Compute
The Inevitability Of FPGAs In The Datacenter
You don’t have to be a chip designer to program an FPGA, just like you don’t have to be a C++ programmer to code in Java, but it probably helps in both cases if you want to do them well. …
Datacenter
Compute
Is That Canary In The Datacenter Feeling Dizzy?
The market for servers used to be a lot more predictable in the past, with a portion of the tens millions of companies worldwide buying machinery in their own cycles that more or less coincided with the global gross domestic product. …
Connect
Relentless Competition Drives Down Ethernet Switch Costs
If you want to see what real competition might look like at some point in the future of the server racket, look no further than the Ethernet switch market, where switch ASICs and the companies that build switches alike have to fight for every dollar and make it up in volume every year without pause. …
Compute
On The Hot Seat In The Hyperscale Datacenter
As one of the dominant hyperscalers in the world, Microsoft is out there on the cutting edge, driving efficiencies on every front it can in server, storage, switching, software, and datacenter design. …
AI
The Computing Needs Of Earth Are Not Yet Satisfied
To a certain way of looking at it, Nvidia has always been engaged in the high performance computing business and it has always been subject to the same kinds of cyclical waves that affect makers of supercomputers and enterprise systems. …
Compute
Intel Makes Money Hand Over Fist In The Datacenter
Despite the increasing competitive pressures that Intel is feeling in the datacenter and very serious issues that the company is having ramping up its 10 nanometer manufacturing processes, the datacenter business at Intel were booming in the second quarter, helping to drive a record second quarter and what is looking like will be a record full year for the chip maker. …
AI
Just How Large Can Nvidia’s Datacenter Business Grow?
The combination of the excitement for new video games, the machine learning software revolution, the buildout of very large supercomputers based on hybrid CPU-GPU architectures, and the mining of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have combined into a quadruple whammy that is driving Nvidia to new heights for revenues, profits, and market capitalization. …
Compute
A Rare Tour Of Microsoft’s Hyperscale Datacenters
If you want to study how datacenter design has changed over the past two decades, a good place to visit is Quincy, Washington. …
Compute
Concept Data Tower Scrapes The Sky For Efficiency
We talk about architecture all the time when discussing systems, but when it comes to the datacenters that house these machines, the shells are about as exciting as a monstrous warehouse for a massive distribution operation. …
Cloud
How This Battery Cut Microsoft Datacenter Costs By A Quarter
In yet another example of how distributed systems sometimes work better than centralized ones, the hardware engineers at Microsoft have come up with a new battery-backed power supply for their homegrown servers that allows for massive – and expensive – battery rooms to be eliminated from the cloud giant’s datacenters. …