Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, today announced the launch of its X1 controller based solid state drive (SSD) platform that delivers the industry's most advanced enterprise SSD solution. Engineered with Phison's technology to meet the evolving demands of faster and smarter global data-center infrastructures, the X1 SSD platform was designed in partnership with Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions. The X1 SSD customizable platform offers more computing with less energy consumption. With a cost-effective solution that eliminates bottlenecks and improves quality of service, the X1 offers more than a 30 percent increase in data reads than existing market competitors for the same power used.

"We combined Seagate's proprietary data management and customer integration capabilities with Phison's cutting-edge technology to create highly customized SSDs that meet the ever-evolving needs of the enterprise storage market," said Sai Varanasi, senior vice president of product and business marketing at Seagate Technology. "Seagate is excited to partner with Phison on developing advanced SSD technology to provide the industry with increased density, higher performance and power efficiency for all mass capacity storage providers."

MaxLinear Inc. today announced the availability of Panther III, the latest in the company's Panther series of storage accelerators. The company is showcasing this product at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA, August 2 - 4. Booth 111. Businesses need immediate access to larger and larger amounts of data and, at the same time, are faced with security and CAPEX costs challenges. With its 16 nanometer (nm) DPU architecture, Panther III provides breakthrough data reduction, encryption, deduplication, and data protection and sets a new standard in storage acceleration with a high throughput of 200 Gbps and ultra-low single-pass transformation latency.

Panther III opens new opportunities within the storage market, including all-flash-array and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) systems. As with previous generations of Panther products, Panther III offers powerful data reduction technology that intelligently offloads the CPU to open all tiers of storage to their full bandwidth potential with no CPU or software limitations. These capabilities enable intelligent and faster dataset delivery, high-performance analytics, and improved workload accuracy in fast-growing Edge to disaggregated computing of the public cloud.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, is announcing future Total IT Solutions for availability with Android Cloud Gaming and Media Processing & Delivery. These new solutions will incorporate the Intel Data Center GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound-M, and will be supported on several Supermicro servers. Supermicro solutions that will contain the Intel Data Center GPUs codenamed Arctic Sound-M, include the 4U 10x GPU server for transcoding and media delivery, the Supermicro BigTwin system with up to eight Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M in 2U for media processing applications, the Supermicro CloudDC server for edge AI inferencing, and the Supermicro 2U 2-Node server with three Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M per node, optimized for cloud gaming. Additional systems will be made available later this year.

"Supermicro will extend our media processing solutions by incorporating the Intel Data Center GPU," said Charles Liang, President, and CEO, Supermicro. "The new solutions will increase video stream rates and enable lower latency Android cloud gaming. As a result, Android cloud gaming performance and interactivity will increase dramatically with the Supermicro BigTwin systems, while media delivery and transcoding will show dramatic improvements with the new Intel Data Center GPUs. The solutions will expand our market-leading accelerated computing offerings, including everything from Media Processing & Delivery to Collaboration, and HPC."

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $51.9 billion and increased 12% (up 16% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $20.5 billion and increased 8% (up 14% in constant currency)
• Net income was $16.7 billion and increased 2% (up 7% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.23 and increased 3% (up 8% in constant currency)

"We see real opportunity to help every customer in every industry use digital technology to overcome today's challenges and emerge stronger," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "No company is better positioned than Microsoft to help organizations deliver on their digital imperative - so they can do more with less."

The recent semiconductor shortage has put an unprecedented amount of focus on the industry. Both commercial and government entities have come to recognize the lack of advanced node semiconductor manufacturing capabilities onshore in the United States. Intel Foundry Services (IFS) entry into the commercial foundry space is poised to change all that. As part of IFS Accelerator program, Intel recently announced their new IFS Cloud Alliance program, with Microsoft Azure as one of the inaugural members.

This is the latest chapter in a partnership between Intel and Microsoft that stretches back decades all the way back to the early days of the personal computer. In the last few years, Intel and Microsoft have collaborated on advancing semiconductor design on the cloud by working together to bring out EDA centric cloud compute such as the FX series on Azure, working with EDA vendors to enhance their software to better take advantage of the elasticity of the Azure cloud, as well as collaborating on a secure cloud-based semiconductor development platform for the US Department of Defense RAMP and RAMP-C programs.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it is the first major server provider to deliver a new line of cloud-native compute solutions using processors from Ampere. The new HPE solutions provide service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with an agile, extensible, and trusted compute foundation to drive innovation.

Available in Q3 2022, the new HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 server is the first in a series of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers that deliver next-generation compute performance with higher power efficiency using Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max cloud-native processors.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, announces the global availability of the new TOS 5 operating system - officially released on June 13, 2022. Compared to TOS 4, TerraMaster TOS 5 features more than 100 new functions that provided great improvements and tighter security for data storage. Some of the new feature functions for higher data protection includes WORM file system support, Security Isolation Mode, and OTP Authorization.

Amazon's AWS division has been making Graviton processors for a few years now, and the company recently announced its Graviton3 design will soon to available in the cloud. Today, we are witnessing a full launch of the Graviton3 CPUs with the first instances available in the AWS Cloud. In theC7g instances, AWS customers can now scale their workloads across 1-64 vCPU instance variants. Graviton3's 64 cores run at 2.6 GHz clock speed, 300 GB/sec maximum memory bandwidth, DDR5 memory controller, 64 cores, seven silicon die chiplet-based design, 256-bit SVE (Scalable Vector Extension), all across 55 billion transistors. Paired with up to 128 GiB of DDR5 memory, these processors are compute-intensive solutions. AWS noted that the company used a monolithic computing and memory controller logic design to reduce latency and improve performance.

One interesting thing to note is the motherboard that AWS hosts Graviton3 processors in. Usually, server motherboards can be single, dual, or quad-socket solutions. However, AWS decided to implement a unique solution with three sockets. This tri-socket setup is designed to see each CPU as an independent processor, managed by a Nitro Card, which can handle exactly three CPUs. The company notes that the CPU is now in general availability with C7g instances and you can see it below.

Google Cloud and AMD today announced a technology partnership in which AMD will run electronic design automation (EDA) for its chip-design workloads on Google Cloud, further extending the on-premises capabilities of AMD data centers. AMD will also leverage Google Cloud's global networking, storage, artificial intelligence, and machine learning capabilities to further improve upon its hybrid and multicloud strategy for these EDA workloads.

Scale, elasticity, and efficient utilization of resources play critical roles in chip design, particularly given that the demand for compute processing grows with each node advancement. To remain flexible and scale easily, AMD will add Google Cloud's newest compute-optimized C2D VM instance, powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, to its suite of resources focused on EDA workloads. By leveraging Google Cloud, AMD anticipates being able to run more designs in parallel, giving the team more flexibility to manage short-term compute demands, without reducing allocation on long-term projects.

Tachyum today launched the world's first universal processor, Prodigy, which unifies the functionality of a CPU, GPU and TPU in a single processor, creating a homogeneous architecture, while delivering massive performance improvements at a cost many times less than competing products.

After the company undertook its mission to conquer the processor performance plateau in nanometer-class chips and the systems they power, Tachyum has succeeded by launching its first commercial product. The Prodigy Cloud/AI/HPC supercomputer processor chip offers 4x the performance of the fastest Xeon, has 3x more raw performance than NVIDIA's H100 on HPC and has 6x more raw performance on AI training and inference workloads, and up to 10x performance at the same power. Prodigy is poised to overcome the challenges of increasing data center power consumption, low server utilization and stalled performance scaling.

Building on significant technology innovations cultivated over decades, Western Digital today announced that it is sampling its new industry-leading 22 TB and 26 TB UltraSMR HDDs to select hyperscale cloud customers, further expanding its areal density leadership and delivering customer value by driving TCO lower. Western Digital's HDD technology portfolio and areal density leadership puts it at the center of storage innovation. Leveraging its unique OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal and now UltraSMR technologies, Western Digital is on a clear path to delivering 30+ TB with ePMR.

"As a longstanding partner of the industry's leading cloud providers, we understand their unique requirements in building next-generation cloud infrastructure and invested in several HDD innovations we developed alongside our areal density technology," said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, EVP and GM, HDD Business Unit, Western Digital. "Our intent with taking this development strategy was not only to address the capacity demands of the world's largest cloud titans but to deliver on a roadmap that would also support the evolving economics of their data centers for decades to come. With ePMR, OptiNAND and now UltraSMR as the foundation of Western Digital's HDD roadmap, our cloud customers can continue rapidly scaling their business by taking advantage of our innovations to lower their storage TCO."

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the expansion of the AMD EPYC processor footprint within the cloud ecosystem, powering the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) E4 Dense instances. These new instances are part of the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution offerings, enable customers to build and run a hybrid-cloud environment for their VMware based workloads.

Based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, the new E4 Dense instances expand the AMD EPYC presence at OCI and are made to support memory and storage intense VMware workloads. The E4 Dense instances utilize the core density and performance capabilities of EPYC processors to provide customers a fast path to a cloud environment, enabling similar performance and advanced security features through enabling the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) security feature for VMware workloads that they have on-premises.

Blackmagic Design today announced DaVinci Resolve 18, a major new cloud collaboration update which allows multiple editors, colorists, VFX artists and audio engineers to work simultaneously on the same project, on the same timeline, anywhere in the world. DaVinci Resolve 18 supports the Blackmagic Cloud for hosting and sharing projects, as well as a new DaVinci proxy workflow. This update also includes new Resolve FX AI tools powered by the DaVinci Neural Engine, as well as time saving tools for editors, Fairlight legacy fixed bus to FlexBus conversion, GPU accelerated paint in Fusion, and more! DaVinci Resolve 18 public beta is available for download now from the Blackmagic Design web site.

DaVinci Resolve 18 is a major release featuring cloud based workflows for a new way to collaborate remotely. Customers can host project libraries using Blackmagic Cloud and collaborate on the same timeline, in real time, with multiple users globally. The new Blackmagic Proxy generator automatically creates proxies linked to camera originals, for a faster editing workflow. There are new Resolve FX such as ultra beauty and 3D depth map, improved subtitling for editors, GPU accelerated Fusion paint and real time title template playback, Fairlight fixed to FlexBus conversion and more. DaVinci Resolve 18 supports Blackmagic Cloud, so customers can host their project libraries on the DaVinci Resolve Project Server in the cloud. Share projects and work collaboratively with editors, colorists, VFX artists and audio engineers on the same project at the same time, anywhere in the world.

One of the largest cloud providers in China, Alibaba, has today announced a preview for a new instance powered by Yitian 710 processor. The new processor is a collection of Alibaba's efforts to develop a home-grown design capable of powering cloud instances and the infrastructure needed for it and its clients. Without much further ado, the Yitian 710 is based on Armv9 ISA and features 128 cores. Ramping up to 3.2 GHz, these cores are paired with eight-channel DDR5 memory to enable sufficient data transfer. In addition, the CPU supports 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes for IO with storage and accelerators. These are most likely custom designs, and we don't know if they are using a blueprint based on Arm's Neoverse. The CPU is manufactured at TSMC's facilities on 5 nm node and features 60 billion transistors.

Alibaba offers these processors as a part of their Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance called g8m, where users can select 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128 vCPUs, where each vCPU is equal to one CPU core physically. Alibaba is running this as a trial option and notes that users should not run production code on these instances, as they will disappear after two months. Only 100 instances are available for now, and they are based in Alibaba's Hangzhou zone in China. The company notes that instances based on Yitian 710 processors offer 100 percent higher efficiency than existing AMD/Intel solutions; however, they don't have any useful data to back it up. The Chinese cloud giant is likely trying to test and see if the home-grown hardware can satisfy the needs of its clients so that they can continue the path to self-sustainability.

Fujitsu today announced the launch of its new service portfolio "Fujitsu Computing as a Service (CaaS)" to accelerate digital transformation (DX) and empower customers globally by offering access to some of the world's most advanced computing technologies via the cloud for commercial use. The new service encompasses advanced computing resources like Fujitsu's quantum-inspired Digital Annealer technology, the computing technology at the heart of the world's fastest supercomputer, Fugaku, and software applications that allow a wide range of users to solve problems with AI and machine learning. Fujitsu will begin delivery of these new services to the Japanese market starting in October 2022 with a global rollout to international regions including Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas to follow.

As the first step, Fujitsu will begin preorders for "Fujitsu Cloud Service HPC," which offers the computing power of the "Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX1000," which shares the same CPU at the heart of the supercomputer Fugaku. Fujitsu will begin sales of the service for the general public and organizations in Japan starting April 6, 2022, with delivery to commence from October. In the months ahead, Fujitsu will further add services for its Digital Annealer technology and AI cloud services to its service lineup in order to provide further value-added services that seamlessly integrate various solutions.

Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in an online format from June 6 through 10, free for all developers to attend. Building on the success of the past two years of virtual events, WWDC22 will showcase the latest innovations in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, while giving developers access to Apple engineers and technologies to learn how to create groundbreaking apps and interactive experiences.

"At its heart, WWDC has always been a forum to create connection and build community," said Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise and Education Marketing. "In that spirit, WWDC22 invites developers from around the world to come together to explore how to bring their best ideas to life and push the envelope of what's possible. We love connecting with our developers, and we hope all of our participants come away feeling energized by their experience."

Today, Microsoft launches Azure Virtual Machines (VM) based on the Ampere Altra Cloud Native Processor. This marks an important milestone as developers can now take advantage of these modern high-performance VMs for their existing and greenfield applications. The Ampere Altra processor family leads in performance across a range of broadly deployed cloud workloads and is now making available the Arm architecture on Azure.

Industry leading performance and the most sustainable solution
Cloud users who have pushed the limits of legacy x86 architectures now have a high-performance compute alternative that scales up in a linear fashion and delivers predictable performance even at full utilization. For example, Ampere Altra VMs outperform equivalently sized Intel and AMD instances from the same generation by 39% and 47%, respectively.* In addition to being the high-performance choice, Ampere Altra processors are extremely power efficient, directly reducing users' overall carbon footprint.

Intel Corporation today announced an agreement to acquire Granulate Cloud Solutions Ltd, an Israel-based developer of real-time continuous optimization software. The acquisition of Granulate will help cloud and data center customers maximize compute workload performance and reduce infrastructure and cloud costs. Deal terms are not being disclosed.

"Today's cloud and data center customers demand scalable, high-performance software to make the most of their hardware deployments," said Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel. "Granulate's cutting-edge autonomous optimization software can be applied to production workloads without requiring the customer to make changes to its code, driving optimized hardware and software value for every cloud and data center customer."

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.

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) today announced the industry's first 800 Gbps or 8x 100 Gbps multimode platform solution, that enables data center infrastructure to achieve dramatically higher speeds for short-reach optical modules and Active Optical Cable (AOC) applications. As artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications continue to drive greater bandwidth requirements, cloud-optimized solutions are needed that can bring lower power, latency and cost to short-range data center interconnections. The new 800G platform, which includes Marvell's PAM4 DSP with a multimode transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and Driver, enables faster data center speeds scaling to 800 Gbps, using conventional cost-effective vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) technology while accelerating time-to-market with plug-and-play deployment.

Today's data centers are packed with equipment utilizing optical modules or AOCs connected by multimode optical fiber optimized for communication over short distances within data centers. This 100G per lane multimode fiber provides cost-effective, low-power, short-reach connectivity. To support multi-gigabit transmissions, multimode architectures often use VCSEL transmitters, which offer the cost benefits of reliability, power efficiency and easy deployment.

Amazon today announced its Luna cloud gaming service is now available for all customers in the mainland United States with an expanded library of games and new features. The new Prime Gaming Channel brings Amazon Prime customers a unique offer to try a rotating selection of free games on Luna, and all players can now access even more games by subscribing to the new Retro Channel and Jackbox Games Channel. New Luna features include Live Broadcasting to Twitch and the Luna Phone Controller, which is available in the Luna Controller app for iPhone and Android phones.

Amazon Luna is a cloud gaming service that lets you play games on devices you already own, including Fire TV, Fire tablets, Windows PCs, Chromebook, Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Android phones. Luna offers a variety of channels to choose from, bringing great content from multiple genres so there is always something interesting to play for all types of gamers. Luna is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), making it easy to stream games without lengthy downloads or updates, expensive hardware, or complicated configurations.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the fourth quarter of 2021 of $4.8 billion, operating income of $1.2 billion, net income of $974 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.80. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $1.3 billion, net income was $1.1 billion and diluted earnings per share was $0.92. For full year 2021, the company reported revenue of $16.4 billion, operating income of $3.6 billion, net income of $3.2 billion and diluted earnings per share of $2.57. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $4.1 billion, net income was $3.4 billion and diluted earnings per share was $2.79.

"2021 was an outstanding year for AMD with record annual revenue and profitability," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "Each of our businesses performed extremely well, with data center revenue doubling year-over-year driven by growing adoption of AMD EPYC processors across cloud and enterprise customers. We expect another year of significant growth in 2022 as we ramp our current portfolio and launch our next generation of PC, gaming and data center products."

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.

Intel today released oneAPI 2022 toolkits. Newly enhanced toolkits expand cross-architecture features to provide developers greater utility and architectural choice to accelerate computing. "I am impressed by the breadth of more than 900 technical improvements that the oneAPI software engineering team has done to accelerate development time and performance for critical application workloads across Intel's client and server CPUs and GPUs. The rich set of oneAPI technologies conforms to key industry standards, with deep technical innovations that enable applications developers to obtain the best possible run-time performance from the cloud to the edge. Multi-language support and cross-architecture performance acceleration are ready today in our oneAPI 2022 release to further enable programmer productivity on Intel platforms," said Greg Lavender, Intel chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group.

New capabilities include the world's first unified compiler implementing C++, SYCL and Fortran, data parallel Python for CPUs and GPUs, advanced accelerator performance modeling and tuning, and performance acceleration for AI and ray tracing visualization workloads. The oneAPI cross-architecture programming model provides developers with tools that aim to improve the productivity and velocity of code development when building cross-architecture applications.

China's technology reliance on 3rd party companies seems to be getting smaller. One of the leading technology companies in China, Huawei, has designed a laptop powered by a custom 5 nm Kirin SoC with DDR5 memory. Called the Dyna Cloud L420, Huawei has prepared this model for the Chinese market to provide a fully functional laptop that will get the job done, with no risk of the potential security backdoors implemented in the processor. Powered by a brand new Kirin 9006C SoC manufactured on TSMC's 5 nm process, it features eight unknown cores running at 3.1 GHz frequency. We assume that those are custom cores designed by Huawei. This SoC is accompanied by 8 GB of LPDDR5 memory, with 256 GB and 512 GB UFS 3.1 configurations storage options.

When it comes to the rest of the laptop, it rocks a 14-inch 2160x1440 display. I/O options are solid as well, as this machine has an HDMI video output, two USB-A, one USB-C, and Gigabit Ethernet using a mini-RJ45 port. Connectivity is provided by Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 4.2. There is a 56 W/h battery that provides the juice to keep it running when it comes to the battery. And to complete all of that, this laptop officially only supports Huawei's proprietary Kirin OS (KOS) and Unity OS (UOS), with expected support for HarmonyOS in the future. Pricing and availability information is a mistery at the present date.