't be more appropriate. That new home is with OpenAI, the world's largest non-profit artificial intelligence research agency, which is based in San Francisco. If the OpenAI name sounds familiar but you can't quite place why, it's probably because we've talked about it a couple of times before. With the help of fellow industry legends, Tesla's Elon Musk helped launch OpenAI last year with a major goal: to progress AI with the mindset that it will benefit all humankind. The integration of the DGX-1 into its first lab was special enough for NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang to show up and hand-deliver...
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When we think of SoCs, we typically think of smartphones, tablets and other low-power devices; but how well are they suited for servers? Well, as it happens, an SoC can deliver a huge punch when working on certain workloads, as Serve the Home found out after putting Intel's Xeon D-1587 through the paces. The D-1587 was shipped this quarter and can be found only as an embedded option. In this particular case, the test platform included Supermicro's X10SDV-7TP8F, which supports up to 128GB of ECC memory, and includes 4x M.2 slots (supporting up to 22110 sizes), dual 10GbE Ethernet, six 1GbE Ethernet, and 4 SATA ports provided by the SoC. This board comes in a "Flex ATX" format, with a...
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It might be needless to put a ton of CPU cores inside of a smartphone, but it makes all the sense in the world to put a lot of them in a server. Of course, mega-core server CPUs are nothing new. Both AMD and Intel offer Hulk-smashing chips with up to 18 cores, and in some cases, up to eight of those can be packed into a single server. It's the stuff geek tears are made of. Sometimes, however, high-end processors are not needed; just lots of cores. It's for that reason that there's been an uptick in servers utilizing ARM-based processors. While these might not be as full-featured as a chip from Intel or AMD, they can prove to be extremely efficient in many different workloads. An example of an...
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Thanks to Kenny Rogers, every gambler now knows, 'You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run'. Heeding that advice, AMD is exiting the dense server systems business, effectively folding its hand on SeaMicro, which it acquired three years ago for $334 million.AMD made the news public on Thursday when delivering its fiscal first quarter financial results. The Sunnyvale chip designer posted a net loss of $180 million on revenue of $1.03 billion, the latter of which is down 17 percent sequentially and 26 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago when it posted a profit of $49 million."Building great products, driving deeper customer...
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Storage guru Western Digital on Wednesday expanded its business-class NAS (Network Attached Storage) portfolio with the WD Sentinel DX4200 storage server powered by an Intel Atom C2338 dual-core processor. Western Digital is pitching its latest box as a complete solution using Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 workgroup operating system The WD Sentinel DX4200 features a four-bay design with tool-less and tray-less installation. It supports up to 16TB of capacity, and the drives are also hot swappable -- if an HDD goes down for whatever reason, you can swap it out with a new one without skipping a beat. "The WD Sentinel DX4200 provides the enterprise grade storage and file services capabilities of...
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ARM continues to make headway into territories typically occupied by AMD and in particular Intel. Namely, the server market. Giving ARM a boost in the enterprise segment, Hewlett-Packard today announced two ARM-based servers, one of which is the first enterprise-class 64-bit ARM-based server. In addition, HP is making available a production-ready platform for software developers to build, test, and port applications to the 64-bit ARM based server. "ARM technology will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges," said Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, Servers and Networking, HP. "HP’s history, culture of innovation...
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Lenovo is already the world's top PC maker in terms of shipments and sales, and once it closes the deal with IBM for its server division, the Chinese company will become the third largest player in the global x86 server market. No small deal, Lenovo is paying IBM $2.1 billion to increase its standing in a market that's worth $42.1 billion. "With the close of the x86 acquisition, Lenovo will add a world-class business that extends our capabilities in enterprise hardware and services, immediately making us a strong number three in the global server market," said Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo. "Now, our priorities are to ensure a smooth integration and deliver a seamless transition for...
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It's being called a worse threat than Heartbleed, but unlike Heartbleed, "Shellshock" can affect home users just as well as servers. The bug is tied to the Bash Unix shell, one that's pretty much de facto in Linux, and can be found in all Mac OS X releases. While you'll be in a Bash environment whenever you open up a terminal, there are many cases where Bash will run in the background as well - such as with SSH, which constantly listens for connections. The bug was reported to Red Hat last week and published just yesterday. The report reads: "A flaw was found in the way Bash evaluated certain specially crafted environment variables. An attacker could use this flaw to override or bypass environment...
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Applied Micro is betting big on microserver use in the HPC market, and to help things along, it's just begun shipping its new X-Gene processors, based on ARM's v8 64-bit architecture. In late June, the firm revealed a number of partners that would be shipping servers with its X-Gene chip inside, and one similarity amongst them all is that they also bundle in NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators. It's no secret that ARM's v8 architecture isn't as full-featured as Intel's, with its Xeon chips, but in some cases, that might be just fine. For the hardcore data-handling, the GPU could step in. On Tuesday, Applied Micro missed expectations on Wall Street, but noted that the next couple of quarters are going...
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