Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, supports two new Intel-based accelerators for demanding cloud gaming, media delivery, AI and ML workloads, enabling customers to deploy the latest acceleration technology from Intel and Intel Habana. "Supermicro continues to work closely with Intel and Habana Labs to deliver a range of server solutions supporting Arctic Sound-M and Gaudi 2 that address the demanding needs of organizations that require highly efficient media delivery and AI training," said Charles Liang, president and CEO. "We continue to collaborate with leading technology suppliers to deliver application-optimized total system solutions for complex workloads while also increasing system performance."

Supermicro can quickly bring to market new technologies by using a Building Block Solutions approach to designing new systems. This methodology allows new GPUs and acceleration technology to be easily placed into existing designs or, when necessary, quickly adapt an existing design when needed for higher-performing components. "Supermicro helps deliver advanced AI and media processing with systems that leverage our latest Gaudi 2 and Arctic Sound-M accelerators," stated Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel. "Supermicro's Gaudi AI Training Server will accelerate deep learning training in some of the fastest growing workloads in the datacenter."

AMD and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One (F1) Team today showcased how AMD EPYC processors improved aerodynamics testing capacity, contributing to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team winning its eighth Constructors' Championship in the 2021 racing season. By using AMD EPYC processors, the team was able to achieve a 20 percent performance improvement for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workloads that were used to model and test aerodynamic flow of their F1 car.

"We are proud to partner with the reigning Constructors' Champions, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, operating at the cutting edge of racing and technology," said, Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, AMD. "For F1 teams, having the most effective computational analysis of aerodynamics can mean the difference between winning and losing a race. With AMD EPYC processors, the Mercedes-AMG F1 team can iterate on vehicle design faster and more efficiently than their previous system."

Global shipments of traditional PCs, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, declined 5.1% in the first quarter of 2022 (1Q22) but exceeded earlier forecasts, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The PC market is coming off two years of double-digit growth, so while the first quarter decline is a change in this momentum, it doesn't mean the industry is in a downward spiral. Despite ongoing supply chain and logistical challenges, vendors still shipped 80.5 million PCs during the quarter. The 1Q22 volume marks the seventh consecutive quarter where global shipments surpassed 80 million, a feat not seen since 2012.

"The focus shouldn't be on the year-over-year decline in PC volumes because that was to be expected. The focus should be on the PC industry managing to ship more than 80 million PCs at a time when logistics and supply chain are still a mess, accompanied by numerous geopolitical and pandemic-related challenges," said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "We have witnessed some slowdown in both the education and consumer markets, but all indicators show demand for commercial PCs remains very strong. We also believe that the consumer market will pick up again in the near future. The result of 1Q22 was PC shipment volumes that were near record levels for a first quarter."

According to TrendForce research, corporate demand for digital transformation including artificial intelligence and high-performance computing has accelerated in recent years, which has led to increasing adoption of cloud computing. In order to improve service flexibility, the world's major cloud service providers have gradually introduced ARM-based servers. The penetration rate of ARM architecture in data center servers is expected to reach 22% by 2025.

In the past few years, ARM architecture processors have matured in the fields of mobile terminals and Internet of Things but progress in the server field has been relatively slow. However, companies have diversified cloud workloads in recent years and the market has begun to pay attention to the benefits ARM architecture processing can provide to data centers. TrendForce believes that ARM-based processors have three major advantages. First, they can support diverse and rapidly changing workloads and are more scalability and cost-effective. Second, ARM-based processors provide higher customization for different niche markets with a more flexible ecosystem. Third, physical footprint is relatively small which meets the needs of today's micro data centers.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, today announced availability of high-performance server platforms supporting new 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology for the modern data center. "The modern data center requires a powerful foundation to balance compute, storage, memory and IO that can efficiently manage growing volumes in the digital transformation trend," said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's Server Infrastructure Business Unit. "TYAN's industry-leading server platforms powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology give our customers better energy efficiency and increased performance for a current and future of highly complex workloads."

"3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology continue to drive a new standard for the modern data center with breakthrough performance for technical computing workloads due to 768 MB of L3 cache, enabling faster time-to-results on targeted workloads. Fully socket compatible with our 3rd Gen AMD EPYC platforms, customers can adopt these processors to transform their data center operations to achieve faster product development along with exceptional energy savings," said Ram Peddibhotla, corporate vice president, EPYC product management, AMD.

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.

The new normal ushered in by the pandemic will not only become the driving force of digital transformation but will also continue to drive the server market in 2022, according to TrendForce's investigations. It is worth noting that potential unmet demand in 2021 and the risk of future server component shortages will become medium and long-term variables that influence the market. Analyzing the shipment volume of completed servers, a growth rate of approximately 4-5% in completed server shipments is expected next year with primary shipment dynamics remaining concentrated in North American data centers with an annual growth rate of approximately 13-14%. From the supply chain perspective, the ODM Direct business model has gradually replaced the business model of the traditional server market, giving cloud service providers the ability to respond quickly to market changes. However, based on the unpredictability of the market, TrendForce assumes two forecasts for server growth trends. One, the supply situation of key components is effectively improved. Two, the supply situation of key components is exacerbated.

AMD announced today that IBM Cloud has chosen 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to expand its bare metal service offerings designed to power customers' demanding workloads and solutions. The new servers, featuring 128 cores, up to 4 TB of memory and 10 NVMe drives per server, give users full access to high-end, dual-socket performance with AMD EPYC 7763 processors; a first for IBM Cloud in a dual-socket platform.

"Our customers have a high demand for computing processing power and the new 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors provide the high levels of performance and scalability we were looking for," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, vice president, IBM Cloud. "Our collaboration with AMD has helped us deliver our highest core counts and bandwidth ever available for IBM Cloud customers, to offer top market performance for today and tomorrow's demanding workloads."

"IBM Cloud customers regularly running compute-intensive workloads can see an immediate benefit to speed and scalability by upgrading to 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, while helping to deliver a secure experience for end-users," said Lynn Comp, corporate vice president, Cloud Business Group, AMD. "Our continued collaboration with IBM Cloud is further validation of the strong standing AMD holds in the market as we deliver topline solutions that promote a seamless experience for cloud partners and their customers."

GIGABYTE Technology, today announced at OCP Summit support for the Ampere Altra Max processor and unveiled the new GIGABYTE high-density server, H262-P60, that embodies performance and scalability for HPC clusters and HCI. The Ampere Altra processor has also shown great power efficiency in cloud and edge applications while gaining momentum as it uses Arm architecture to give x86 a run for its money.

The competitiveness of Ampere Altra processors and ARMv8 64-bit architecture has become even more apparent as the Ampere Altra Max processor maintains the same 250 W TDP as Ampere Altra and is pin-to-pin compatible, yet it is able to add 60% more cores for up to 128 cores. For networking, storage, or accelerators the single socket supports 128 PCIe lanes, while the dual socket configuration for Altra Max will support 192 PCIe lanes. The H262-P60 will ship with updated support for Altra Max.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced a new server, GIGABYTE R282-Z9G, that gets around hardware and software RAID limitations that bottleneck RAID when used with NVMe SSDs. Continuing in the success of the R282 series, the new SKU was designed to house an all-in-one server solution that specifically targets high performance NVMe (Gen4) SSDs for RAID by incorporating the GRAID SupremeRAID solution into the R282-Z9G. This is the first GIGABYTE server to incorporate a GRAID Technology solution and has proven to be highly successful with Kioxia CM6-R SSDs.

More and more companies are using flash storage and doing so on a larger scale; however, there may be pitfalls when using RAID, such as limitations in computing performance or consuming a large amount of CPU resources. To solve these problems and to do so with a large amount of drives, the GRAID SupremeRAID works by installing a virtual NVMe controller on the OS while integrating a PCIe device for high performance. With this GIGABYTE solution over 100 GB/s of throughput is possible for workloads in HPC, 4K/8K video editing, high-frequency trading, online transaction processing, or database processing.

Following the peak period of production in 3Q21, the supply of DRAM will likely begin to outpace demand in 4Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations (the surplus of DRAM supply is henceforth referred to as "sufficiency ratio", expressed as a percentage). In addition, while DRAM suppliers are generally carrying a healthy level of inventory, most of their clients in the end-product markets are carrying a higher level of DRAM inventory than what is considered healthy, meaning these clients will be less willing to procure additional DRAM going forward. TrendForce therefore forecasts a downward trajectory for DRAM ASP in 4Q21. More specifically, DRAM products that are currently in oversupply may experience price drops of more than 5% QoQ, and the overall DRAM ASP will likely decline by about 3-8% QoQ in 4Q21.

Although WFH and distance learning applications previously generated high demand for notebook computers, increasingly widespread vaccinations in Europe and North America have now weakened this demand, particularly for Chromebooks. As a result, global production of notebooks is expected to decline in 4Q21, in turn propelling the sufficiency ratio of PC DRAM to 1.38%, which indicates that PC DRAM will no longer be in short supply in 4Q21. However, PC DRAM accounts for a relatively low share of DRAM manufacturers' DRAM supply bits, since these suppliers have allocated more production capacities to server DRAM, which is in relatively high demand. Hence, there will unlikely be a severe surplus of PC DRAM in 4Q21. It should also be pointed out that, on average, the current spot prices of PC DRAM modules are far lower than their contract prices for 3Q21. TrendForce therefore expects an imminent 5-10% QoQ decline in PC DRAM contract prices for 4Q21, with potential for declines that are even greater than 10% for certain transactions, as PC OEMs anticipate further price drops in PC DRAM prices in the future.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, today introduced a new Intel Xeon E-2300 processor-based server motherboard to the market. The new product is designed to offer enhanced performance, greater PCIe support and faster memory speeds for entry-level servers in data centers and prevailing Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) servers in 5G networks.

"TYAN's Tempest CX S5560 server motherboard based on Intel Xeon E-2300 processor is optimized for cloudand edge computing applications. By utilizing Intel's features of increased DDR4 speeds, double M.2 slots, and PCIe 4.0 capabilities, TYAN's customers can get outstanding performance and maintain their competitiveness with cost-effective benefit", said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's Server Infrastructure Business Unit.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the new IBM Power E1080 server, the first in a new family of servers based on the new IBM Power10 processor, designed specifically for hybrid cloud environments. The IBM Power10-equipped E1080 server is engineered to be one of the most secured server platforms and is designed to help clients operate a secured, frictionless hybrid cloud experience across their entire IT infrastructure.

The IBM Power E1080 server is launching at a critical time for IT. As organizations around the world continue to adapt to unpredictable changes in consumer behaviors and needs, they need a platform that can deliver their applications and insights securely where and when they need them. The IBM Institute of Business Value's 2021 CEO Study found that, of the 3,000 CEOs surveyed, 56% emphasized the need to enhance operational agility and flexibility when asked what they'll most aggressively pursue over the next two to three years.

Annual shipment of notebook computers and desktop PCs underwent a massive increase in 2020 thanks to the proliferation of the stay-at-home economy brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, notebook shipment increased by a staggering 26% YoY, thereby generating a corresponding demand for DRAM chips. Although the movement of DRAM prices remained stable in 2020, there was a palpable growth in actual DRAM bit demand. Hence, global DRAM module revenue increased by about 5% YoY to US$16.9 billion for 2020.

Looking back at the price trend of DRAM modules for 2020, TrendForce indicates that the market adopted a relative conservative outlook going forward in view of the ongoing pandemic. In turn, various end-products differed wildly in their respective market performances as well. For instance, while demand for notebooks remained strong, smartphone demand was relatively bearish. Server shipment, on the other hand, was at the same time consistent yet indicative of uncertainties, to some degree. In light of the varying performances in the end-markets, PC DRAM prices did not undergo drastic fluctuations throughout the year, and DRAM module suppliers posted earnings performances that were a direct result of their sales strategies, with certain suppliers, including Kimtigo and ADATA, able to raise their revenues by a massive margin.

While the server industry transitions to the latest generation of processors based on the x86 platform, the Intel Ice Lake and AMD Milan CPUs entered mass production earlier this year and were shipped to certain customers, such as North American CSPs and telecommunication companies, at a low volume in 1Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. These processors are expected to begin seeing widespread adoption in the server market in 3Q21. TrendForce believes that Ice Lake represents a step-up in computing performance from the previous generation due to its higher scalability and support for more memory channels. On the other hand, the new normal that emerged in the post-pandemic era is expected to drive clients in the server sector to partially migrate to the Ice Lake platform, whose share in the server market is expected to surpass 30% in 4Q21.

Worldwide revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, is estimated to grow 15.2% year over year in 2021 to $341.8 billion, according to the latest release of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Tracker. The market is forecast to accelerate further in 2022 with 18.8% growth and remain on track to break the $500 billion mark by 2024. Among the three technology categories, AI Software occupied 88% of the overall AI market. However, in terms of growth, AI Hardware is estimated to grow the fastest in the next several years. From 2023 onwards, AI Services is forecast to become the fastest growing category.

Within the AI Software category, AI Applications has the lion's share at nearly 50% of revenues. In terms of growth, AI Platforms is the strongest with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2%. The slowest will be AI System Infrastructure Software with a five-year CAGR of 14.4% while accounting for roughly 35% of all AI Software revenues. Within the AI Applications market, AI ERM is expected to grow slightly stronger than AI CRM over the next five years. Meanwhile, AI Lifecycle Software is forecast to grow the fastest among the markets within AI Platforms.

Alphacool today introduces three different server racks in 1U, 2U and 4U formats. Alphacool is the first manufacturer to offer server racks that are directly prepared for water cooling components. Previous solutions consisted of expensive and complicated complete solutions from individual manufacturers with external cooling or you could buy corresponding water cooling sets for which you had to subsequently adapt cases.

Alphacool takes a different approach. The enclosures offer a largely classic interior design. However, special and versatile mounting options for reservoirs, pumps and radiators have been taken into account. A special carrier, which is included with every case, offers the possibility of accommodating radiators directly in the case. Further mounting options for the special and optionally available ES Distroplates allow neat hosing in the case. In this way, other components can also be easily integrated with the Alphacool ES quick connectors.

AAEON, an industry leader of AI and IOT solutions, is excited to celebrate the launch of Intel's latest scalable platform, the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (formerly Ice Lake-SP). As an associate member of the Intel IoT Solutions Alliance, AAEON is excited to bring this new technology to market with the ARES-WHI0 industrial ATX server board and other future products.

The 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors deliver the next generation of high-end computing performance and support for vital data integrity and security technologies. This new generation of Xeon SP brings higher processing speeds and Intel's Deep Learning Boost technology, allowing for greater acceleration and more efficient processing for AI server applications.

The demands of data center workloads and internet traffic are growing exponentially, and new solutions are needed to keep up with these demands while reducing the current and anticipated growth of power consumption. But the variety of workloads and applications being run today means the traditional one-size-fits all approach to computing is not the answer. The industry demands flexibility; design freedom to achieve the right level of compute for the right application.

As Moore's Law comes to an end, solution providers are seeking specialized processing. Enabling specialized processing has been a focal point since the inception of our Neoverse line of platforms, and we expect these latest additions to accelerate this trend.

Video streaming is looking a bit like magic. The uploader sends a video to one platform in one resolution and encoding format, while the viewer requests a video in a specific resolution and encoding format used by the device the video is streamed on. YouTube knows this best, as it represents the world's largest video platform with over 2 billion users visiting the platform each month. That takes a massive load on the server infrastructure over at Google's data centers that host the service. There is about 500 hours worth of video content uploaded to the platform every minute, and regular hardware isn't being enough anymore to handle everything.

That is why YouTube has developed custom chips, ASICs, that are called VCUs or Video (trans)Coding Units. In Google data centers, there is a large problem with transcoding. Each video needs to adapt to the streaming platform and desired specifications, and doing that on regular hardware is a problem. By using ASIC devices, such as VCUs, Google can keep up with the demand and deliver the best possible quality. Codenamed Argos, the chip can deliver 20-33x improvement in efficiency compared to the regular server platform. In data centers, the VCU is implemented as a regular PCIe card, with two chips under the heatsinks.

Thanks to their flexible pricing schemes and diverse service offerings, CSPs have been a direct, major driver of enterprise demand for cloud services, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. As such, the rise of CSPs have in turn brought about a gradual shift in the prevailing business model of server supply chains from sales of traditional branded servers (that is, server OEMs) to ODM Direct sales instead. Incidentally, the global public cloud market operates as an oligopoly dominated by North American companies including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which collectively possess an above-50% share in this market. More specifically, GCP and AWS are the most aggressive in their data center build-outs. Each of these two companies is expected to increase its server procurement by 25-30% YoY this year, followed closely by Azure.

Enterprise demand for cloud services has been rising steady in the past two years owing to the rapidly changing global markets and uncertainties brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. TrendForce's investigations find that most enterprises have been prioritizing cloud service adoption across applications ranging from AI to other emerging technologies as cloud services have relatively flexible costs. Case in point, demand from clients in the hyperscale data center segment constituted more than 40% of total demand for servers in 4Q20, while this figure may potentially approach 45% for 2021. For 2021, TrendForce expects global server shipment to increase by more than 5% YoY and ODM Direct server shipment to increase by more than 15% YoY.

NVIDIA today introduced a new class of NVIDIA-Certified Systems, bringing AI within reach for organizations that run their applications on industry-standard enterprise data center infrastructure. These include high-volume enterprise servers from top manufacturers, which were announced in January and are now certified to run the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite—which is exclusively certified for VMware vSphere 7, the world's most widely used compute virtualization platform.

Further expanding the NVIDIA-Certified servers ecosystem is a new wave of systems featuring the NVIDIA A30 GPU for mainstream AI and data analytics and the NVIDIA A10 GPU for AI-enabled graphics, virtual workstations and mixed compute and graphics workloads, also announced today.

Intel has just launched its Ice Lake-SP lineup of Xeon Scalable processors, featuring the new Sunny Cove CPU core design. Built on the 10 nm node, these processors represent Intel's first 10 nm shipping product designed for enterprise. However, there is another 10 nm product going to be released for enterprise users. Intel is already preparing the Sapphire Rapids generation of Xeon processors and today we get to see more details about it. Thanks to the anonymous tip that VideoCardz received, we have a bit more details like core count, memory configurations, and connectivity options. And Sapphire Rapids is shaping up to be a very competitive platform. Do note that the slide is a bit older, however, it contains useful information.

The lineup will top at 56 cores with 112 threads, where this processor will carry a TDP of 350 Watts, notably higher than its predecessors. Perhaps one of the most interesting notes from the slide is the department of memory. The new platform will make a debut of DDR5 standard and bring higher capacities with higher speeds. Along with the new protocol, the chiplet design of Sapphire Rapids will bring HBM2E memory to CPUs, with up to 64 GBs of it per socket/processor. The PCIe 5.0 standard will also be present with 80 lanes, accompanying four Intel UPI 2.0 links. Intel is also supposed to extend the x86_64 configuration here with AMX/TMUL extensions for better INT8 and BFloat16 processing.

Microsoft employees are trialing a novel new immersive cooling system for their data center servers involving boiling liquid. Microsoft has looked to this two-phase closed-loop system as a solution to increasing power requirements from components. The cooling system features large vats where servers are submerged in a specially designed fluid from 3M which is harmless to electronics and boils at just 50°C (122°F). The heat from the servers is transferred to the fluid which boils and carries the heat away without any risk of overheating. The vats each contain a condenser that comes in contact with the gas cooling it down into a liquid and falling back into the loop. Microsoft claims that this new cooling approach will improve efficiency and sustainability through increased utilization of resources.