Solidigm, a leading global provider of innovative NAND flash memory solutions, is expanding its D5 Product Series with the Solidigm D5-P5430, a new QLC solid-state storage drive (SSD) optimized for mainstream and read-intensive workloads. With most of today's enterprise applications read-dominant, the D5-P5430—a 4th gen PCIe QLC SSD—offers substantial storage density and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) opportunities while delivering read performance that is equivalent to the most widely-adopted TLC SSDs.

The D5-P5430 is optimized for mainstream workloads (e.g., email/unified communications, decision support systems, object storage, and virtual desktop infrastructure) and read-intensive workloads (e.g., content delivery networks, data lakes/pipelines, video-on-demand). These workloads are typically 80% reads or higher and need to move massive amounts of data at high throughput.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that its lineup of CD7 Series Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S NVMe SSDs are first to ship on servers and storage from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The industry's first EDSFF drives designed with PCIe 5.0 technology, KIOXIA CD7 E3.S SSDs increase flash storage density per drive for optimized power efficiency and rack consolidation. HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers, HPE Alletra 4000 data storage servers and the HPE Synergy 480 Gen11 Compute Module are enabled with the latest PCIe 5.0 interface, enabling up to twice the performance over PCIe 4.0, and come with optionally equipped EDSFF E3.S drive bays.

As a natural evolution of the 2.5-inch form factor, EDSFF E3.S is designed for the needs of high performance flash storage. E3.S enables more dense, efficient deployments in the same rack unit compared to 2.5-inch drives, while improving cooling and thermal characteristics and raising capacities by up to 1.5 - 2x.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced the release of two SSDs, the Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD and the Micron XTR NVMe SSD. Designed to keep pace with the accelerating growth of data, these drives provide a major advancement for data centers by lowering operating costs and improving storage efficiency. The Micron 6500 ION is a high-capacity SSD that offers a superior value over competitive QLC-based drives by providing best-in-class performance and enabling a more environmentally sustainable data center. The 6500 ION is able to deliver TLC performance and QLC-like cost due to Micron's 232-layer technology node leadership compared to the competition's use of sub-200-layer QLC technology. When paired with Micron 6500 ION drives or other SSDs, the Micron XTR SSD delivers extreme endurance that enhances system performance.

"Customers are looking for new capabilities to address the data growth and performance needs of artificial intelligence data lakes and other demanding workloads. As a result, we are seeing tremendous traction on the 6500 ION and XTR with customers who are deploying storage at scale due to their unrivaled combination of large capacity, superior performance, and amazing endurance," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron's Data Center Storage group. "The 6500 ION SSD offers QLC value with TLC performance and up to a 20% reduction in power consumption versus competing QLC SSDs, allowing our customers to reduce their carbon footprint. Together, these SSDs enable customers to leap ahead and harness the power of artificial intelligence without compromising performance."

Today, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced the "AMD Data Center and AI Technology Premiere," an in-person and livestreamed event to showcase the company's growth strategy and expanding product portfolio and capabilities for data center and AI. AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su will be joined by other AMD executives and key customers to detail new products, and momentum across data center, AI, adaptive and high-performance computing solutions.

The live stream will start at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday, June 13 at www.amd.com/datacenter as well as the AMD YouTube channel.

Following the recent Q1 2023 financial report with declining revenue, Intel is restructuring its Client Computing Group (CCG) and Data Center Group (DCG). These two units were hit the hardest, with 38 and 39% downturns, respectively. According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, and a statement from Tom's Hardware, we have information that Intel will be conducting budget cuts to CCG and DCG, with some layoffs. As Dylan Patel notes, Intel will cut CCG and DCG budgets by 10%, resulting in as much as a 20% reduction of the workforce inside those two groups. Additionally, this was supported by Intel's spokesperson, who issued a statement for Tom's Hardware stating the following:

Intel SpokespersonIntel is working to accelerate its strategy while navigating a challenging macro-economic environment. We are focused on identifying cost reductions and efficiency gains through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company.

We continue to invest in areas core to our business, including our U.S.-based manufacturing operations, to ensure we are well-positioned for long-term growth. These are difficult decisions, and we are committed to treating impacted employees with dignity and respect.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2023 of $5.4 billion, gross margin of 44%, operating loss of $145 million, net loss of $139 million and diluted loss per share of $0.09. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin was 50%, operating income was $1.1 billion, net income was $970 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.60.

"We executed very well in the first quarter as we delivered better than expected revenue and earnings in a mixed demand environment," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We launched multiple leadership products and made significant progress accelerating our AI roadmap and customer engagements in the quarter. Longer-term, we see significant growth opportunities as we successfully deliver our roadmaps, execute our strategic data center and embedded priorities and accelerate adoption of our AI portfolio."

Keen-eyed hardware tipster momomo_us this week spotted that an upcoming AMD data center "Siena Dense" CPU has received verification, in the general sense, for SATA and PCI support - courtesy of the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO). The information dump was uploaded to SATA-IO's online database on April 6 of this year - under the heading: "AMD EPYC 8004 Series Processors." As covered by TPU mid-way through this month the family of enterprise-grade processors, bearing codename Siena, is expected to be an entry-level alternative to the EPYC Genoa-X range, set for launch later in 2023.

The EPYC Siena series is reported to arrive with a new socket type - SP6 (LGA 4844) - which is said to be similar in size to the older Socket SP3. The upcoming large "Genoa-X" and "Bergamo" processors will sit in the already existing Socket SP5 (LGA 6096) - 2022's EPYC Genoa lineup makes use of it already. AMD has not made its SP6 socket official to the public, but industry figures have been informed that it can run up to 64 "Zen 4" cores. This new standard has been designed with more power efficient tasks in mind - targeting intelligent edge and telecommunication sectors. The smaller SP6 socket will play host to CPUs optimized for as low as 70 W operation, with hungrier variants accommodated up to 225 W. This single platform solution is said to offer 6-channel memory, 96 PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes, 48 lanes for CXL V1.1+, and 8 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes.

Seagate is celebrating the debut shipment of very sophisticated storage solutions to a preferred client (dealing in the cloud data center sector). These 30+ terabyte hard drives are based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology - the American data storage company is setting up its next generation Corvault range with the thermal magnetic recording methodology. The first shipment of HAMR-based drives is reported to consist of final qualification samples, but Seagate is anticipating that fully verified equipment - after trial customers give this new product lineup a thumbs-up - will be generating revenue in the coming weeks.

According to a transcript of a recent Seagate financial meeting conference call, CEO Dave Mosley mentioned a dip in business as well as a costly legal settlement, but expects company fortunes to rise due to client uptake of breakthrough storage technologies: "Beyond this cycle, we remain excited about the long-term opportunities presented by the secular growth of data and the relevance of mass capacity storage as new data-centric applications emerge and more workloads migrate to the cloud. We continue to make strong progress on our industry-leading technology road map, including launching HAMR-based products this quarter, which we believe put us in outstanding longer-term position."

Intel has decided to re-organize its Max series of Data Center GPUs (codenamed Ponte Vecchio), as revealed to Tom's Hardware this week, with a particular model - the Data Center Max GPU 1350 set for removal from the lineup. Industry experts are puzzled by this decision, given that the 1350 has been officially "available" on the market since January 2023, following soon after the announcement of the entire Max range in November 2022. Intel has removed listings and entries for the Data Center GPU Max 1350 from its various web presences.

A (sort of) successor is in the works, Intel has lined up the Data Center Max GPU 1450 for release later in the year. This model will have a trimmed I/O bandwidth - this modification is likely targeting companies in China, where performance standards are capped at a certain level (via U.S. sanctions on GPU exports). An Intel spokesperson provided further details and reasons for rearranging the Max product range: "We launched the Intel Data Center Max GPU 1550 (600 W), which was initially targeted for liquid-cooled solutions only. We have since expanded our support by offering Intel Data Center Max GPU 1550 (600 W) to include air-cooled solutions."

Once upon a time, the data center market represented a duopoly of x86-64 makers AMD and Intel. However, in recent years companies started developing custom Arm-based processors to handle workloads as complex within smaller power envelopes and doing it more efficiently. According to Counterpoint Research firm, we have the latest data highlighting a significant new player called Ampere Computing in the data center world. With the latest data center revenue share report, we get to see Intel/AMD x86-64 and AWS/Ampere Arm CPU revenue. For the first time, we see that a 3rd party company, Ampere Computing, managed to capture as much as 1.54% market revenue share of the entire data center market in 2022. Thanks to having CPUs in off-the-shelf servers from OEMs, enterprises and cloud providers are able to easily integrate Ampere Altra processors.

Intel, still the most significant player, saw a 70.77% share of the overall revenue; however, that comes as a drop from 2021 data which stated an 80.71% revenue share in the data center market. This represents a 16% year-over-year decline. This reduction is not due to the low demand for server processors, as the global data center CPU market's revenue registered only a 4.4% YoY decline in 2022, but due to the high demand for AMD EPYC solutions, where team red managed to grab 19.84% of the revenue from 2022. This is a 62% YoY growth from last year's 11.74% revenue share. Slowly but surely, AMD is eating Intel's lunch. Another revenue source comes from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which the company filled with its Graviton CPU offerings based on Arm ISA. AWS Graviton CPUs accounted for 3.16% of the market revenue, up 74% from 1.82% in 2021.

Ayar Labs, a leader in the use of silicon photonics for chip-to-chip optical connectivity, today announced public demonstration of the industry's first 4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) bidirectional Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical solution at the upcoming Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in San Diego on March 5-9, 2023. The company achieves this latest milestone as it works with leading high-volume manufacturing and supply partners including GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers Photonics and others to deliver the optical interconnects needed for data-intensive applications. Separately, the company was featured in an announcement with partner Quantifi Photonics on a CW-WDM-compliant test platform for its SuperNova light source, also at OFC.

In-package optical I/O uniquely changes the power and performance trajectories of system design by enabling compute, memory and network silicon to communicate with a fraction of the power and dramatically improved performance, latency and reach versus existing electrical I/O solutions. Delivered in a compact, co-packaged CMOS chiplet, optical I/O becomes foundational to next-generation AI, disaggregated data centers, dense 6G telecommunications systems, phased array sensory systems and more.

Supermicro, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, will be showcasing its latest generation of systems that accelerate workloads for the entire Telco industry, specifically at the edge of the network. These systems are part of the newly introduced Supermicro Intel-based product line; the better, faster, and greener systems based on the brand new 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (formerly codenamed Sapphire Rapids) that deliver up to 60% better workload-optimized performance. From a performance standpoint these new systems that demonstrate up to 30X faster AI inference speedups on large models for AI and edge workloads with the NVIDIA H100 GPUs. In addition, Supermicro systems support the new Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (formerly codenamed Ponte Vecchio) across a wide range of servers. The Intel Data Center GPU Max Series contains up to 128 Xe-HPC cores and will accelerate a range of AI, HPC, and visualization workloads. Supermicro X13 AI systems will support next-generation built-in accelerators and GPUs up to 700 W from Intel, NVIDIA, and others.

Supermicro's wide range of product families is deployed in a broad range of industries to speed up workloads and allow faster and more accurate decisions. With the addition of purpose-built servers tuned for networking workloads, such as Open RAN deployments and private 5G, the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor vRAN Boost technology reduces power consumption while improving performance. Supermicro continues to offer a wide range of environmentally friendly servers for workloads from the edge to the data center.

Atos today announces a contract to build and install a new high-performance computer for the Max Planck Society, a world-leading science and technology research organization. The new system will be based on Atos' latest BullSequana XH3000 platform, which is powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators. In its final configuration, the application performance will be three times higher than the current "Cobra" system, which is also based on Atos technologies.

The new supercomputer, with a total order value of over 20 million euros, will be operated by the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF) in Garching near Munich and will provide high-performance computing (HPC) capacity for many institutes of the Max Planck Society. Particularly demanding scientific projects, such as those in astrophysics, life science research, materials research, plasma physics, and AI will benefit from the high-performance capabilities of the new system.

Intel Corporation today reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 financial results. The company also announced that its board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.365 per share on the company's common stock, which will be payable on March 1, 2023, to shareholders of record as of February 7, 2023.

"Despite the economic and market headwinds, we continued to make good progress on our strategic transformation in Q4, including advancing our product roadmap and improving our operational structure and processes to drive efficiencies while delivering at the low-end of our guided range," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "In 2023, we will continue to navigate the short-term challenges while striving to meet our long-term commitments, including delivering leadership products anchored on open and secure platforms, powered by at-scale manufacturing and supercharged by our incredible team."

Today, Lenovo unveiled 25 new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile server and hyperconverged solutions powered by Intel's 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Processors as part of its recently announced Infrastructure Solutions V3 portfolio. Designed to help accelerate global IT modernization for organizations of all sizes, the integrated solutions deliver advanced performance, efficiency and management capabilities specifically optimized for complex workloads, including mission-critical, AI, HPC and containerized applications.

"In today's competitive business climate, modern infrastructure solutions that generate faster insights and more efficiently enable complex workloads from the edge to the cloud are critical across every major industry," said Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager of Server & Storage, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. "With the performance and management improvements of the Intel-based ThinkSystem V3 portfolio, customers can reduce their IT footprint by up to three times to achieve greater ROI and more easily transform their infrastructure with one seamless platform designed for today's AI, virtualization, multi-cloud and sustainable computing demands."

Intel today marked one of the most important product launches in company history with the unveiling of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids), the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series (code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM) and the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (code-named Ponte Vecchio), delivering for its customers a leap in data center performance, efficiency, security and new capabilities for AI, the cloud, the network and edge, and the world's most powerful supercomputers.

Working alongside its customers and partners with 4th Gen Xeon, Intel is delivering differentiated solutions and systems at scale to tackle their biggest computing challenges. Intel's unique approach to providing purpose-built, workload-first acceleration and highly optimized software tuned for specific workloads enables the company to deliver the right performance at the right power for optimal overall total cost of ownership. Additionally, as Intel's most sustainable data center processors, 4th Gen Xeon processors deliver customers a range of features for managing power and performance, making the optimal use of CPU resources to help achieve their sustainability goals.

Today, Microsoft is announcing the acquisition of Fungible Inc., a provider of composable infrastructure aimed at accelerating networking and storage performance in datacenters with high-efficiency, low-power data processing units (DPUs). Fungible's technologies help enable high-performance, scalable, disaggregated, scaled-out datacenter infrastructure with reliability and security.

The Fungible team will join Microsoft's datacenter infrastructure engineering teams and will focus on delivering multiple DPU solutions, network innovation and hardware systems advancements.

On Jan. 10, Intel will officially welcome to market the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series, as well as the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series for high performance computing (HPC) and AI. Hosted by Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel, and Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel Xeon Products, the event will highlight the value of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the Intel Max Series product family, while showcasing customer, partner and ecosystem support.

The event will demonstrate how Intel is addressing critical needs in the marketplace with a focus on a workload-first approach, performance leadership in key areas such as AI, networking and HPC, the benefits of security and sustainability, and how the company is delivering significant outcomes for its customers and the industry.

Today, Intel announced the 2023 release of the Intel oneAPI tools - available in the Intel Developer Cloud and rolling out through regular distribution channels. The new oneAPI 2023 tools support the upcoming 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Xeon CPU Max Series and Intel Data Center GPUs, including Flex Series and the new Max Series. The tools deliver performance and productivity enhancements, and also add support for new Codeplay plug-ins that make it easier than ever for developers to write SYCL code for non-Intel GPU architectures. These standards-based tools deliver choice in hardware and ease in developing high-performance applications that run on multiarchitecture systems.

"We're seeing encouraging early application performance results on our development systems using Intel Max Series GPU accelerators - applications built with Intel's oneAPI compilers and libraries. For leadership-class computational science, we value the benefits of code portability from multivendor, multiarchitecture programming standards such as SYCL and Python AI frameworks such as PyTorch, accelerated by Intel libraries. We look forward to the first exascale scientific discoveries from these technologies on the Aurora system next year."
-Timothy Williams, deputy director, Argonne Computational Science Division

Ventana Micro Systems Inc. today announced its Veyron family of high performance RISC-V processors. The Veyron V1 is the first member of the family, and the highest performance RISC-V processor available today. It will be offered in the form of high performance chiplets and IP. Ventana Founder and CEO Balaji Baktha will make the public announcement during his RISC-V Summit keynote today.

The Veyron V1 is the first RISC-V processor to provide single thread performance that is competitive with the latest incumbent processors for Data Center, Automotive, 5G, AI, and Client applications. The Veyron V1 efficient microarchitecture also enables the highest single socket performance among competing architectures.

SiPearl, the company designing the highperformance, low-power microprocessor for European supercomputers, has entered into a business collaboration agreement with AMD to provide a joint offering for exascale supercomputing systems, combining SiPearl's HPC microprocessor, Rhea, with AMD Instinct accelerators.

Initially, AMD and SiPearl will jointly assess the interoperability of the AMD ROCm open software with the SiPearl Rhea microprocessor and build an optimized software solution that would strengthen the capabilities of a SiPearl microprocessor combined with an AMD Instinct accelerator. This joint work targets porting and optimization activities of the AMD HIP backend, openMP compilers and libraries, will enable scientific applications to benefit from both technologies.

In advance of Supercomputing '22 in Dallas, Intel Corporation has introduced the Intel Max Series product family with two leading-edge products for high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI): Intel Xeon CPU Max Series (code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM) and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (code-named Ponte Vecchio). The new products will power the upcoming Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, with updates on its deployment shared today.

The Xeon Max CPU is the first and only x86-based processor with high bandwidth memory, accelerating many HPC workloads without the need for code changes. The Max Series GPU is Intel's highest density processor, packing over 100 billion transistors into a 47-tile package with up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of high bandwidth memory. The oneAPI open software ecosystem provides a single programming environment for both new processors. Intel's 2023 oneAPI and AI tools will deliver capabilities to enable the Intel Max Series products' advanced features.

Kyocera Corporation today announced it has developed an On-Board Optics Module that achieves world-record bandwidth of 512 Gbps. The module is expected to support high-speed network applications, such as data centers. Additionally, by converting electrical signals into optical signals, the module uses much less power than conventional alternatives and will also help decrease power consumption and promote sustainability.

Kyocera's prototype module is miniaturized for installation on a printed circuit board near the processor, allowing electronic data to be converted into optical signals instantaneously. In addition, the product is designed to create unprecedented improvements in signal-to-noise ratio, virtually eliminating the signal loss caused by conventional electrical conductors. As a result of these technological advances, Kyocera's On-Board Optics Module has achieved world-record bandwidth of 512 gigabits per second (Gbps) and is expected to help data centers and supercomputers save power while increasing bandwidth and data transfer rates.

Intel just finalized the launch date of its 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" server processors. The company plans to launch them on January 10, 2023. The new processors will be launched at a special event dedicated to the company's various new Data Center (group) innovations, which cover server processors, new networking innovations, possible launches from Intel's ecosystem partners, and more.

A lot is riding on the success of "Sapphire Rapids," as they see the introduction of Intel's new high-performance CPU core on in the enterprise segment at core-counts of up to 60-core/120-thread per socket; along with cutting-edge new I/O that includes DDR5 memory, PCI-Express Gen 5, next-gen CXL, and on-package HBM memory on certain variants.

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter 2022 financial results. "Despite the worsening economic conditions, we delivered solid results and made significant progress with our product and process execution during the quarter," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "To position ourselves for this business cycle, we are aggressively addressing costs and driving efficiencies across the business to accelerate our IDM 2.0 flywheel for the digital future."

"As we usher in the next phase of IDM 2.0, we are focused on embracing an internal foundry model to allow our manufacturing group and business units to be more agile, make better decisions and establish a leadership cost structure," said David Zinsner, Intel CFO. "We remain committed to the strategy and long-term financial model communicated at our Investor Meeting."