Processor News from Arm, Ampere and Tachyum

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting - semiconductor edition:

• Arm launches Trillium to bring ML to edge devices.  Arm announced Project Trillium, a suite of Arm intellectual property including new highly scalable processors that will deliver enhanced machine learning (ML) and neural network functionality. With a focus on scalability Trillium will cover mobile processors and Arm ML products for sensors, mobile, entertainment and beyond. Built from the ground-up for ML, the Arm ML processor delivers 4.6 trillion operations per second and over three trillion operations per second per watt (TOPs/W). THe Arm OD processor is designed to efficiently identify people and other objects with virtually unlimited objects per frame. Arm NN software is optimized for neural networks, and bridges the gap between NN frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe, and Android NN and the full range of Arm Cortex CPUs, Arm Mali GPUs, and ML processors. 

• Chip Startup Ampere Launches. Silicon Valley chip startup Ampere emerged from stealth last week, led by former Intel president Renee James. As the company states, its chips born in and built for the cloud with a modern architecture, featuring 64-bit Arm server processors geared for high memory performance and substantially lower power and total cost of ownership. "We have an opportunity with cloud computing to take a fresh approach with products that are built to address the new software ecosystem,” said James. “The workloads moving to the cloud require more memory, and at the same time, customers have stringent requirements for power, size and costs. The software that runs the cloud enables Ampere to design with a different point of view. The Ampere team’s approach and architecture meets the expectation on performance and power and gives customers the freedom to accelerate the delivery of the most memory-intensive applications and workloads such as AI, big data, storage and database in their next-generation data centers." 

• Tachyum nets investment from IPM.  After emerging from stealth last year chip company Tachyum announced it has received an outside investment from IPM Growth, the venture capital division of InfraPartners Management. Tachyum looks to deliver a product family of "Cloud Chips" that offer "unprecedented power savings, performance and value to help overcome the energy demands of exponential growth in data center capacity." Tachyum CEO Dr. Radoslav Danilak holds over 100 granted patents, and notes that the investment from IPN gives the company a "significant boost in our ability to bring our Cloud Chip to life and to address the sea change in semiconductor development threatening to topple industries that depend on processing performance and density."

Data Center Links: October 27, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• NVIDIA and Amazon Simplify Machine Learning.  Amazon and NVIDIA announced new Machine Learning software stacks in the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC), and a new 8 Volta GPU EC2 instance. 

• IBM's Blockchain solution for global payments.  IBM announced a new blockchain banking solution that will, with partners Stellar.org and KlickEx Group improve the speed in which banks both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time. IBM says the solution is run from the IBM Blockchain Platform on Hyperledger Fabric and that they will continue to advance the solution with the goal of expanding capabilities in order to support central bank-issued digital currencies, securities, bonds and structured financial assets.

• Arm launches security framework IoT at scale. At the annual Arm TechCon conference this year Arm introduced a common industry framework for building secure connected devices, called Platform Security Architecture (PSA). The company said PSA will deliver representative IoT threat models and security analyses, hardware and firmware architecture specs, and a reference open source implementation of the firmware specification called Trusted Firmware-M.

• Cisco acquires Perspica. Cisco announced that it is acquiring machine learning-driven operations analytics firm Perspica for an undisclosed amount. Cisco will fold the company staff into AppDynamics, which it purchased earlier in the year for $3.7 billion. 

• Intel doubles down with $60M on startups. At its annual conference Intel Capital revealed 19 new investments in startups, totaling more than $60 million. Intel Capital's Wendell Brooks focused on the data explosion, noting that "by 2020, every autonomous vehicle on the road will create 4TB of data per day. A million self-driving cars will create the same amount of data every day as 3 billion people.  Company investments in startups were from all over the world and included such companies as Trace, Bossa Nova Robotics, Horizon Robotics, Echo Pixel, TileDB, LeapMind and AdHawk Microsystems.

• U.S. warns about attacks on energy, industrial firms.  This seems almost like a template announcement... that has happened, and will probably keep happening.  The U.S. government issued a public warning last week that hackers are targeting energy and industrial firms. Homeland Security warned that nuclear, energy, aviation, water and critical manufacturing industries have been targeted along with government entities in attacks dating back to at least May.

Bonus item:  Here is a Really cool drone video - from Rotor Visual

Data Center Links, August 23, 2016

Data Center Links for 8/23/2016.

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Avere and Cycle Computing integrate for hybrid HPC in the cloud.  Avere Systems and Cycle Computing announced a technology integration that enables hybrid high performance computing in popular public cloud computing environments. By combining the CycleCloud with Avere's vFXT Edge filer users can launch an Avere tiered file system on demand linked directly with the CycleCloud managed scalable compute nodes through cloud providers like AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure.

• U.S. DOE awards $34 million to protect power grid.  The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $34 million to help protect critical infrastructures, specifically the smart grid. The funds cover 12 projects in the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability's Cybersecurity of Energy of Delivery Systems (CEDS), and is intended to help develop new solutions to protect critical infrastructure in the energy industry.

• U.S. approves handover of IANA to ICANN. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has approved a plan to hand control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) contract to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN has run IANA functions - DNS, IP addresses and protocols - since incorporation in 1999. 

• NVIDIA Parker - SoC for autonomous vehicles. At the #hotchips conference NVIDIA announced Parker, a new mobile processor that the company hopes will power the next generation of autonomous vehicles. Built around the Pascal GPU architecture and NVIDIA's Denver CPU architecture, the company says it will deliver "up to 1.5 teraflops of performance for deep learning-based self-driving AI cockpit systems." NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered a supercomputer to OpenAI, a non-profit founded by Tesla's Elon Musk. 

• SKA Science Data Processor (big data meet big compute). A prototype part of the software system to manage data from the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope has run on the Tiahnhe-2 supercomputer - currently the second best supercomputer in the world.   Deemed the world's largest science project, the SKA data processing system will ingest data from more than a quarter of a million antennas. 

• CyrusOne and the REIT sector. Seeking Alpha has a nice look at data center REIT CyrusOne and their record leasing quarter - and a bullish thesis on the company and its future. 

• Intel to Fab ARM.  I had to check that headline a few times - but yes, Intel Custom Foundry will now "offer access to ARM Artisan physical IP, including POP IP, based on the most advanced ARM cores and Cortex series processors. Intel also told of several foundry success stories from LG Electronics, Spreadtrum, Achronix Semiconductor, Netronome and Altera.