Intel's 5th generation Xeon Scalable processors codenamed Emerald Rapids, have been shipping since late 2023 and are installed at numerous servers today. However, Emerald Rapids appears to possess more performance and efficiency tricks than it initially revealed at launch. According to the report from Phoronix, reporting on a Linux kernel patch sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), there is a chance for up to 38% performance increase while using up to 18% less power on all Intel 5th generation Xeon machines. Thanks to Canonical (maker of Ubuntu Linux) engineer Pedro Henrique Kopper, who explained the patch on the LKML, we found out that changing a single line of code yielded this massive increase.

Ubuntu Linux, as well as many other distributions, ship with Energy Performance Preference (EPP) for Emerald Rapids with a "balance_performance" value of 128. However, changing the value to 32 now yields a massive performance improvement alongside using less power. The EPP "balance_performance" is the default out-of-the-box setting for many Linux distributions. Users manually setting the "performance" mode in the EPP are not expecting any increase from this patch, as the "balance_performance" mode had issues balancing power and efficiency. Introducing this new setting yields more performance for machines that run at default settings, and this is especially important for data centers where the need for lower power and increased performance is constantly surging. Especially at hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Meta, which may run tens of thousands of these CPUs at default settings to keep them stable and well-cooled, who can now enjoy a massive performance increase with less power consumed.Below, you can see the patch quote as well as more performance/power measurements.

DeepComputing partners with Canonical to unveil a huge boost to the DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop family. The DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II is the world's first RISC-V laptop pre-installed and powered by Ubuntu, which is one of the most popular Linux distributions in the world, providing developers with an outstanding mix of usability and reliability, as well as a rich ecosystem with security and support.

Equipped with octa-core 64-bit RISC-V AI CPU
Adding to a long list of firsts, the new DC-ROMA laptop II is the first to feature SpacemiT's SoC K1 - with its 8-cores RISC-V CPU running at up to 2.0 GHz with 16 GB of memory. This significantly doubled its overall performance and energy efficiency over the previous generation's 4-cores SoC running at 1.5 GHz. Moreover, SpacemiT's SoC K1 is also the world's first SoC to support RISC-V high performance computing RVA 22 Profile RVV 1.0 with 256 bit width, and to have powerful AI capabilities with its customised matrix operation instruction based on IME Group design principle!

ASUS IoT, a global AIoT solution provider, today announced a partnership agreement with Canonical to provide pre-installed and certified versions of the Ubuntu Linux operating system for embedded boards and systems in diverse edge computing applications. New ASUS IoT devices such as the PE100A will be guaranteed by Canonical for optimized performance with Ubuntu Linux, in the interest of improving development time, configuration and installation.

This collaboration between ASUS IoT and Canonical ensures that individual hardware I/O functions conform to industrial-grade standards and to the version of Ubuntu running on the device. Moreover, it provides up to 10 years of Linux security (with five years of bundled ESM service) along with updated capabilities for users in industrial manufacturing, smart retail, smart transportation, surveillance and many other application sectors.

Today AMD announced the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit, the latest addition to the Kria portfolio of adaptive system-on-modules (SOMs) and developer kits. A scalable and out-of-the-box development platform for robotics, the Kria KR260 offers a seamless path to production deployment with the existing Kria K26 adaptive SOMs. With native ROS 2 support, the standard framework for robotics application development, and pre-built interfaces for robotics and industrial solutions, the new SOM starter kit enables rapid development of hardware-accelerated applications for robotics, machine vision and industrial communication and control.

"The Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kits builds on the success of our Kria SOMs and KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit for AI and embedded developers, providing roboticists with a complete, out-of-the-box solution for this rapidly growing application space," said Chetan Khona, senior director of Industrial, Vision, Healthcare and Sciences Markets at AMD. "Roboticists will now be able to work in their standard development environment on a platform that has all the interfaces and capabilities needed to be up and running in less than an hour. The KR260 Starter Kit is an ideal platform to accelerate robotics innovation and easily take ideas to production at scale."

AAEON, an industry leader in embedded AI Edge systems, announces new software support for the BOXER-8200 series of embedded PCs featuring NVIDIA Jetson System on Modules (SOM). AAEON has officially signed an agreement with Canonical to provide customers with the NVIDIA Ubuntu operating system pre-installed on new BOXER-8200 systems. Systems with the NVIDIA Ubuntu OS will also ship with the Jetpack 4.5 drivers and toolkit package preinstalled. Additionally, AAEON announces a new customization services to provide Secureboot to clients in addition to other customization options.

AAEON is dedicated to delivering the most comprehensive platform solutions powered by NVIDIA Jetson SOMs. To meet the needs of their clients, AAEON has signed an agreement with Canonical to provide the official NVIDIA Ubuntu OS image on the entire range of BOXER-8200 series systems. Developers and customers who purchase new BOXER-8200 series systems can receive the system with the OS preinstalled, with no need to flash the image before starting the system up for the first time. The BOXER-8200 series includes the BOXER-822x platforms with Jetson Nano, BOXER-8240AI with Jetson AGX Xavier, BOXER-825x platforms with Jetson Xavier NX, and BOXER-823x platforms with Jetson TX2 NX (currently under development).

NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPU, its next-generation data processing unit, to deliver the most powerful software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities available for data centers.

The first DPU built for AI and accelerated computing, BlueField-3 lets every enterprise deliver applications at any scale with industry-leading performance and data center security. It is optimized for multi-tenant, cloud-native environments, offering software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management services at data-center scale.

At a launch event today, AMD was joined by an expansive ecosystem of datacenter partners and customers to introduce the 2nd Generation AMD EPYC family of processors that deliver performance leadership across a broad number of enterprise, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors feature up to 64 "Zen 2" cores in leading-edge 7 nm process technology to deliver record-setting performance while helping reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 50% across numerous workloads. At the event, Google and Twitter announced new 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor deployments and HPE and Lenovo announced immediate availability of new platforms.

"Today, we set a new standard for the modern datacenter with the launch of our 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors that deliver record-setting performance and significantly lower total cost of ownership across a broad set of workloads," said Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. "Adoption of our new leadership server processors is accelerating with multiple new enterprise, cloud and HPC customers choosing EPYC processors to meet their most demanding server computing needs."

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - the newest version of the most widely used Linux for workstations, cloud and IoT, is now available. "Multi-cloud operations are the new normal" said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu. "Boot-time and performance-optimized images of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on every major public cloud make it the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing, especially for storage and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning."

Kubeflow, the Google approach to TensorFlow on Kubernetes, and a range of CI/CD tools are integrated in Canonical Kubernetes and aligned with Google GKE for on-premise and on-cloud AI development."Having an OS that is tuned for advanced workloads such as AI and ML is critical to a high velocity team" said David Aronchick, Product Manager, Cloud AI at Google. "With the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Canonical's collaborations to the Kubeflow project, Canonical has provided both a familiar and highly performant operating system that works everywhere. Whether on-premise or in the cloud, software engineers and data scientists can use tools they are already familiar with, such as Ubuntu, Kubernetes and Kubeflow, and greatly accelerate their ability to deliver value for their customers."

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announces today that Skype is now available as a snap, the universal Linux app packaging format. Available as of today, the release means that Skype can deliver its communication service to a wider range of Linux users, including millions on Ubuntu. Skype is used by millions of users globally to make free video and voice calls, send files, video and instant messages and to share both special occasions and everyday moments with the people who matter most.

Skype has turned to snaps to ensure its users on Linux, are automatically delivered to its latest version upon release. And with snaps' roll-back feature, whereby applications can revert back to the previous working version in the event of a bug, Skype's developers can ensure a seamless user experience. The Skype snap will work natively on all Linux distributions that support snaps, including Linux Mint, Manjaro, Debian, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Solus, and Ubuntu. This Skype desktop application is compatible across the wide range of Linux platforms, opening it up to an increased range of devices and to millions of users.

Intel today launched its new Intel Xeon Scalable processors, providing businesses with breakthrough performance to handle compute-hungry tasks including real-time analytics, virtualized infrastructure and high-performance computing. Today's launch marks the greatest set of data center and network processor advancements in a decade.

"Data center and network infrastructure is undergoing massive transformations to support emerging use cases like precision medicine, artificial intelligence and agile network services paving the path to 5G," said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Data Center Group. "Intel Xeon Scalable processors represent the biggest data center advancement in a decade."

QNAP Systems, Inc. has announced today a partnership with Canonical. The partnership will provide an advanced platform for the development of services and applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) using both Ubuntu and QTS operating systems. Canonical and QNAP will cooperate to provide, promote, and enable the creation of an ecosystem of IoT applications across home, SMB, and enterprises.

QNAP leverages its NAS operating system, QTS, with its built-in, mature, and comprehensive virtualization platform and further, integrates the Ubuntu operating system to provide a complete and familiar software development platform for software developers. Users are able to enjoy simultaneously the wide variety of apps from the QTS App Center, and diversified services available on Ubuntu.

AMD today announced that its SeaMicro SM15000 server set a significant industry benchmark record for hyperscale cloud computing with a demonstration that highlights how OpenStack can quickly and reliably provision on-demand computing services at scale. The test provisioned 168,000 virtual machines on 576 physical hosts. The first 75,000 virtual machines were deployed in six hours and thirty minutes. This is the largest known demonstration of OpenStack scalability ever. AMD achieved the record in collaboration with Canonical using the Ubuntu OpenStack (Icehouse) distribution. MaaS (Metal as a Service), part of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu OpenStack, was used to deliver the bare metal servers, storage and networking. The solution is available today and is the most scalable, automated application for deploying OpenStack in hyperscale environments.

"This record validates that the SeaMicro SM15000 is well suited for massive OpenStack deployments," said Dhiraj Mallick, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Data Center Server Solutions. "The combination of Ubuntu OpenStack and the SeaMicro SM15000 server provides the industry's leading solution to build cloud infrastructure that is highly responsive and ideal for on-demand services."

At the end of November 2013, Ubuntu / Canonical contacted Tranquil PC to commission the design and manufacture of what would become known as 'The Orange Box'. Today, 13th May 2014, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth launches the product to the world at OpenStack (Atlanta).

The Orange Box is an innovative, custom designed micro cluster chassis, envisioned by Canonical, and contract manufactured by TranquilPC Limited. The chassis includes a small cluster of Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) boards, and is particularly well suited for portable demonstration and local prototyping of cloud workloads. The Orange Box, manufactured in the UK to exacting standards is available to order and ships internationally (free of charge). For more information, visit this page.

Canonical today announces the availability of Ubuntu 13.10 for desktop and smartphone. Ubuntu's first true mobile release delivers the streamlined core OS and mobile user interface that pave the way for full device convergence and create a unique platform for modern computing.

"This is a milestone in Ubuntu's history; the exact same Ubuntu OS runs on ARM phones and modern HP Moonshot ARM servers, and provides exactly the same capability as x86 platforms," said Rick Spencer, who leads Ubuntu's consumer-facing engineering. "Ubuntu 13.10 is a full server-grade OS that offers a mobile experience and is lean enough to support mobile devices, kicking off a new era in mobile security and computing convergence."