Lightelligence, the global leader in photonic computing and connectivity systems, today announced Photowave, the first optical communications hardware designed for PCIe and Compute Express Link (CXL) connectivity, unleashing next-generation workload efficiency.

Photowave, an Optical Networking (oNET) transceiver leveraging the significant latency and energy efficiency of photonics technology, empowers data center managers to scale resources within or across server racks. The first public demonstration of Photowave will be at Flash Memory Summit today through Thursday, August 10, in Santa Clara, Calif.

From the cloud, to the edge, to the enterprise, data center architects are deploying higher levels of flash to unlock the potential of AI, object storage, file sharing and more. At the same time, they are laser-focused on controlling spend and must find solutions to help them manage, scale and utilize storage assets more efficiently. This is driving a growing trend to disaggregate and share NVMe flash over fabric (NVMe-oF) for improved performance, availability and flexibility of storage resources.

Helping customers simplify NVMe/NVMe-oF storage deployment, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced its enhanced OpenFlex Data24 3200 NVMe-oF JBOF/Storage Platform along with the next-generation RapidFlex A2000 and C2000 NVMe-oF fabric bridge devices (FBDs), and the new Ultrastar DC SN655 PCIe Gen 4.0 dual-port NVMe SSD. These new storage solutions are enabling an ecosystem, providing more flexibility and choice for simplifying NVMe and NVMe-oF deployment for customers. Western Digital is now the only company with vertical integration capabilities targeting both ends of the Ethernet wire to deliver solutions where data travels from the server initiator to the storage target.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the addition of the KIOXIA CD8P Series to its lineup of data center-class solid state drives (SSDs). KIOXIA CD8P drives are well-suited to general purpose server and cloud environments that can take advantage of PCIe 5.0 (32 gigatransfers/s x4) performance. These data center applications can generate complex mixed workloads spread across large scale virtualized systems. The new drives are available in capacities up to 30.72 terabytes (TB) and in both Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.5-inch (U.2) form factors.

Optimized for the performance, latency, reduced power and thermal requirements of data center environments where power and cooling efficiency is critical, the KIOXIA CD8P Series provides the predictability and consistency needed for a seamless user experience. According to Jeff Janukowicz, Research Vice President, IDC, "Growth in NVMe SSDs continues with PCIe capacity shipments in servers and storage systems expected to grow at a 40% CAGR between 2022 and 2027. The new CD8P Series SSDs gives these customers the range of performance, capacity, and security choices essential for meeting the storage requirements of next-generation digital enterprise and data center infrastructure."

AMD today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2023 of $5.4 billion, gross margin of 46%, operating loss of $20 million, net income of $27 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.02. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin was 50%, operating income was $1.1 billion, net income was $948 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.58.

"We delivered strong results in the second quarter as 4th Gen EPYC and Ryzen 7000 processors ramped significantly," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "Our AI engagements increased by more than seven times in the quarter as multiple customers initiated or expanded programs supporting future deployments of Instinct accelerators at scale. We made strong progress meeting key hardware and software milestones to address the growing customer pull for our data center AI solutions and are on-track to launch and ramp production of MI300 accelerators in the fourth quarter."

Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating generative AI, and G42, the UAE-based technology holding group, today announced Condor Galaxy, a network of nine interconnected supercomputers, offering a new approach to AI compute that promises to significantly reduce AI model training time. The first AI supercomputer on this network, Condor Galaxy 1 (CG-1), has 4 exaFLOPs and 54 million cores. Cerebras and G42 are planning to deploy two more such supercomputers, CG-2 and CG-3, in the U.S. in early 2024. With a planned capacity of 36 exaFLOPs in total, this unprecedented supercomputing network will revolutionize the advancement of AI globally.

"Collaborating with Cerebras to rapidly deliver the world's fastest AI training supercomputer and laying the foundation for interconnecting a constellation of these supercomputers across the world has been enormously exciting. This partnership brings together Cerebras' extraordinary compute capabilities, together with G42's multi-industry AI expertise. G42 and Cerebras' shared vision is that Condor Galaxy will be used to address society's most pressing challenges across healthcare, energy, climate action and more," said Talal Alkaissi, CEO of G42 Cloud, a subsidiary of G42.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced its selection of Intel as one of 15 organizations tasked with developing high-performance, energy-efficient cooling solutions for future data centers. The award, announced in May, is part of the COOLERCHIPS program - Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems - supported by DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Intel's project, anticipated to be a three-year agreement with $1.71 million in funding, will enable the continuation of Moore's Law by allowing Intel to add more cores and transistors to its highest performance processors, while managing the heat on future devices.

Tejas Shah, principal engineer and lead thermal architect for Intel's Super Compute Platforms Group said: "Immersion cooling is used for its simplicity, sustainability and ease of upgrades. This proposal will enable two-phase immersion cooling to align with the exponential increase in power expected by processors over the next decade."

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a subsidiary of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation, will be showcasing its latest HPC, cloud and storage platforms at Computex 2023, Booth #M0701a in Taipei, Taiwan from May 30 to June 2. These platforms are powered by AMD EPYC 9004 Series processors, which offer superior energy efficiency and are designed to enhance data center computing performance.

"As businesses increasingly prioritize sustainability in their operations, data centers - which serve as the computational core of an organization - offer a significant opportunity to improve efficiency and support ambitious sustainability targets," said Eric Kuo, Vice President of the Server Infrastructure Business Unit at MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation. "TYAN's server platforms powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processor enable IT organizations to achieve high performance while remaining cost-effective and contributing to environmental sustainability."

NVIDIA and SoftBank Corp. today announced they are collaborating on a pioneering platform for generative AI and 5G/6G applications that is based on the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and which SoftBank plans to roll out at new, distributed AI data centers across Japan. Paving the way for the rapid, worldwide deployment of generative AI applications and services, SoftBank will build data centers that can, in collaboration with NVIDIA, host generative AI and wireless applications on a multi-tenant common server platform, which reduces costs and is more energy efficient.

The platform will use the new NVIDIA MGX reference architecture with Arm Neoverse-based GH200 Superchips and is expected to improve performance, scalability and resource utilization of application workloads. "As we enter an era where society coexists with AI, the demand for data processing and electricity requirements will rapidly increase. SoftBank will provide next-generation social infrastructure to support the super-digitalized society in Japan," said Junichi Miyakawa, president and CEO of SoftBank Corp. "Our collaboration with NVIDIA will help our infrastructure achieve a significantly higher performance with the utilization of AI, including optimization of the RAN. We expect it can also help us reduce energy consumption and create a network of interconnected data centers that can be used to share resources and host a range of generative AI applications."

Lenovo Group today announced full-year results, reporting Group revenue of US$62 billion and net income of US$1.6 billion, or US$1.9 billion on a non-Hong Kong Financial Reporting Standards (HKFRS) [1] basis. Profitability was stable with gross margin and operating margin both delivering 18-year highs and non-HKFRS net margin flat year-to-year. While Group revenue was impacted due to the softness in the device market, revenue from non-PC businesses reached a fiscal year high of nearly 40%, fueled by Lenovo's diversified growth engines of Solutions and Services Group (SSG) and Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) growing revenue to record highs of US$6.7 billion and US$9.8 billion respectively, up 22% and 37% year-on-year.

After a year of industry and global uncertainties, Lenovo sees positive signs of the market stabilizing. The Group expects the entire PC and smart devices market to resume year-to-year growth in the second half of 2023, and for the IT services market to resume relatively high growth - together these will drive the total IT market in 2023 back to moderate growth. In the mid-to-long term, digital and intelligent transformation will continue to accelerate, leading to a big growth potential for cloud and computing infrastructure.

Today, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) showcased its high performance computing (HPC) leadership at ISC High Performance 2023 and celebrated, along with key partners, its first year of breaking the exascale barrier. AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators continue to be the solutions of choice behind many of the most innovative, green and powerful supercomputers in the world, powering 121 supercomputers on the latest TOP500 list.

"AMD's mission in high-performance computing is to enable our customers to tackle the world's most important challenges," said Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Business Group, AMD. "Our industry partners and the global HPC community continue to leverage the performance and efficiency of AMD EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators to advance their groundbreaking work and scientific discoveries."

At the ISC High Performance Conference, Intel showcased leadership performance for high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads; shared its portfolio of future HPC and AI products, unified by the oneAPI open programming model; and announced an ambitious international effort to use the Aurora supercomputer to develop generative AI models for science and society.

"Intel is committed to serving the HPC and AI community with products that help customers and end-users make breakthrough discoveries faster," said Jeff McVeigh, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group. "Our product portfolio spanning Intel Xeon CPU Max Series, Intel Data Center GPU Max Series, 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Habana Gaudi 2 are outperforming the competition on a variety of workloads, offering energy and total cost of ownership advantages, democratizing AI and providing choice, openness and flexibility."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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