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.

Today, AMD announced its continued momentum and collaboration with Microsoft Azure, who is offering the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processor in the latest generation of Dasv5 and Easv5 Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). Azure is also introducing new confidential VMs, DCasv5 and ECasv5, which use the latest advanced security features available in 3rd Gen EPYC processors, including Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP).

The new Azure confidential VMs, DCasv5 and ECasv5, the first EPYC processor-based confidential VMs at Azure and the first confidential VMs to use SEV-SNP, will enable customers to have the data in their security focused applications encrypted in use, in transit and at rest. The updated Dasv5 VMs, optimized for general purpose workloads, and the Easv5 VMs, optimized for memory-based workloads, deliver better price-performance for most general purpose and memory intensive workloads compared to prior EPYC processor-based Microsoft Azure VMs.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported record revenue for the second quarter ended August 1, 2021, of $6.51 billion, up 68 percent from a year earlier and up 15 percent from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company's Gaming, Data Center and Professional Visualization platforms. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.94, up 276 percent from a year ago and up 24 percent from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.04, up 89 percent from a year ago and up 14 percent from the previous quarter.

"NVIDIA's pioneering work in accelerated computing continues to advance graphics, scientific computing and AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Enabled by the NVIDIA platform, developers are creating the most impactful technologies of our time - from natural language understanding and recommender systems, to autonomous vehicles and logistic centers, to digital biology and climate science, to metaverse worlds that obey the laws of physics.

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.

At this year's International Supercomputing 2021 digital event, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) is showcasing momentum for its AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators across the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry. The company also outlined updates to the ROCm open software platform and introduced the AMD Instinct Education and Research (AIER) initiative. The latest Top500 list showcased the continued growth of AMD EPYC processors for HPC systems. AMD EPYC processors power nearly 5x more systems compared to the June 2020 list, and more than double the number of systems compared to November 2020. As well, AMD EPYC processors power half of the 58 new entries on the June 2021 list.

"High performance computing is critical to addressing the world's biggest and most important challenges," said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, data center and embedded systems group, AMD. "With our AMD EPYC processor family and Instinct accelerators, AMD continues to be the partner of choice for HPC. We are committed to enabling the performance and capabilities needed to advance scientific discoveries, break the exascale barrier, and continue driving innovation."

NVIDIA today announced it is turbocharging the NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform with new technologies that fuse AI with high performance computing, making supercomputing more useful to a growing number of industries.

To accelerate the new era of industrial AI and HPC, NVIDIA has added three key technologies to its HGX platform: the NVIDIA A100 80 GB PCIe GPU, NVIDIA NDR 400G InfiniBand networking, and NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage software. Together, they provide the extreme performance to enable industrial HPC innovation.

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.

AMD today announced its 3rd generation EPYC (7003 series) enterprise processors, codenamed "Milan." These processors combine up to 64 of the company's latest "Zen 3" CPU cores, with an updated I/O controller die, and promise significant performance uplifts and new security capabilities over the previous generation EPYC 7002 "Rome." The "Zen 3" CPU cores, AMD claims, introduce an IPC uplift of up to 19% over the previous generation, which when combined by generational increases in CPU clock speeds, bring about significant single-threaded performance increases. The processor also comes with large multi-threaded performance gains thanks to a redesigned CCD.

The new "Zen 3" CPU complex die (CCD) comes with a radical redesign in the arrangement of CPU cores, putting all eight CPU cores of the CCD in a single CCX, sharing a large 32 MB L3 cache. This the total amount of L3 cache addressable by a CPU core, and significantly reduces latencies for multi-threaded workloads. The "Milan" multi-chip module has up to eight such CCDs talking to a centralized server I/O controller die (sIOD) over the Infinity Fabric interconnect.

AAEON, an industry leader in Edge Computing solutions, announces the SRG-3352C Compact Edge IoT Gateway System. The SRG-3352C brings reliable, cost effective gateway operations with expandability and wireless communication support designed to quickly deploy edge networks in a variety of environments.
The SRG-3352C builds upon the features, durability and reliability of the SRG-3352 Edge IoT Gateway System with expanded support for more connections and wireless communications. All of this is packed into a compact form factor that makes deploying the SRG-3352C even easier, powering more flexible edge network deployments.

The SRG-3352C is powered by the Arm Cortex-A8 800 MHz RISC processor. This innovative processor reduces the energy requirements of the system, allowing for a more efficient system to help save electricity costs. While powerful enough to connect edge networks together, the low energy usage can help cities with achieving green energy goals, and even allow the system to operate on solar power or batteries. It also eliminates the need for dedicated heatsinks, allowing the system to operate in wider temperatures, from 0°C up to 60°C without loss in performance.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced it is accelerating space exploration and increasing self-sufficiency for astronauts by enabling real-time data processing with advanced commercial edge computing in space for the first time. Astronauts and space explorers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will speed time-to-insight from months to minutes on various experiments in space, from processing medical imaging and DNA sequencing to unlocking key insights from volumes of remote sensors and satellites, using HPE's Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2), an edge computing system.

Spaceborne Computer-2 is scheduled to launch into orbit on the 15th Northrop Grumman Resupply Mission to Space Station (NG-15) on February 20 and will be available for use on the International Space Station for the next 2-3 years. The NG-15 spacecraft has been named "SS. Katherine Johnson" in honor of Katherine Johnson, a famed Black, female NASA mathematician who was critical to the early success of the space program.

Designing a custom processor can be a rewarding thing. You can control your ecosystem surrounding it and get massive rewards in terms of application-specific performance uplift, or lower total cost of ownership. It seems like cloud providers have figured out that at their scale, designing a custom processor can get all of the above with the right amount of effort put into it. If you remember, in 2018, Amazon has announced its Graviton processor based on Arm instruction set architecture. Today, the company has almost 10% of its AWS instances based on the Graviton 1 or 2 processors, which is a massive win for a custom design.

Following Amazon's example, the next company to join the custom server processor race is going to be Microsoft. The Redmond based giant is looking to build a custom lineup of processors that are meant to satisfy Microsoft's most demanding sector - server space. The company's Azure arm is an important part where it has big and increasing revenue. By building a custom processor, it could satisfy the market needs better while delivering higher value. The sources of Bloomberg say that Microsoft is planning to use Arm ISA, and start building independence from the x86 vendors like Intel and AMD. Just like we saw with AWS, the industry cloud giants are starting to get silicon-independent and with their scale, they can drive the ecosystem surrounding the new processors forward rapidly. The sources are also speculating that the company is building custom processors for Surface PCs, and with Windows-on-Arm (WoA) project, Microsoft has laid the groundwork in that field as well.

NVIDIA today introduced the next generation of NVIDIA Mellanox 400G InfiniBand, giving AI developers and scientific researchers the fastest networking performance available to take on the world's most challenging problems.

As computing requirements continue to grow exponentially in areas such as drug discovery, climate research and genomics, NVIDIA Mellanox 400G InfiniBand is accelerating this work through a dramatic leap in performance offered on the world's only fully offloadable, in-network computing platform. The seventh generation of Mellanox InfiniBand provides ultra-low latency and doubles data throughput with NDR 400 Gb/s and adds new NVIDIA In-Network Computing engines to provide additional acceleration.

Intel today unveiled the suite of new security features for the upcoming 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable platform, code-named "Ice Lake." Intel is doubling down on its Security First Pledge, bringing its pioneering and proven Intel Software Guard Extension (Intel SGX) to the full spectrum of Ice Lake platforms, along with new features that include Intel Total Memory Encryption (Intel TME), Intel Platform Firmware Resilience (Intel PFR) and new cryptographic accelerators to strengthen the platform and improve the overall confidentiality and integrity of data.

Data is a critical asset both in terms of the business value it may yield and the personal information that must be protected, so cybersecurity is a top concern. The security features in Ice Lake enable Intel's customers to develop solutions that help improve their security posture and reduce risks related to privacy and compliance, such as regulated data in financial services and healthcare.

In the list of typos with extreme relevance to the world, this one doesn't register unless it's at the "comical" side of the scale, but it's interesting, nevertheless, to look into. Recent reports on the recently-released Microsoft Flight Simulator mentioned the existence of an eldritch-esque obelisk in the in-game representation of Australia. This obelisk was nothing more than a 212-story building, which became a visual skyscraper, the top of which where particularly gifted flight simulator pilots managed to land on.

While one could think of this as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke or as a manifest of Robert Silverberg's Tower of Glass, the truth, as always, follows Occam's Razor. Microsoft Simulator makes use of OpenStreetMap data for its Bing Maps service, which runs on Microsoft's Azure servers. The integration of OpenStreetMap featured a bug on that particular building that was introduced, as has been discovered, by Nathan Wright, a university student who, as part of his degree work last year, made an edit to that particular building's specifications. A 2 became 212, and thus the tower was born and manifested in-game. Other bugs have been found in-game, but some of them defy skepticism: turning Buckingham Palace into an office building seems like a particularly snobbish way of criticizing Britain's royalty. As a particular Disney and Pixar character would say, "Coincidence? I Think not!".

AAEON, an industry leader in Edge Computing solutions, announces the SRG-3352 Edge IoT Gateway System. The SRG-3352 offers reliable and cost saving edge network operations, with flexibility to connect edge nodes and sensors with cloud services. The SRG-3352 is powered by the Arm Cortex-A8 800 MHz RISC processor. This innovative processor reduces the energy requirements of the system, saving electricity costs and allowing the system to be deployed with solar power or battery operated. With very little heat output, the system can operate in a wide range of temperatures from 0°C up to 60°C without loss in performance.

The SRG-3352 is designed to provide a great value and cost-effective platform not only with initial investment, but also in long term costs. With rugged design and Arm processor, the system provides stable and reliable operation, reducing maintenance needs. To connect from edge to cloud, the SRG-3352 supports 3G/4G LTE as well as NB-IoT to help reduce carrier costs.

ASUSTek, the leading IT Company in server systems, server motherboards and workstations today announced the new NVIDIA A100-powered server - ESC4000A E10 to accelerate and optimize data centers for high utilization and low total cost of ownership with the PCIe Gen 4 expansions, OCP 3.0 networking, faster compute and better GPU performance. ASUS continues building a strong partnership with NVIDIA to deliver unprecedented acceleration and flexibility to power the world's highest-performing elastic data centers for AI, data analytics, and HPC applications.

ASUS ESC4000A-E10 is a 2U server powered by the AMD EPYC 7002 series processors that deliver up to 2x the performance and 4x the floating point capability in a single socket versus the previous 7001 generation. Targeted for AI, HPC and VDI applications in data center or enterprise environments which require powerful CPU cores, more GPUs support, and faster transmission speed, ESC4000A E10 focuses on delivering GPU-optimized performance with support for up to four double-deck high performance or eight single-deck GPUs including the latest NVIDIA Ampere-architecture V100, Tesla, and Quadro. This also benefits on virtualization to consolidate GPU resources in to shared pool for users to utilize resources in more efficient ways.

Microsoft is working on bringing the latest artificial intelligence technology everywhere it can, and everywhere when it works. According to a few reports from Business Insider and Seattle Times, Microsoft is working on terminating its contracts with journalists and replacing them with artificial intelligence software. In the period between Wednesday and Thursday of last week, around 50 employees have received the information that their contracts will not be renewed after June 30th. The journalists in question were responsible for Microsoft's MSN Web portal which will now use machine learning (ML) models that will generate news stream. To use ML for an application like this, Microsoft is surely utilizing its Azure infrastructure to process everything in the cloud.

One of the ex-employees has said that the MSN platform has been semi-automated for some time now and that this is a completion of the automation. "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic." - said Microsoft spokesman to Seattle Times.

Microsoft has held a Build 2020 conference for developers from all over the world, and they live-streamed it online. Among some of the announcements, Microsoft has announced a new supercomputer dedicated to the OpenAI company, which works on building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The new supercomputer is a part of Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and it will allow OpenAI developers to train very large scale machine learning models in the cloud. The supercomputer is said to be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world with specifications of "more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server."

Specific information wasn't announced and we don't know what CPUs and GPUs go into this machine, but we can speculate that the latest Nvidia A100 "Ampere" GPU could be used. The company hasn't yet submitted its entry to the Top500 website, so we can't keep track of the FLOPs count and see what power it holds.

Today, Microsoft Azure DCsv2-Series featuring a hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE) built on Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) was released for general availability. Built on Intel's trusted foundation, the Azure DCsv2-Series makes confidential computing broadly available to enterprise customers who want to leverage cloud computing while helping to keep sensitive workloads protected.

"Customers demand the capability to reduce the attack surface and help protect sensitive data in the cloud by encrypting data in use. Our collaboration with Microsoft brings enterprise-ready confidential computing solutions to market and enables customers to take greater advantage of the benefits of cloud and multiparty compute paradigms using Intel SGX technology," said Anil Rao, Intel vice president, Data Center Security and Systems Architecture.

Microsoft's flight simulator, an upcoming game designed to bring real-life scenarios of flying an airplane, just got a list of system requirements needed to run a game. To play with Flight Simulator, you would at least need to have a quad-core CPU like AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-4460 equipped system, along with 8 GB of RAM. For graphics, you would need a GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM, where the requirement is either AMD Radeon RX 570 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 GPU. Another interesting observation is the requirement of 150 GB of drive space, meaning that this game will be pretty big. Internet connection needs to be 5 Mbps at minimum, and as you up the resolution and graphics, you would need a faster connection. You can check out the entire table below.

The need for incrementally faster connection comes out of one reason - adaptive streaming. The game looks stunning, and if you wish to play at the highest quality, parts of the game will be rendered in the cloud. Microsoft is using its Azure infrastructure to help and render parts of the game and stream it down to your PC. This ensures that your PC is capable of playing the game and Microsoft is showing how they can tap the power of cloud for uses like this.

Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service, has seen a huge uplift in traffic/usage in the past few days amid the COVID-19 outbreak. In the places where the outbreak happened and people are enforcing social distancing, Microsoft reports that there has been a 775% traffic uplift compared to the previous situation. As everyone capable of working from home needs a communication tool, Microsoft Teams is a popular choice, and it has seen some amazing usage as well. The users of Teams service have generated over 900 million meetings and calling minutes on Teams daily in a single week, resulting in high server usage. The demand for Windows Virtual Desktops has tripled as well.

Ampere Computing, a startup focusing on making HPC and processors from cloud applications based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture, today announced the release of a first 80 core "cloud-native" processor based on the Arm ISA. The new Ampere Altra CPU is the company's first 80 core CPU meant for hyper scalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Being built on TSMC's 7 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, the Altra is a CPU that is utilizing a monolithic die to achieve maximum performance. Using Arm's v8.2+ instruction set, the CPU is using the Neoverse N1 platform as its core, to be ready for any data center workload needed. It also borrows a few security features from v8.3 and v8.5, namely the hardware mitigations of speculative attacks.

When it comes to the core itself, the CPU is running at 3.0 GHz frequency and has some very interesting specifications. The design of the core is such that it is 4-wide superscalar Out of Order Execution (OoOE), which Ampere refers to as "aggressive" meaning that there is a lot of data throughput going on. The cache levels are structured in a way that there is 64 KB of L1D and L1I cache per core, along with 1 MB of L2 cache per core as well. For system-level cache, there is 32 MB of L3 available to the SoC. All of the caches have Error-correcting code (ECC) built-in, giving the CPU a much-needed feature. There are two 128-bit wide Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) units, which are there to do parallel processing if needed. There is no mention if they implement Arm's Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) or not.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the fourth quarter ended Jan. 26, 2020, of $3.11 billion, up 41 percent from $2.21 billion a year earlier, and up 3 percent from $3.01 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.53, up 66 percent from $0.92 a year ago, and up 6 percent from $1.45 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.89, up 136 percent from $0.80 a year earlier, and up 6 percent from $1.78 in the previous quarter.

For fiscal 2020, revenue was $10.92 billion, down 7 percent from $11.72 billion a year earlier. GAAP earnings per diluted share were $4.52, down 32 percent from $6.63 a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $5.79, down 13 percent from $6.64 a year earlier. "Adoption of NVIDIA accelerated computing drove excellent results, with record data center revenue," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Our initiatives are achieving great success.

Top-of-the-line gaming brand AORUS, reveals itself at the 2019 GAMESCOM trade show in Germany Cologne, in which the spotlight shines at the all-new 17 inch flagship gaming laptop, the AORUS 17. AORUS takes the lead yet again through the co-op with world renowned switch manufacture OMRON to innovate and develop a set of unique mechanical switches that is tailored for the AORUS 17, not only does the keys offer exceptional durability, it also offers one of the best feeling keys that gamers can find on a laptop. The AORUS greatness continues through the combination of the brand new Intel 8-core CPU, NVIDIA RTX graphics chip with Ray Tracing technology and an exclusive WINDFORCE INFINITY cooling system, the AORUS 17 steadily sits on the high-end gaming thrown with these specs.

AORUS leads the industry again by working with world renowned mechanical switch manufacture, OMRON in order to create a unique set of mechanical keys for the AORUS laptop, with gamer oriented design details, including an optimal 2.5 mm key travel and an actuation point of 1.6 mm, giving gamers both the sensational touch and sound of a crisp blue switch, which gamers can now enjoy the qualities of a full mechanical keyboard right on their AORUS laptop. AORUS pursues further by redesigning the key caps to produce stunning backlit keys with unique "concentric" keycaps, letting the LED underneath the keycap shine though evenly, increasing the overall lighting intensity by 27%, in addition to the AORUS exclusive FUSION 2.0 keyboard customization software, gamers can truly create a unique personal style.

Sony Corporation (Sony) and Microsoft Corp. (Microsoft) announced on Thursday that the two companies will partner on new innovations to enhance customer experiences in their direct-to-consumer entertainment platforms and AI solutions.

Under the memorandum of understanding signed by the parties, the two companies will explore joint development of future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure to support their respective game and content-streaming services. In addition, the two companies will explore the use of current Microsoft Azure datacenter-based solutions for Sony's game and content-streaming services. By working together, the companies aim to deliver more enhanced entertainment experiences for their worldwide customers. These efforts will also include building better development platforms for the content creator community.