Last week, we got a preview of Microsoft's Azure production-ready NVIDIA "Blackwell" GB200 system, showing that only a third of the rack that goes in the data center is actually holding the compute elements, with the other two-thirds holding the cooling compartment to cool down the immense heat output from tens of GB200 GPUs. Today, Google is showing off a part of its own infrastructure ahead of the Google Cloud App Dev & Infrastructure Summit, taking place on October 30, digitally as an event. Shown below are two racks standing side by side, connecting NVIDIA "Blackwell" GB200 NVL cards with the rest of the Google infrastructure. Unlike Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud uses a different data center design in its facilities.

There is one rack with power distribution units, networking switches, and cooling distribution units, all connected to the compute rack, which houses power supplies, GPUs, and CPU servers. Networking equipment is present, and it connects to Google's "global" data center network, which is Google's own data center fabric. We are not sure what is the fabric connection of choice between these racks; as for optimal performance, NVIDIA recommends InfiniBand (Mellanox acquisition). However, given that Google's infrastructure is set up differently, there may be Ethernet switches present. Interestingly, Google's design of GB200 racks differs from Azure's, as it uses additional rack space to distribute the coolant to its local heat exchangers, i.e., coolers. We are curious to see if Google releases more information on infrastructure, as it has been known as the infrastructure king because of its ability to scale and keep everything organized.

Xockets, inventor of Data Processing Unit (DPU) technology has launched a legal battle against NVIDIA and Microsoft. The lawsuit, filed in Texas, accuses the companies of forming an illegal cartel to avoid fair compensation for its patented DPU technology. Xockets claims that the Data Processing Unit technology its co-founder Parin Dalal invented in 2012 is fundamental to NVIDIA's GPU-enabled AI systems and Microsoft's AI platforms. The lawsuit alleges that NVIDIA has infringed on Xockets' patents since its 2020 acquisition of Mellanox, a deal NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang once called a "homerun." Xockets is seeking injunctions to halt the release of NVIDIA's new Blackwell GPU-enabled AI systems and Microsoft's use of these systems in their generative AI platforms.

The case touches on the bigger issues of intellectual property rights and the monopoly in the tech sector. Robert Cote, a Xockets board member, describes the suit as a fight against "Big Tech's predatory infringement playbook," accusing NVIDIA and Microsoft of making moves to devalue smaller companies' innovations. The AI revolution continues to transform the tech world, and this legal dispute may have a profound effect on the way intellectual property is valued and protected in the industry, possibly introducing new precedents for the relationship between tech giants and smaller innovators.

The 63rd edition of the TOP500 reveals that Frontier has once again claimed the top spot, despite no longer being the only exascale machine on the list. Additionally, a new system has found its way into the Top 10.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA remains the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores, an HPE Cray EX architecture that combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, and it relies on Cray's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer. On top of that, this machine has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.93 GFlops/Watt - putting Frontier at the No. 13 spot on the GREEN500.

AEWIN is glad to announce our latest High-Performance Network Appliance powered by Intel latest 5th Gen Xeon Scalable Processors, SCB-1942 Series. It is a series of flagship products powered by dual Intel Emerald Rapids CPUs, having up to 128 CPU cores (64 cores per CPU) for the extreme computing power pursued in the market. SCB-1942 series has multiple SKU with various PCIe slots options for great expandability to fulfill customer's solutions.

The SCB-1942A is a 2U, 2-socket network computing platform having 16x memory socket of DDR5 up to 5600 MHz, and 8x PCIe 5.0 expansion slots for AEWIN wide coverage NIC cards with 1G/10/25/40/100G copper/fiber interfaces or other Accelerators & NVMe SSDs for flexible functionality enhancement. The SCB-1942A provides the flexibility to change the 2x PCIe slots to 1x PCIe x16 slot for standard PCIe form factor which can install off-the-shelf add-on card for additional function required. It can support 400G NIC card installed such as Mellanox PCIe 5.0 NIC. In addition, the SCB-1942 series support 10 SATA which make it also suitable for various kinds of storage applications.

Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

Supermicro, a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing an expanded product line with exciting new ARM-based series of servers as part of the MegaDC family. Using Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors, the Mt. Hamilton platform leverages a single unified motherboard design, targeting cloud-native applications, such as Cloud Gaming, Video-on-Demand, CDN, IaaS, Database, Object-Storage, dense VDI, and Telco Edge (Distributed Unit and Centralized Unit) solutions. In addition, the new servers address several objectives for cloud-native workloads, specifically delivering high performance per watt while executing scalable workloads and those that require very low latency responses.

"Supermicro continues to bolster our product line by introducing ARM-based servers, using the Ampere Altra and Altra Max CPUs," said Ivan Tay, SVP of Product Management, Supermicro. "Expanding our already broad server product line gives customers even more choices for their specific workloads. We can quickly offer optimized application servers for customers worldwide using our Building Block Solutions approach."

The 60th edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system is still the only true exascale machine on the list.

With an HPL score of 1.102 EFlop/s, the Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) did not improve upon the score it reached on the June 2022 list. That said, Frontier's near-tripling of the HPL score received by second-place winner is still a major victory for computer science. On top of that, Frontier demonstrated a score of 7.94 EFlop/s on the HPL-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and it relies on AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processor. The system has 8,730,112 cores and a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

Excelero, a Tel Aviv-based provider of high-performance software-defined storage, is now a part of NVIDIA. The company's team of engineers—including its seasoned co-founders with decades of experience in HPC, storage and networking—bring deep expertise in the block storage that large businesses use in storage-area networks.

Now their mission is to help expand support for block storage in our enterprise software stack such as clusters for high performance computing. Block storage also has an important role to play inside the DOCA software framework that runs on our DPUs.

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.

QNAP, today launched the QXG-25G2SF-CX6 - a 25 GbE PCIe Gen 4 (compatible with PCIe Gen 3/Gen 2) network expansion card with an NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX -6 Lx SmartNIC. Compatible with QNAP NAS and Windows /Linux PCs, the QXG-25G2SF-CX6 provides a convenient way to upgrade your storage and workstations to benefit from next-generation networking.

With two 25 GbE ports, the QXG-25G2SF-CX6 supports up to 50 Gbps when used in a Port Trunking configuration - perfect for the most demanding storage environments that require intensive data transfer. With SR-IOV and RoCE support, where a network can be accessed directly in RAM, VMware virtualization environments can greatly benefit from reduced latency and enhanced performance and efficiency. The QXG-25G2SF-CX6 is perfectly suited for QNAP NAS solutions such as the TS-h3088XU-RP All-Flash NAS to take full advantage of the incredible bandwidth potential. You can also consider pairing the QXG-25G2SF-CX6 with a QNAP Switch to build a budget-friendly high-speed network environment.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 1H20 seemed at first poised to devastate the IC design industry. However, as WFH and distance education became the norm, TrendForce finds that the demand for notebook computers and networking products also spiked in response, in turn driving manufacturers to massively ramp up their procurement activities for components. Fabless IC design companies that supply such components therefore benefitted greatly from manufacturers' procurement demand, and the IC design industry underwent tremendous growth in 2020. In particular, the top three IC design companies (Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Nvidia) all posted YoY increases in their revenues, with Nvidia registering the most impressive growth, at a staggering 52.2% increase YoY, the highest among the top 10 companies.

GIGABYTE Technology, (TWSE: 2376), an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced the G262-ZR0 for HPC, AI, and data analytics. Designed to support the highest-level of performance in GPU computing, the G262-ZR0 incorporates fast PCIe 4.0 throughput in addition to NVIDIA HGX technologies and NVIDIA NVLink to provide industry leading bandwidth performance.

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.

NVIDIA today announced that the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA—one of the world's most important supercomputing centers—will use the company's accelerated computing platform to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer.

The new "Leonardo" system, built with Atos, is expected to deliver 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases. Featuring nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs and NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200 Gb/s InfiniBand networking, Leonardo will propel Italy as the global leader in AI and high performance computing research and innovation.

NVIDIA today announced a new kind of processor—DPUs, or data processing units—supported by DOCA, a novel data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture that enables breakthrough networking, storage and security performance.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company's three-year DPU roadmap in today's GPU Technology Conference keynote. It features the new NVIDIA BlueField -2 family of DPUs and NVIDIA DOCA software development kit for building applications on DPU-accelerated data center infrastructure services.

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.

Expected to come online by year end, the "Cambridge-1" supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world's top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

NVIDIA over the weekend formally renamed Mellanox Technologies to NVIDIA Networking. The graphics and scalar computing giant had acquired Mellanox in April 2020, in a deal valued at $7 billion. It is expected that the NVIDIA corporate identity will cover all Mellanox products, including NICs, switches, and interconnect solutions targeted at large-scale data-centers and HPC environments. Mellanox website now defaults to NVIDIA, with the announcement banner "Mellanox Technologies is now NVIDIA Networking." With the acquisition of Mellanox, a potential bid for Softbank's Arm Holdings, and market leadership in the scalar compute industry, NVIDIA moves close to becoming an end-to-end enterprise solution provider.

NVIDIA on Wednesday posted its Q2 Fiscal Year 2021 financial results, and the most startling result has been a breakdown of the company's $3.86 billion quarterly revenue among its various businesses. Turns out, that Data Center, and not Gaming, is NVIDIA's largest revenue generator for the quarter. Growing 54 percent over the previous quarter, this division contributed $1.74 billion, as opposed to $1.65 billion from Gaming (up 24 percent QoQ). The Gaming business includes NVIDIA's GeForce line of discrete graphics solutions and the GeForce NOW cloud gaming service.

Much of the growth in revenues for the Data Center business is attributable to the addition of revenues by Mellanox - a network infrastructure company NVIDIA acquired, and adoption of NVIDIA's new A100 Tensor Core GPUs by several new supercomputer projects focused on AI. NVIDIA's scalar processors now power 2/3rds of the supercomputers on the TOP500 list.

The biggest tech news story from last week was Japan's SoftBank contemplating the sale of Arm, one of the hottest pieces of tech IP out there. Turns out, this has piqued NVIDIA's interest. The graphics and scalar compute giant recently surpassed Intel in market capitalization, and has the resources to pull off what could end up being the biggest tech acquisition in history. When it was acquired by SoftBank, Arm Holdings valued at $32 billion, and it's only conceivable that the firm's current valuation is significantly higher for SoftBank to dangle it out in the market. NVIDIA is already an Arm licensee, and following its acquisition of Mellanox, has stated intent to go big in the datacenter industry.

The University of Florida and NVIDIA Tuesday unveiled a plan to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer in academia, delivering 700 petaflops of AI performance. The effort is anchored by a $50 million gift: $25 million from alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky and $25 million in hardware, software, training and services from NVIDIA.

"We've created a replicable, powerful model of public-private cooperation for everyone's benefit," said Malachowsky, who serves as an NVIDIA Fellow, in an online event featuring leaders from both the UF and NVIDIA. UF will invest an additional $20 million to create an AI-centric supercomputing and data center.

Yesterday after the stock market has closed, NVIDIA has officially reached a bigger market cap compared to Intel. After hours, the price of the NVIDIA (ticker: NVDA) stock is $411.20 with a market cap of 251.31B USD. It marks a historic day for NVIDIA as the company has historically been smaller than Intel (ticker: INTC), with some speculating that Intel could buy NVIDIA in the past while the company was much smaller. Intel's market cap now stands at 248.15B USD, which is a bit lower than NVIDIA's. However, the market cap is not an indication of everything. NVIDIA's stock is fueled by the hype generated around Machine Learning and AI, while Intel is not relying on any possible bubbles.

If we compare the revenues of both companies, Intel is having much better performance. It had a revenue of 71.9 billion USD in 2019, while NVIDIA has 11.72 billion USD of revenue. No doubt that NVIDIA has managed to do a good job and it managed to almost double revenue from 2017, where it went from $6.91 billion in 2017 to $11.72 billion in 2019. That is an amazing feat and market predictions are that it is not stopping to grow. With the recent acquisition of Mellanox, the company now has much bigger opportunities for expansion and growth.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the first quarter ended April 26, 2020, of $3.08 billion, up 39 percent from $2.22 billion a year earlier, and down 1 percent from $3.11 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.47, up 130 percent from $0.64 a year ago, and down 4 percent from $1.53 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.80, up 105 percent from $0.88 a year earlier, and down 5 percent from $1.89 in the previous quarter.

NVIDIA completed its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies Ltd. on April 27, 2020, for a transaction value of $7 billion. It also transitioned its GPU Technology Conference to an all-digital format, drawing more than 55,000 registered participants, while NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang's keynote videos were viewed 3.8 million times in their first three days.

GIGABYTE, a supplier of high-performance computing (HPC) systems, today disclosed four NVIDIA HGX A100 platforms under development. These platforms will be available with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. NVIDIA A100 is the first elastic, multi-instance GPU that unifies training, inference, HPC, and analytics. These four products include G262 series servers that can hold four NVIDIA A100 GPUs and G492 series that can provide eight A100 GPUs. Each series also distinguishes between two models, which support the 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor and the 2nd generation AMD EPYC processor. The NVIDIA HGX A100 platform is a key element in the NVIDIA accelerated data center concept that brings huge parallel computing power to customers, thereby helping customers accelerate their digital transformation.

With GPU acceleration becoming the mainstream technology in today's data center. Scientists, researchers and engineers are committed to using GPU-accelerated HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) to meet the important challenges of the current world. The NVIDIA accelerated data center concept, including GIGABYTE high-performance servers with NVIDIA NVSwitch, NVIDIA NVLink, and NVIDIA A100 GPUs, will provide GPU computing power required for different computing scales. The NVIDIA accelerated data center also features NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand high-speed networking and NVIDIA Magnum IO software that supports GPUDirect RDMA and GPUDirect Storage.

NVIDIA is leveraging the 128-lane PCI-Express gen 4.0 root complex of AMD 2nd generation EPYC "Rome" enterprise processors in building its DGX-A100 super scalar compute systems that leverage the new A100 "Ampere" compute processors. Each DGX-A100 block is endowed with two AMD EPYC 7742 64-core/128-thread processors in a 2P setup totaling 128-cores/256-threads, clocked up to 3.40 GHz boost.

This 2P EPYC "Rome" processor setup is configured to feed PCIe gen 4.0 connectivity to eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and 8-port Mellanox ConnectX 200 Gbps InfiniBand NIC. Six NVSwitches provide NVLink connectivity complementing PCI-Express gen 4.0 from the AMD sIODs. The storage and memory subsystem is equally jaw-dropping: 1 TB of hexadeca-channel (16-channel) DDR4 memory, two 1.92 TB NVMe gen 4.0 SSDs, and 15 TB of U.2 NVMe drives (4x 3.84 TB units). The GPU memory of the eight A100 units add up to 320 GB (that's 8x 40 GB, 6144-bit HBM2E). When you power it up, you're greeted with the Ubuntu Linux splash screen. All this can be yours for USD $199,000.

NVIDIA today launched the NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX -6 Lx SmartNIC—a highly secure and efficient 25/50 gigabit per second (Gb/s) Ethernet smart network interface controller (SmartNIC)—to meet surging growth in enterprise and cloud scale-out workloads.

ConnectX-6 Lx, the 11th generation product in the ConnectX family, is designed to meet the needs of modern data centers, where 25 Gb/s connections are becoming standard for handling demanding workflows, such as enterprise applications, AI and real-time analytics. The new SmartNIC extends accelerated computing by leveraging software-defined, hardware-accelerated engines to offload more security and network processing from CPUs.