Tech Field Day News Rundown

Supermicro, Dell, HPE, Cisco, and others have introduced the first server lines based on Intel's recently-announced 4th generation Xeon processors. And of course Nvidia is also supporting these new processors with their H100 DGX platform. Let's take a look under the hood and see how Sapphire Rapids brings new capabilities to these devices! Time Stamps: 0:00 | Welcome to the Rundown 1:42 | Amazon C...

If you were curious as to when Intel would launch their fourth generation Xeon processors you can satisfy that curiosity. Intel's long-rumored Sapphire Rapids architecture is now official as of this week. The biggest takeaways from the official coverage are the inclusion of accelerators on the CPU die to help increase performance for specific workloads such as SSL, 5G, and networking built around...

Just in time for the holidays, Okta got a lump of coal in the form of a breach of their GitHub repository for souce code. The intrusion appears to have been targeted at the Workforce Identity Cloud solution and an automated tool was able to access and dump the code. GitHub declined to offer details on how the code was accessed but assured users that customer data was not impacted and Auth0 product...

Join us for the Rundown of all our 2022 Rundowns! We’re looking at the big picture and linking the various stories throughout the year. See how things like DPU and ARM drove companies like AMD and Intel to make big moves in the industry. How did technologies like 5G and Quantum Computing impact the world? Are companies looking to move away from China’s chipmaking dominance? Will hackers steal your...

Tech production in China is getting more concerning by the day. Between the pandemic and international technology transfer restrictions, this could become the big story of 2023. China had tried to keep the Covid genie in the bottle since the pandemic started but is now shifting gears, relaxing testing and quarantine, and seemingly hoping for the best. This follows repeated interruptions to life an...

It's been a while since we've talked about Nutanix but they're back in the news with a big rumor. The market is abuzz with reports that HPE is looking to acquire the leader in hyperconverged infrastructure. The two companies are already partnered together for HPE Greenlake infrastructure-as-a-service which lends credence to the reports. Nutanix ousted founder and former CEO Dheeraj Pandey almost t...

Graviton 3E is finally here. What does that mean? It's a CPU that is designed to accelerate floating point and vector math. That may not sound exciting to you but for high performance computing environments that's exactly what the doctor ordered. This custom unit is going to be aimed at giants that are looking to eake out the last drop of performance from those life sciences models. At the same ti...

AMD got the jump on Intel in the battle for fourth-generation server CPUs, announcing the so-called Genoa line at SuperComputing 22. AMD's new CPU line is a massive upgrade, with more cores, accelerator instructions, and CXL. And it comes ahead of Intel's delayed Sapphire Rapids Xeon announcement, which is widely expected early next year. Let's take a closer look at the AMD Genoa CPU line. Time St...

We have some breaking news to cover today as ML Commons releases the results of their training, HPC, and tiny benchmark suites. Every company in the machine learning space found something to talk about here, with Intel showing Sapphire Rapids and Habana Gaudi 2, Nvidia showing H100, and ARM's tiny inferencing results really shining. But not everyone was happy, with some players complaining that th...

While not completely enterprise tech, we felt like it was necessary to cover the Twitter saga since so many of us use social media to share information and build our communities. The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk closed on Thursday after the market closed. From there the new owner of the platform fired the CEO, CFO, and chief legal counsel. He dismissed the board of directors this week to be...

The story that never seems to fly away has circled back once again. The FAA has as the FCC once again to delay the deployment of C-Band 5G frequencies around airports. The line of reasoning is still that flights could be disrupted becaue of the potential impact of these frequencies on plane altimeters. A new wrinkle in the discussion is that the FAA now states that even the radio filters that are...

The rumors are swirling that there is interest in Nutanix being sold or taken private. A number of reports appeared at the end of the week last week noting that discussions had been taking place with private equity investors about buying up outstanding shares in the company to take it off of Wall Street. The value of Nutanix today is reported to be about $6 billion, which is down from the valuatio...

Intel isn't happy that the source code for their Alder Lake BIOS has been leaked online. The UEFI code was nabbed by someone and posted to the Internet as a 6 GB file containing all kinds of secret things. One of the big finds is the private key for Intel Boot Guard, a seuciry feature designed to create a secure booting environment. No official word has been released on who leaked the data but sig...

Since taking over AMD's enterprise chip business in 2014, Forrest Norrod has built the perennial also-ran into a CPU powerhouse. Now that AMD is truly a major player in CPUs, the company has broadened into network adapters (acquiring Xilinx and Pensando for DPUs) and is seeing traction in ML. The Next Platform sat down with Norrod for an in-depth interview covering the competition with Intel, the...

Intel Innovation 2022 is happening this week and that means lots of coverage of the things that Intel is talking about and showing off. Pat Gelsinger has been on the job for a little less than two years and he's been working tirelessly to keep Intel relevant. From the admission that Moore's Law isn't dead just yet but may involve chiplets to the end of Optane and the anticipation for Sapphire Rapi...

Oracle released it’s fiscal 2023 Q1 results and it showed massive year-on-year cloud-revenue growth. The numbers could only mean one thing – Oracle is set to win the race against other cloud vendors. With its accelerated growth, it may very well one-up Google Cloud and become the fastest growing cloud vendor in the industry. This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show n...

MLCommons released the latest wave of machine learning training and inferencing benchmarks, and Nvidia's next-generaltion H100 really aced the results, delivering up to 4.5 times the performance of the leading Nvidia A100. But there are some other gems in the results, including a surprisingly strong showing for the Biren Technology BR104 and good enough performance from Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeo...

The United States turned up the heat on China last week, announcing that export or sale of advanced GPUs from Nvidia and AMD would not be allowed. This escalation of the trade war also reflects the war in Ukraine, with western governments seeking to keep most technology out of Russian hands. But this comes just as two Chinese firms have announced advanced GPU designs of their own. Will this move h...

VMware's annual conference is taking place in San Francisco this week, and Stephen Foskett is on-site to cover the event for Gestalt IT. It's been a tumultuous event, the first from VMware since the pandemic, and it's returning with a new name and theme. VMware Explore is different from VMworld in many ways, not least for the focus on multi-cloud management and entierprise IT developers, but we're...

Chipmaker Qualcomm is aiming to jump back into the server CPU market. The avenue is coming from last year's acquisition of Nuvia. We covered this deal on the Rundown last January and mentioned that the company was founded by former Apple engineers that wanted to focus on bring ARM to the datacenter. At first the acquistion seemed to refocus Nuvia on mobile device CPUs but Qualcomm appears to be lo...

Flash Memory Summit happened last week but we didn't want to let it go by without having our own storage expert comment on some of the announcements there. Lots of talk around CXL happened along with the ever-present discussion of the impending issues with Intel Optane, as covered by Stephen on the Gestalt IT Checksum. Oh, and that tiny little 128TB SSD that Samsung showed off. Stephen, what were...

It's Black Hat and DEFCON week and it wouldn't be a show without the disclosure of a few big bugs. The winner so far seems to be a new exploit found in Intel's SGX memory encryption technology. Per pre-briefing ahead of a talk happening today, security researchers found a flaw in the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) that allows them to read uninitialized memory that could contain...

The name Optane is one that should be familiar to almost everyone in the IT industry. Heralded by some as a revolution in computer architecture, the promise of persistent memory seemed to always be just over the horizon. That horizon has faded away this week as Intel made mention in their Q2 earnings report of a winding down of the Optane memory business buried in a forward-looking footnote statue...

We've been talking about the shortage of integrated circuits and the race to build more production capacity for over a year, but maybe there's more to this story. News out of Taiwan suggests that production capacity for mature ICs is exceeding demand, and price reductions are coming. Companies like SMIC in mainland China and smaller firms there and in Taiwan are dropping prices over 10% as demand...

Attackers are starting to target the critical infrastructure that runs industrial and manufacturing facilities. That may not sound like a new thing but the speed and sophistication with which they're increasing their attacks is. Security firm Dragos hast noted in a recent post that there has been a significant increase in the number of people using password cracking tools on industrial equipment s...