Trillions for Chips: A Roiled Semiconductor Industry Strains to Meet AI Demand

We’re seeing the chip industry’s version of the scientific aphorism: “nature hates a vacuum.” The vacuum is the short supply of – and vast demand for – AI chips, and it’s roiling the semiconductor industry. Chip foundry companies TSMC, Intel and Samsung are straining to expand GPU fab capacity….

HPC News Bytes 20230918: New AMD CPUs and Intel FPGAs, Arm’s IPO and Strategic Pivot, AI for Science

A happy mid-September morning to you. Here’s a hop (4:54) through recent HPC news, including: AMD launches EPYC 8004 CPUs for energy- and space-constrained workloads; Intel announces FPGAs going into its Innovation 2023 event; Arm’s successful IPO and strategic pivot; a report on AI for science….

Astera Labs Launches Cloud-Scale Interop Lab for CXL Solutions at Scale

SANTA CLARA, CA – January 31, 2022 – Astera Labs, maker of connectivity solutions, today announced the expansion of its Cloud-Scale Interop Lab designed to provide robust interoperability testing between its Leo Memory Connectivity Platform and an ecosystem of CXL-based CPUs, memory modules, and operating systems.  “Compute Express Link (CXL) is proving to be a […]

Intel Architecture Day: Details Revealed on Sapphire Rapids and ‘Powered on’ Ponte Vecchio

Harried data center and HPC server market dominator Intel today unveiled what the company said is its biggest shifts in Intel architectures in a generation. The Architecture Day event included looks at the two chips that will power the delayed Aurora exascale supercomputer, to be installed at Argonne National Laboratory; those chips are: Sapphire Rapids, […]

Arm Releases Details on 2 Neoverse Platforms and Mesh Interconnect for HPC, ML

Arm Holdings this morning released information on two new compute platforms and an interconnect for HPC, machine learning and other workloads introduced last September: The Arm Neoverse V1 platform is a new computing tier for Arm and the first Arm-designed core to support Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), delivering 50 percent more performance for HPC and […]

Rice Univ. Researchers Claim 15x AI Model Training Speed-up Using CPUs

Reports are circulating in AI circles that researchers from Rice University claim a breakthrough in AI model training acceleration – without using accelerators. Running AI software on commodity x86 CPUs, the Rice computer science team say  neural networks can be trained 15x faster than platforms utilizing GPUs. If valid, the new approach would be a double boon for organizations implementing AI strategies: faster model training using less costly microprocessors.

AMD Launches 7nm ‘Milan’ EPYC Chips, Ups Price/Performance Ante for HPC, Data Center CPUs

Striving to continue on its path back to HPC and data center processor market prominence, AMD this morning introduced a new series of EPYC “Milan” CPUs that industry analysts and customers say looks to be a price/performance juggernaut. The EPYC 7003 series (SKUs below), designed by AMD and fabricated using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s 7-nanometer […]

UK Antitrust Agency to Probe Nvidia Acquisition of Arm

Nvidia’s intended acquisition of chip maker Arm from SoftBank, the biggest tech deal of 2020 and one with major implications for HPC and AI, is now under investigation by British regulators. A story in today’s Wall Street Journal by Stu Woo reported that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said “it was inviting third […]