Inspur Information, a leading IT infrastructure solutions provider, is rolling out full-stack liquid-cooled products, with cold plate liquid-cooling technology being available in all of its products including general-purpose servers, high-density servers, rack servers, and AI servers. This is another major step in Inspur Information's march towards being carbon neutral following its unveiling of Asia's largest development and manufacturing facility for liquid-cooled data centers.

As Green, low-carbon and sustainable development has become the international consensus, nearly 130 countries and regions around the world have set the goal of being carbon neutral. In 2022, with "All in Liquid-Cooling" incorporated into its strategy, Inspur Information has incorporated cold plate liquid-cooling technology into all of its products (general-purpose servers, high-density servers, rack servers, and AI servers), which can be fully customized for a diverse array of scenarios.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, is announcing the global availability of a wide range of systems for edge computing, including the recently announced SuperEdge and a range of Intel Xeon D processor-based systems, with up to 20 cores, 25 GbE networking built-in, and a temperature operating range from -40° C to 85° C. These systems are optimized for the Intelligent Edge, where responsive systems that reduce latency are required. In addition, locating powerful AI systems closer to where data is generated reduces network traffic and lowers response time.

"We are pleased to be able to deliver our high-volume optimized edge systems worldwide due to our expanded factories and capacity," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO of Supermicro. "Our latest systems are designed for harsh conditions with the highest performing CPUs and GPUs that are available. Supermicro has the unique ability to quickly deliver industry-optimized solutions from the edge to the data center by using our Building Block Solution approach. We are also committed to lessening our servers' carbon footprint, resulting in fewer emissions and a greener planet."

Intel's high-end desktop (HEDT), usually reserved for workstation and enterprise applications, is due for an update, and the company is readying an entire family of updated products. Today, we found a leak of what appears to be an Intel Sapphire Rapids design made for desktops. Called Xeon W5-3433, the CPU appears in the SiSoftware Sandra benchmark database. It carries a configuration of 16 cores and 32 threads and is equipped with 32 MB of L2 cache and 45 MB of L3 cache. Having 2 MB of L2 cache per core suggests that the design is not an Alder Lake variation. This specific SKU is clocked at 1.99 GHz, meaning an early engineering sample.

The Sapphire Rapids HEDT platform is codenamed FishHawk Falls. Intel is supposed to offer Alder Lake-X processors with higher core counts and the FishHawk Falls. Both will be running on the same W790 chipset; however, the Sapphire Rapids implementation will carry more cores in a Xeon package designed for professionals. There was an Ice Lake-X Xeon processor called Xeon W-3335 with 16 cores and 32 threads, meaning that the leaked Xeon W5-3433 is its direct successor.

Intel's ambitious next-generation server processor, Xeon "Sapphire Rapids," hit its second shipping delay this year, according to the company. Speaking at the Bank of America Securities Global Technology Conference, Intel's Sandra Rivera stated that the volume ramp for "Sapphire Rapids," is not going as planned, indicating that its general availability could be delayed for the second time after original plans to do so in the first quarter of 2022.

Riviera was quick to defend the Intel 7 silicon fabrication node (10 nm Enhanced SuperFin) that the "Sapphire Rapids" chip is based on. "One thing I didn't mention on Sapphire, it sits on - it's on our 7-nanometer node and so the process is quite healthy. In fact Alder Lake, which is our client product ramped 15 million units. I think we announced at Q1 earnings, which makes that the fastest ramping, you know one of the fastest ramping client products in almost a decade."

Hot Chips 34, the upcoming semiconductor conference from Sunday, August 21 to Tuesday, August 23, 2022, will feature many significant contributions from folks like Intel, AMD, Tesla, and NVIDIA. Today, thanks to Intel's registration at the event, we discovered that the company would present its work on Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake processors with the novel Foveros 3D packaging. The all-virtual presentation from Intel will include talks about Ponte Vecchio GPU and its architecture, system, and software; Meteorlake and Arrowlake 3D Client Architecture Platform with Foveros; and some Xeon D and FPGA presentations. You can see the official website here for a complete list of upcoming talks.

As a little reminder, Meteor Lake is supposed to arrive next year, replacing the upcoming Raptor Lake design, and it has already ahs been pictured, which you can see below. The presentation will be recorded and all content posted on Hot Chips's website for non-attendees to catch up on.

Intel is slowly transitioning its data center customers to a new processor generation called Sapphire Rapids. Today, thanks to the hardware leaker Yuuki_ans we have more profound insights into the top-end 56-core Sapphire Rapids processor and its power settings. According to the leak, we have information on either Xeon Platinum 8476 or Platinum 8480 designs that are equipped with 56 cores and 112 threads. This model was running at the base frequency of 1.9 GHz and a boost frequency of 3.3 GHz. Single-core can boost to 3.7 GHz if the report is giving a correct reading. Remember that this is only an engineering sample, so the final target speeds could differ. It carries 112 MB of L2 and 105 MB of L3 cache, and this sample was running with 1 TB of DDR5 memory with CL40-39-38-76 timings.

Perhaps the most exciting finding is the power configuration of this SKU. Intel has enabled this CPU to consume 350 Watts in PL1 rating, with up to 420 Watts in PL2 performance mode. The enforced BIOS power limit rating is set at an astonishing 764 Watts, which could happen with AVX-512 enabled. Final TDP ratings are yet to be disclosed; however, these Sapphire Rapids processors are shaping to be relatively power-hungry chips.

When NVIDIA announced its Grace CPU Superchip, the company officially showed its efforts of creating an HPC-oriented processor to compete with Intel and AMD. The Grace CPU Superchip combines two Grace CPU modules that use the NVLink-C2C technology to deliver 144 Arm v9 cores and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. Each core is Arm Neoverse N2 Perseus design, configured to achieve the highest throughput and bandwidth. As far as performance is concerned, the only detail NVIDIA provides on its website is the estimated SPECrate 2017_int_base score of over 740. Thanks to the colleges over at Tom's Hardware, we have another performance figure to look at.

NVIDIA has made a slide about comparison with Intel's Ice Lake server processors. One Grace CPU Superchip was compared to two Xeon Platinum 8360Y Ice Lake CPUs configured in a dual-socket server node. The Grace CPU Superchip outperformed the Ice Lake configuration by two times and provided 2.3 times the efficiency in WRF simulation. This HPC application is CPU-bound, allowing the new Grace CPU to show off. This is all thanks to the Arm v9 Neoverse N2 cores pairing efficiently with outstanding performance. NVIDIA made a graph showcasing all HPC applications running on Arm today, with many more to come, which you can see below. Remember that NVIDIA provides this information, so we have to wait for the 2023 launch to see it in action.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, has announced a revolutionary technology that simplifies large scale GPU deployments and is a future proof design that supports yet to be announced technologies. The Universal GPU server provides the ultimate flexibility in a resource-saving server.

The Universal GPU system architecture combines the latest technologies supporting multiple GPU form factors, CPU choices, storage, and networking options optimized together to deliver uniquely-configured and highly scalable systems. Systems can be optimized for each customer's specific Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Organizations worldwide are demanding new options for their next generation of computing environments, which have the thermal headroom for the next generation of CPUs and GPUs.

If you have already bought a 12th gen Intel Alder Lake CPU, you could be sitting on a collectors item, as according to Tom's Hardware, Intel is now fusing off AVX-512 support in production. It's possible this could be in preparation for the arrival of the Core "W" series of CPUs that might be replacing the Xeon-W series of processors for Intel. It should be noted that this isn't a rumour, as Tom's Hardware has had an official statement on the matter from Intel.

The statement reads, "Although AVX-512 was not fuse-disabled on certain early Alder Lake desktop products, Intel plans to fuse off AVX-512 on Alder Lake products going forward." As to exactly when this will go into full effect isn't clear, but according to Tom's Hardware, they've already had reports of batches of non-K Alder Lake CPUs that are lacking AVX-512 support. In all fairness to Intel, the company never claimed that its Alder Lake CPUs would support AVX-512 and the support has never been guaranteed to be flawless on the chips that have shipped with it enabled. Intel has also disabled AVX-512 via a microcode update that shipped to motherboard makers in January, but at least some motherboard makers have added a toggle to allow people to re-enable AVX-512 support. It's unlikely that this will affect many potential customers, since AVX-512 instructions aren't widely used in consumer facing software.

Today, ahead of MWC Barcelona 2022, Intel launched new Intel Xeon D processors: the D-2700 and the D-1700. They are Intel's newest system-on-chip (SoC) built for the software-defined network and edge, with integrated AI and crypto acceleration, built-in Ethernet, support for Intel Time Coordinated Computing (Intel TCC) and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), and industrial-class reliability. New Intel Xeon D processors extend compute with acceleration beyond the core data center, generating a better overall experience for key network and edge usages and workloads.

"As the industry enters a world of software-defined everything, Intel is delivering programmable platforms for networking and the edge to enable one of the most significant transformations our industry has ever seen. The new Intel Xeon D processor is built for this. Based on the proven and trusted Intel architecture, this processor is designed for a range of use cases to unleash innovation across the network and edge," said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president, Network & Edge Group, general manager of the Network Platforms Group.

Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" is an upcoming enterprise processor with a CPU core count of up to 60. This core-count is achieved using four dies inter-connected using EMIB. Locuza, who leads social media with logic die annotation, posted one for "Sapphire Rapids," based on a high-resolution die-shot revealed by Intel in its ISSCC 2022 presentation.

Each of the four dies in "Sapphire Rapids" is a fully-fledged multi-core processor in its own right, complete with CPU cores, integrated northbridge, memory and PCIe interfaces, and other platform I/O. What brings four of these together is the use of five EMIB bridges per die. This allows CPU cores of a die to transparantly access the I/O and memory controlled any of the other dies transparently. Logically, "Sapphire Rapids" isn't unlike AMD "Naples," which uses IFOP (Infinity Fabric over package) to inter-connect four 8-core "Zeppelin" dies, but the effort here appears to be to minimize the latency arising from an on-package interconnect, toward a high-bandwidth, low-latency one that uses silicon bridges with high-density microscopic wiring between them (akin to an interposer).

At Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger and Intel's business leaders outlined key elements of the company's strategy and path for long-term growth. Intel's long-term plans will capitalize on transformative growth during an era of unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Among the presentations, Intel announced product roadmaps across its major business units and key execution milestones, including: Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, Intel Foundry Services, Software and Advanced Technology, Network and Edge, Technology Development, More: For more from Intel's Investor Meeting 2022, including the presentations and news, please visit the Intel Newsroom and Intel.com's Investor Meeting site.

Intel's next-generation Xeon processors code-named Sapphire Rapids are on track to hit the market this year. These new processors are supposed to bring a wide array of new and improved features and a chance for Intel to show off its 10 nm SuperFin manufacturing process in the server market. Thanks to the Twitter user YuuKi_AnS, we have some of the first tests run in AIDA64 and Cinebench R15 benchmark suites. Yuuki managed to get ahold of DDR5-enabled Sapphire Rapids Xeon with 48 cores and 96 threads, equipped with a base frequency of 2.3 GHz and boost speeds of 3.3 GHz. The processor tested was an engineering sample with a Q-SPEC designation of "QYFQ" and made for Intel Socket E (LGA-4677). This CPU sample was locked at 270 Watt TDP.

Below, you can see the performance results of this processor, tested in the AIDA64 cache and memory benchmark and Cinebench R15 bench test. There is a comparison between AMD's Milan-X and Xeon Platinum 8380, so the numbers are more in check of what you can expect from the final product.

Server processors tend to be one of the most profitable businesses for AMD and Intel. Thus, investment groups and analysts closely monitor happenings in the server and data center world. A report from Mizuho Securities (investment bank) Managing Director Jordan Klein states that many upcoming changes on the server processor front are coming this year. Mr. Klein cites sources over at Insupur Systems, one of the most prominent server vendors. More precisely, Dolly Wu is the VP and GM of Datacenter/Cloud at Inspur. According to the report, AMD and Intel will change their strategy in the server market going forward in 2022.

As far as AMD is concerned, the company plans to increase the pricing of its EPYC processors by 10-30%. This increase should be a bit easier on the strategic cloud customers. The report also indicates that as the demand far exceeds the supply of EPYC processors, AMD increases prices and makes a "take it or leave it" offer, resulting in most customers accepting the increased costs. Another interesting tidbit from the report was the talk about Intel. The blue team laid out its strategy to launch highly-anticipated Sapphire Rapids Xeons in Q2 of 2022. However, it will maybe get delayed to Q3 of 2022. Intel doesn't plan to increase prices to remain competitive with AMD, so the server space will see Intel fighting to regain the lost market share.

In recent years, government institutions have been funding the development of home-grown hardware that will power the government infrastructure. This trend was born out of a desire to design chips with no back doors implemented so that no foreign body could monitor the government's processes. Today, Russian company Baikal Electronics managed to boot up the Baikal-S processor with 48 cores based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The processor codenamed BE-S1000 manages to operate 48 cores at a 2.0 GHz base frequency, with a maximum boost of 2.5 GHz clock speed. All of that is achieved at the TDP of 120 Watts, making this design very efficient.

When it comes to some server configurations, the Baikal-S processor run in up to four sockets in a server board. It offers a home-grown RISC-V processor for safe boot and management, so the entire SoC is controlled by a custom design. Baikal Electronics provided some benchmark numbers, which you can see in the slides below. They cover SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack performance. Additionally, the company claims that Baikal-S is in line with Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake design and AMD EPYC 7351 CPU based on Zen1 core. Compared to Huawei's Kunpeng 920, the Baikal-S design provides 0.86x performance.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build its third-generation, high performance computing (HPC) system, called Kestrel. Named for a falcon with keen eyesight and intelligence, Kestrel's moniker is apropos for its mission—to rapidly advance the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) energy research and development (R&D) efforts to deliver transformative energy solutions to the entire United States.

Installation of the new system will begin in the fall of 2022 in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) data center. Kestrel will complement the laboratory's current supercomputer, Eagle, during the transition. When completed—in early 2023—Kestrel will accelerate energy efficiency and renewable energy research at a pace and scale more than five times greater than Eagle, with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power.

During the Supercomputing (SC) 21 event, Intel has disclosed additional information regarding the company's upcoming Xeon server processor lineup, codenamed Sapphire Rapids. One of the central areas of improvement for the new processor generation is the core architecture based on Golden Cove, the same core found in Alder Lake processors for consumers. However, the only difference between the Golden Cove variant found in Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids is the amount of L2 (level two) cache. With Alder Lake, Intel equipped each core with 1.25 MB of its L2 cache. However, with Sapphire Rapids, each core receives a 2 MB bank.

One of the most exciting things about the processors, confirmed by Intel today, is the inclusion of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). These processors operate with eight memory channels carrying DDR5 memory and offer PCIe Gen5 IO expansion. Intel has confirmed that Sapphire Rapids Xeons will feature up to 64 GB of HBM2E memory, including a few operating modes. The first is a simple HBM caching mode, where the HBM memory acts as a buffer for the installed DDR5. This method is transparent to software and allows easy usage. The second method is Flat Mode, which means that both DDR5 and HBM are used as contiguous address spaces. And finally, there exists an HBM-only mode that utilizes the HBM2E modules as the only system memory, and applications fit inside it. This has numerous benefits, primarily drawn from HBM's performance and reduced latency.

The 58th annual edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2 was the only machine to shake up the top spots, claiming No. 10. Based on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and 2.45GHz working together with an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 80 GB of memory, Voyager-EUS2 also utilizes a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for data transfer.

While there were no other changes to the positions of the systems in the Top10, Perlmutter at NERSC improved its performance to 70.9 Pflop/s. Housed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Perlmutter's increased performance couldn't move it from its previously held No. 5 spot.

Intel's Aurora supercomputer is a $500 million contract with the US Department of Energy to deliver an exascale supercomputer for Argonne National Laboratory. The project aims to build a machine capable of cranking over one ExaFLOP of computing at sustained workloads. The supercomputer aims to reach two ExaFLOPs of computing power once the installation system is completed and powered. The contract bound Intel to create accelerators that are powerful enough to achieve this magical number. However, they left Intel with room to do a little bit extra. With Ponte Vecchio GPU behind the project, it seems like the GPU is performing better than expected.

According to Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, the system will reach over 2 ExaFLOPs at peak and a bit below in sustained workloads. As per preliminary calculations done by The Next Platform, the system's estimations point towards 2.43 ExaFLOPs peak and around 1.7 ExaFLOPs in sustained workloads at Double-precision floating-point format math, aka FP64. The system will utilize Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors with HBM memory and the powerful Ponte Vecchio GPU with 47 tiles and over 100 billion transistors.

Axiomtek - a world-renowned leader relentlessly devoted in the research, development, and manufacture of series of innovative and reliable industrial computer products of high efficiency - is pleased to introduce the IPC970, its new feature-rich, expandable 4-slot industrial system. This intelligent industrial computer is powered by the Intel Xeon or 10th generation Intel Core i7/i5/i3 processors (code name: Comet Lake S) with the Intel W480E chipset. The powerful edge computing system supports NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card with 10,496 CUDA cores and a whopping 24 GB of GDDR6X memory for powerful GPU computing capability. The ruggedized IPC970 enables simultaneous AI processing for intelligent AI computing at the edge.

The Axiomtek's IPC970 provides flexible expansion options with one I/O module slot and three PCIe slots plus one blank expansion slot. In addition, it has a full-size PCIe Mini Card slot for Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/LTE modules, one M.2 Key B 3042/3050 socket for 5G wireless connections, and one M.2 Key E 2230 socket for Wi-Fi/Bluetooth modules. Its front-facing I/O design makes it easy to access and deploy. To ensure stable and reliable operation in harsh industrial environments, the IPC970 has a wide operating temperature range of -10°C to +70°C and a power input of 24 V DC (uMin=19 V/uMax=30 V) with power-on delay function, over-voltage protection, over current protection, and reverse voltage protection.

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter 2021 financial results. "Q3 shone an even greater spotlight on the global demand for semiconductors, where Intel has the unique breadth and scale to lead. Our focus on execution continued as we started delivering on our IDM 2.0 commitments. We broke ground on new fabs, shared our accelerated path to regain process performance leadership, and unveiled our most dramatic architectural innovations in a decade. We also announced major customer wins across every part of our business," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "We are still in the early stages of our journey, but I see the enormous opportunity ahead, and I couldn't be prouder of the progress we are making towards that opportunity."

In the third quarter, the company generated $9.9 billion in cash from operations and paid dividends of $1.4 billion. Intel CFO George Davis announced plans to retire from Intel in May 2022. He will continue to serve in his current role while Intel conducts a search for a new CFO and until his successor is appointed. Third-quarter revenue was led by strong recovery in the Enterprise portion of DCG and in IOTG, which saw higher demand amid recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19. The Client Computing Group (CCG) was down due to lower notebook volumes due to industry-wide component shortages, and on lower adjacent revenue, partially offset by higher average selling prices (ASPs) and strength in desktop.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, presents its line-up of 8-bay storage servers designed to meet the needs of modern businesses for enterprise virtualization, data-intensive applications, and service continuity. TerraMaster's Rackmount NAS Series is equipped with the latest technologies and advanced securities to deliver efficient performance with excellent data security making it ideal for business and government use.

The TerraMaster 8-Bay Rackmount NAS Series support up to 1000 user accounts with RBAC rights management and Windows ACL. This allows easy user and access rights management. The 8-Bay Rackmount NAS Series supports 2.5" and 3.5" drives and comes fitted with four RJ-45 1 GbE LAN ports. All models also come with one PCIe 3.0 X16 slot and two PCIe 3.0 x8 slots offering expansion flexibility for 10GbE NIC cards or dedicated RAID cards.

DRAM contract prices are likely to exit a bullish period that lasted three quarters and be on the downswing in 4Q21 at a QoQ decline of 3-8%, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. This decline can be attributed to not only the declining procurement activities of DRAM buyers going forward, but also the drop in DRAM spot prices ahead of contract prices. While the buying and selling sides attempt to gain the advantage in future transactions, the DRAM market's movement in 2022 will primarily be determined by suppliers' capacity expansion strategies in conjunction with potential growths in demand. The capacity expansion plans of the three largest DRAM suppliers (Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron) for 2022 are expected to remain conservative, resulting in a 17.9% growth in total DRAM bit supply next year. On the demand side, inventory levels at the moment are relatively high. Hence, DRAM bit demand is expected to grow by 16.3% next year and lag behind bit supply growth. TrendForce therefore forecasts a shift in the DRAM market next year from shortage to surplus.

Some of you might remember Intel's Upgrade Service, aka software locked CPUs that launched back in 2010 with the Pentium G6951 that could have an extra 1 MB of cache and Hyper-Threading unlocked for a mere $50. Well, it seems like Intel is working on something similar, but for Xeon CPUs this time around, although the exact details aren't clear as yet.

Phoronix spotted a Linux patch on GitHub for something called Intel Software Defined Silicon or SDSi for short. It's clear that it's for Xeon CPUs and the GitHub page mentions that SDSi "allows the configuration of additional CPU features through a license activation process." There's very little to go by beyond this, but it's not hard to draw parallels with Intel's Upgrade Service from last decade, just this time Intel is targeting its business customers rather than consumers.

Presenting at the China Flash-Market Summit, KIOXIA unveiled its plans to leverage PCI-Express 5.0 to double SSD performance over the current generation. In typical 4-lane U.2 and M.2 connections, PCI-Express Gen 5 enables an interface bandwidth of 16 GB/s per direction (comparable to PCI-Express 3.0 x16). This means that accounting for interface overheads, typical PCIe Gen 5 SSDs will dance around the 11-15 GB/s (sequential) range. KIOXIA unveiled the CD7, a prototype enterprise SSD in the 2.5-inch EDSFF E3S form-factor with U.2 PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface. This drive, the company claims, offers up to 14 GB/s sequential transfers, more than double the performance of the current CM6 series drives that leverage PCI-Express Gen 4.

KIOXIA said that its first PCI-Express Gen 5 SSDs will begin shipping in Q4-2021, although it didn't mention if this was mass-market, or to select customers. The first enterprise platforms to leverage Gen 5 won't arrive before mid-2022, with Intel's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors that feature PCI-Express Gen 5 support. KIOXIA sounded optimistic about the future growth in performance of SSDs. "Today, Moore's Law is technically dead in both the CPU and DRAM, but it still works at the PCIe clock rate," the company said, adding ""2015 [was] be the third generation of PCIe, 2019 is the fourth generation, and 2022 will be the fifth generation. Even if people spend a lot of money, they can't double CPU nodes to improve system performance, but buying Gen 5 SSD instead of Gen 4 SSD can greatly improve system performance."