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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