ASUS today announced its groundbreaking next-generation infrastructure solutions at SC24, featuring a comprehensive lineup powered by AMD and Intel, as well as liquid-cooling solutions designed to accelerate the future of AI. By continuously pushing the limits of innovation, ASUS simplifies the complexities of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) through adaptive server solutions paired with expert cooling and software-development services, tailored for the exascale era and beyond. As a total-solution provider with a distinguished history in pioneering AI supercomputing, ASUS is committed to delivering exceptional value to its customers.

Comprehensive Lineup for AI and HPC Success
To fuel enterprise digital transformation through HPC and AI-driven architecture, ASUS provides a full lineup of server systems that are powered by AMD and Intel. Startups, research institutions, large enterprises or government organizations all could find the adaptive solutions to unlock value and accelerate business agility from the big data.

NVIDIA today announced that xAI's Colossus supercomputer cluster comprising 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee, achieved this massive scale by using the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform, which is designed to deliver superior performance to multi-tenant, hyperscale AI factories using standards-based Ethernet, for its Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network.

Colossus, the world's largest AI supercomputer, is being used to train xAI's Grok family of large language models, with chatbots offered as a feature for X Premium subscribers. xAI is in the process of doubling the size of Colossus to a combined total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.

Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL), a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, today announced the development of FBNIC, a custom 5 nm network interface controller (NIC) ASIC in collaboration with Meta to meet the company's infrastructure and use case requirements. The FBNIC board design will also be contributed by Marvell to the Open Compute Project (OCP) community. FBNIC combines a customized network controller designed by Marvell and Meta, a co-designed board, and Meta's ASIC, firmware and software. This custom design delivers innovative capabilities, optimizes performance, increases efficiencies, and reduces the average time needed to resolve potential network and server issues.

"The future of large-scale, data center computing will increasingly revolve around optimizing semiconductors and other components for specific applications and cloud infrastructure architectures," said Raghib Hussain, President of Products and Technologies at Marvell. "It's been exciting to partner with Meta on developing their custom FBNIC on our industry-leading 5 nm accelerated infrastructure silicon platform. We look forward to the OCP community leveraging the board design for future innovations."

At Computex, Realtek was showing off a new 5 Gbps switch platform which is set to bring much more affordable high-speed Ethernet switches to the consumer market. At the core of the new switch platform sits Realtek's RTL9303 which is an eight port 10 Gbps switch controller. This was released a few years ago as a low cost 10 Gbps switch IC, but as it still required third party PHYs, it never really took off. The RTL9303 is built around an 800 MHz MIPS 34Kc CPU and supports up to 1 GB of DDR3 RAM as well as 64 MB of SPI NOR Flash for the firmware.

When combined with Realtek's RTL8251B 5 Gbps PHY, the end result is a comparably low-cost 5 Gbps switch. According to Ananadtech, Realtek is expecting a US$25 price per port, which is only about $10 more per port than your typical 2.5 Gbps switch today, even though some are as little as US$10 per port. When combined with a Realtek RTL8126 PCIe based 5 Gbps NIC which retails from around US$30, 5 Gbps Ethernet looks like a very sensible option in terms of price/performance. Admittedly 2.5 Gbps Ethernet cards can be had for as little as $13, but they started out at a higher price point compared to what 5 Gbps NICs are already selling for. Meanwhile, 10 Gbps NICs are still stuck at around US$80-90, with switches in most cases costing at least US$45 per port, but often a lot more. 5 Gbps Ethernet also has the advantage of being able to operate on CAT 5e cabling at up to 60 metres and CAT 6 cabling at up 100 metres, which means there's no need to replace older cabling to benefit from it.

Quantum computing. Drug discovery. Fusion energy. Scientific computing and physics-based simulations are poised to make giant steps across domains that benefit humanity as advances in accelerated computing and AI drive the world's next big breakthroughs. NVIDIA unveiled at GTC in March the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, which promises generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models (LLMs) at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than the NVIDIA Hopper architecture.

Blackwell has powerful implications for AI workloads, and its technology capabilities can also help to deliver discoveries across all types of scientific computing applications, including traditional numerical simulation. By reducing energy costs, accelerated computing and AI drive sustainable computing. Many scientific computing applications already benefit. Weather can be simulated at 200x lower cost and with 300x less energy, while digital twin simulations have 65x lower cost and 58x less energy consumption versus traditional CPU-based systems and others.

During the Vision 2024 event, Intel announced its latest Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, promising significant improvements over its predecessor. Intel claims the Gaudi 3 offers up to 70% improvement in training performance, 50% better inference, and 40% better efficiency than Nvidia's H100 processors. The new AI accelerator is presented as a PCIe Gen 5 dual-slot add-in card with a 600 W TDP or an OAM module with 900 W. The PCIe card has the same peak 1,835 TeraFLOPS of FP8 performance as the OAM module despite a 300 W lower TDP. The PCIe version works as a group of four per system, while the OAM HL-325L modules can be run in an eight-accelerator configuration per server. This likely will result in a lower sustained performance, given the lower TDP, but it confirms that the same silicon is used, just finetuned with a lower frequency. Built on TSMC's N5 5 nm node, the AI accelerator features 64 Tensor Cores, delivering double the FP8 and quadruple FP16 performance over the previous generation Gaudi 2.

The Gaudi 3 AI chip comes with 128 GB of HBM2E with 3.7 TB/s of bandwidth and 24 200 Gbps Ethernet NICs, with dual 400 Gbps NICs used for scale-out. All of that is laid out on 10 tiles that make up the Gaudi 3 accelerator, which you can see pictured below. There is 96 MB of SRAM split between two compute tiles, which acts as a low-level cache that bridges data communication between Tensor Cores and HBM memory. Intel also announced support for the new performance-boosting standardized MXFP4 data format and is developing an AI NIC ASIC for Ultra Ethernet Consortium-compliant networking. The Gaudi 3 supports clusters of up to 8192 cards, coming from 1024 nodes comprised of systems with eight accelerators. It is on track for volume production in Q3, offering a cost-effective alternative to NVIDIA accelerators with the additional promise of a more open ecosystem. More information and a deeper dive can be found in the Gaudi 3 Whitepaper.

NVIDIA today announced a new wave of networking switches, the X800 series, designed for massive-scale AI. The world's first networking platforms capable of end-to-end 800 Gb/s throughput, NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and NVIDIA Spectrum -X800 Ethernet push the boundaries of networking performance for computing and AI workloads. They feature software that further accelerates AI, cloud, data processing and HPC applications in every type of data center, including those that incorporate the newly released NVIDIA Blackwell architecture-based product lineup.

"NVIDIA Networking is central to the scalability of our AI supercomputing infrastructure," said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA X800 switches are end-to-end networking platforms that enable us to achieve trillion-parameter-scale generative AI essential for new AI infrastructures."

Senao Networks, a leading network solution provider, proudly announces its launch of SX904 SmartNIC based on the Intel NetSec Accelerator Reference Design. This cutting-edge NIC, harnessing the power of PCIe Gen 4 technology and fueled by the Intel Xeon D processor, sets an unprecedented standard in high-performance network computing. Senao will showcase a system demonstration at the Intel booth during the upcoming MWC in Barcelona. As transformative shift in networking edge, enterprises are increasingly leaning on scalable edge infrastructure. In order to cater the demands of workloads, low latency, local data processing, and robust security, SX904 marks a significant leap forward.

The combination of Intel XeonD processor, PCIe Gen 4 technology, dual 25 Gbps SFP28 support, and DDR4 ECC memory support enables the SX904 to achieve unparalleled data transfer rates and maximum bandwidth utilization, ideal for modern server architectures. It provides higher performance from the latest Intel Xeon D processor and Intel Ethernet Controller E810 and supports the latest Intel Platform Firmware Resilience, BMC, and TPM 2.0. SX904 enables the seamless offload of applications optimized for Intel architecture with zero changes, optimizing performance transmission effortlessly into an Intel-based server in PCIe add-in-card form factor.

NAS major Synology showcased its latest consumer NAS, personal cloud, and surveillance solutions at the 2024 International CES. Starting things off are the company's latest TC500 and BC500 high-resolution wired cameras; and the CC400W wireless cameras, enhanced with AI. This may sound nebulous, but upon detecting movement, the cameras automatically move to zoom in on faces or vehicle license plates, and automatically dial up video resolution and probably bitrate (image quality). The wired cameras come with 5 MP sensors, while the wireless ones have 4 MP (capable of 1440p @ 30 FPS). Each of these comes with a dark light that can illuminate up to 30 m. They also come with microSD slots, to in the event of network failures, recording continues onto a memory card. You don't need a Synology Surveillance Station device license to use these.

Moving on to the stuff Synology is best known for, NAS, and we have the upgraded DiskStation DS1823xs+, an 8-bay business grade NAS with a combined RW throughput of 3100 MB/s reads, with 2600 MB/s writes; over 173,000 IOPS random reads, and over 80,800 IOPS random writes. The main networking interface is a 10 GbE, but with an additional PCIe Gen 3 x4 slot to drop in more NICs. The NAS can pair with DX517 expansion units over USB 3.1 to scale up to 18 drives. The DS423+ is a compact 4-bay NAS powered by a Celeron J4125 quad-core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and room for two M.2-2280 NVMe SSDs besides the four 3.5-inch HDDs. The maximum rated throughput is still around 226 MB/s, but the main networking interfaces are two 10 GbE. The DS224+ is nearly the same device, but with just two 3.5-inch bays, and two 2.5 GbE interfaces.

Today, IBM introduced the new IBM Storage Scale System 6000, a cloud-scale global data platform designed to meet today's data intensive and AI workload demands, and the latest offering in the IBM Storage for Data and AI portfolio.

For the seventh consecutive year and counting, IBM is a 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Leader, recognized for its vision and execution. The new IBM Storage Scale System 6000 seeks to build on IBM's leadership position with an enhanced high performance parallel file system designed for data intensive use-cases. It provides up to 7M IOPs and up to 256 GB/s throughput for read only workloads per system in a 4U (four rack units) footprint.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today launched the new QXG-10G2SF-X710 10GbE network expansion card. Equipped with the advanced Intel Ethernet Controller X710-BM2, this PCIe Gen 3 card (compatible with PCIe Gen 2) can be installed into a QNAP NAS or Windows /Linux PC, instantly augmenting connectivity with two high-speed 10GbE ports.

Featuring a low-noise fanless design, the QXG-10G2SF-X710 comes with two 10GbE SFP+ (10G/1G) network ports. Users can utilize SMB Multichannel or Port Trunking to combine bandwidth, providing up to 20 Gbps of data transfer potential, thereby accelerating large file sharing and intensive data transmission. The QXG-10G2SF-X710 also supports SR-IOV that enhances network resource allocation for VMware virtualization applications, reducing network bandwidth consumption and significantly lowering CPU usage for virtual machine servers (hypervisors).

ASUS, a global infrastructure solution provider, is excited to announce its participation in the 2023 OCP Global Summit, which is taking place from October 17-19, 2023, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. The prestigious annual event brings together industry leaders, innovators and decision-makers from around the world to explore and discuss the latest advancements in open infrastructure and cloud technologies, providing a perfect stage for ASUS to unveil its latest cutting-edge products.

The ASUS theme for the OCP Global Summit is Solutions beyond limits—ASUS empowers AI, cloud, telco and more. We will showcase an array of products:

Inventec, a global leader in high-powered servers headquartered in Taiwan, is launching its cutting-edge C805G6 server for data centers based on AMD's newest 4th Gen EPYC platform—a major innovation in computing power that provides double the operating efficiency of previous platforms. These innovations are timely, as the industry worldwide faces converse challenges—on one hand, a growing need to reduce carbon footprints and power consumption, while, on the other hand, the push for ever higher computing power and performance for AI. In fact, in 2022 MIT found that improving a machine learning model tenfold will require a 10,000-fold increase in computational requirements.

Addressing both pain points, George Lin, VP of Business Unit VI, Inventec Enterprise Business Group (Inventec EBG) notes that, "Our latest C805G6 data center solution represents an innovation both for the present and the future, setting the standard for performance, energy efficiency, and security while delivering top-notch hardware for powering AI workloads."

Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and an industry leader in high-performance servers, server motherboards, and workstations, today announced two new workstation motherboards, GIGABYTE MW83-RP0 and MW53-HP0, built to support the Intel Xeon W-3400 or Intel Xeon W-2400 desktop workstation processors. The new CPU platform, developed on the Intel W790 chipset, is the first workstation platform in the market that supports both DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 technology, and this platform excels at demanding applications such as complex 3D CAD, AI development, simulations, 3D rendering, and more.

The new generation of Intel "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon W-3400 & W-2400 series processors adds some significant benefits to its workstation processors when compared to the prior gen of "Ice Lake" Xeon W-3300 processors. Like its predecessor, the new Xeon processors support up to 4 TB of 8-channel memory; however, the new Xeon CPUs have moved to DDR5, which is incredibly advantageous because of the big jump in memory bandwidth performance. Second, higher CPU performance across most workloads, partially due to the higher CPU core count and higher clock speeds. As mentioned before, the new Xeon processors support PCIe Gen 5 devices and speeds for higher throughput between CPU and devices such as GPU.

Yesterday, Intel reported that the company experienced one of the most challenging quarters and year overall revenue results, which led the company's share price to plummet and erase almost 10 billion dollars from its market cap. Amid the economic downtrend, the company is preparing to axe unnecessary developments and research costs that it would get in low-margin markets. Today, this has been reflected in the company's network switch business and the RISC-V pathfinder program. In 2019, the company acquired Barefoot Networks, which ended up in a line of Tofino series of standalone network switches. Apparently, this has been a low-margin or unprofitable business for Intel. "NEX continues to do well and is a core part of our strategic transformation, but we will end future investments in our network switching product line, while still fully supporting existing products and customers," noted Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, adding, "Since my return, we have exited seven businesses, providing in excess of $1.5 billion in savings". Intel NICs are not affected, and the company's investments in other networking businesses continue.

Additionally, the company is also doing a shutdown of its RISC-V Pathfinder program. Thanks to Yusuke Ohara, who questioned Intel's Pathfinder for RISC-V program support, we have information that the company is discontinuing the program "effective immediately." The support also advises that Intel will not provide additional advancements or bug fixes, so everyone should consult 3rd parties for any software and development.

Montage Technology, a leading data processing and interconnect IC design company, announced today that its PCIe 5.0/CXL 2.0 Retimer has successfully achieved mass production. This chip is a key upgrade based on Montage's PCIe 4.0 Retimer, providing a stable and reliable PCIe 5.0 and CXL 2.0 interconnect solution with high bandwidth and low latency for the cloud and high-performance computing market.

Montage's PCIe 5.0/CXL 2.0 Retimer employs advanced signal conditioning technologies to improve signal integrity and increase the effective transmission distance of high-speed signals. Compliant with relevant PCI-SIG and CXL specifications, the chip meets mainstream package requirements, supports transfer rate up to 32 GT/s, and takes the lead in supporting ultra-low transmission latency of less than 5 ns. The chip supports various complex system topologies such as SRIS and Retimer cascading, offering an ideal solution to address the PCIe/CXL signal integrity challenges in next-generation servers, enterprise storage, and AI acceleration systems. The PCIe 5.0/CXL 2.0 Retimer has passed extensive interoperability testing with a variety of compute, storage and networking products, such as CPU, PCIe switches, SSDs, GPUs and NICs, thus laying a solid foundation for the large-scale deployment of cloud computing and data centers.

Today AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced its collaboration with the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) on the launch of ESnet6, the newest generation of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) high-performance network dedicated to science. AMD worked closely with ESnet since 2018 to integrate powerful adaptive computing for the smart and programmable network nodes of ESnet6. ESnet6's extreme scale packet monitoring system uses AMD Alveo U280 FPGA-based network-attached accelerator cards at the core network switching nodes. This will enable high-touch packet processing and help improve the accuracy of network monitoring and management to enhance performance. The programmable hardware allows for new capabilities to be added for continuous innovation in the network.

In order to customize AMD Alveo U280 2x100Gb/s accelerators as network interface cards (NIC) for ESnet6, the OpenNIC overlay - developed by AMD - was used to provide standard network-interface and host-attachment hardware, allowing novel and experimental networking functions to be implemented easily on the Alveo card. OpenNIC has since been open-sourced after being successfully used and evolved by ESnet, as well as various leading academic research groups. Also important for rapid innovation by non-hardware experts was the use of the AMD VitisNetP4 development tools for compiling the P4 packet processing language to FPGA hardware.

AMD Alveo U280 cards, using OpenNIC and VitisNetP4, are being deployed on every node of the ESnet6 network. The high-touch approach based on FPGA-accelerated processing allows every packet in the ESnet6 network to be monitored at extremely high transfer rates to enable deep insights into the behavior of the network, as well as helping to rapidly detect and correct problems and hot spots in the network. The Alveo U280 card with OpenNIC platform also supplies the adaptability to allow the continuous roll-out of new capabilities to the end user community as needs evolve over the lifetime of ESnet6.

In response to rising demand for increased bandwidth of network traffic, NEXCOM, a leading supplier of network appliances, has released a compact single-port 200GbE network interface card (NIC). NL 110FM-OS leverages the award-winning NVIDIA ConnectX -6 Dx SmartNIC silicon and a PCIe Gen4 interface that doubles the speed of data transfer, compared with the previous generation PCIe standard. The network connection is enabled through one QSFP56 port to utilize double-bit PAM4 data transmission, and the NIC card is compatible with NEXCOM's latest rackmount network appliances.

The sheer volume of data traveling over the IT network leaves service providers no other choice but to adjust to the new reality. One of the ways to solve the problem is to increase the number of servers and another is to migrate to more compact solutions based on the latest technologies. The first method will require purchasing additional servers, leading to maintenance personnel expansion and energy consumption growth, whereas the second method is simply to increase the bandwidth of existing network nodes. This latter option provides a greener solution and should be preferable for all CSPs whether or not they have environmental concerns in reducing their carbon footprint.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today launched the TS-h1290FX NAS. Providing QNAP's first PCIe 4.0 and U.2 NVMe/SATA all-flash NAS in a tower form factor, the TS-h1290FX excels in the most demanding work environments such as collaborative high-resolution video workflows. Featuring AMD EPYC 8/16-core processors, built-in 25 GbE and 10GbE connectivity, PCIe Gen 4 expansion, and up to petabyte-scale storage capacity, the TS-h1290FX provides up to 816K/318K iSCSI 4K random read/write IOPS for tackling data-intensive and latency-sensitive applications, such as large media file transfer, real-time editing of 4K/8K media, and virtualization applications.

"Modern businesses and studios shouldn't need to dedicate entire rooms to accommodate hot and loud servers, and that's where the TS-h1290FX comes in. Contained within a unique tower form factor and utilizing quiet cooling is exceptional performance driven by a server-grade processor, all-flash U.2 NVMe SSD storage, and QNAP's enterprise-grade QuTS hero operating system," said Jason Hsu, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "the TS-h1290FX is a remarkable storage solution that provides exceptional power to deal with the modern demands of businesses and studios - including high-resolution media editing and online collaborative workflows."

L7 Defense Ltd., a pioneering developer of AI-based cybersecurity solutions, announced today that it has successfully completed the integration of its API security solution Ammune with the NVIDIA BlueField-2 SmartNIC. The integration elevates the Kubernetes nodes' security posture with maximum "zero trust" in-and-out traffic protection. Furthermore, it does not interfere with the day-to-day efficiency of serving applications. Installed on BlueField-2, the Ammune real-time AI workload is offloaded to the BlueField-2 DPU, reducing nodes' CPU usage for security to the essential minimum.

"Thanks to the successful integration, the server CPU utilization with the BlueField DPU was reduced by almost a factor of 8 in cases of high traffic analysis, in comparison to CPU utilization without the DPU," said Dr. Doron Chema, L7 Defense's CEO. "Ammune is a pure AI product. The real-time AI security agent is going to be further accelerated by more BlueField functionality. The Ammune analytical near-real-time AI unit will gain more acceleration with the NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity AI application framework in the near future."

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today launched new enterprise-grade rackmount NAS model, the TS-h1886XU-RP R2 NAS which runs on QuTS hero, a ZFS-based file system. Powered by Intel Xeon D-1622 processor and 32 GB DDR4 Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory, the TS-h1886XU-RP R2 delivers reliable server-grade performance to help enterprises tackle modern business IT challenges, including high-speed centralized file storage, virtualization, backup, disaster recovery, and cloud storage gateways.

"The TS-h1886XU-RP R2 provides enterprises with a high-performance cost-effective 10GbE NAS. Compared to its predecessor, it has four 2.5GbE ports, making file transfer and information sharing more efficient. The TS-h1886XU-RP R2 is fully equipped to support virtualization applications, remote backup and disaster recovery, cloud storage gateways, and security management to maximize the efficiency and value of enterprise IT," said Jerry Deng, product manager of QNAP.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, introduces the T12-423 12-bay professional compact NAS. Designed for small-sized and medium-sized businesses, the T12-423 comes equipped with a more powerful and efficient Intel Celeron quad-core processor for high-speed transmission and virtualization applications.

The TerraMaster T12-423 has 12 bays that support 3.5" HDDs and 2.5" SSD/HDDs, up to 240 TB of internal raw storage capacity. It has two M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs for SSD caching. This TNAS comes with 8 GB DDR4 SODIMM memory, upgradeable up to 32 GB (2x 16 GB) with its two SODIMM slots. It is also equipped with two 2.5GbE NICs with Link Aggregation support.

NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA Quantum-2, the next generation of its InfiniBand networking platform, which offers the extreme performance, broad accessibility and strong security needed by cloud computing providers and supercomputing centers.

The most advanced end-to-end networking platform ever built, NVIDIA Quantum-2 is a 400 Gbps InfiniBand networking platform that consists of the NVIDIA Quantum-2 switch, the ConnectX-7 network adapter, the BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU) and all the software that supports the new architecture.

MediaTek today unveiled its new Filogic connectivity family with the introduction of the Filogic 830 Wi-Fi 6/6E system-on-chip (SoC) and Filogic 630 Wi-Fi 6E network interface card (NIC) solutions. MediaTek's new Filogic series of high-performance Wi-Fi 6/6E chipsets provide reliable connectivity, high computation capabilities and a rich set of features in highly integrated, power-efficient designs.

"The MediaTek Filogic series ushers in a new era of smart Wi-Fi solutions with extreme speeds, low latency and superb power efficiency for seamless, always connected experiences," said Alan Hsu, Corporate Vice President & General Manager, Intelligent Connectivity at MediaTek. "These new chipsets provide best-in-class features with highly integrated designs for the next generation of premium broadband, enterprise and retail Wi-Fi solutions."

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, launches the U12 rackmount enterprise cloud storage server equipped with a powerful quad-core Intel Xeon processor.TheTerraMaster U12 is a 12-bay networked storage server with high scalability. The U12 is designed to meet the requirements of enterprise virtualizations, data-intensive applications, and service continuity.

The new TerraMaster U12 Series rackmount storage server is the ideal solution for business cloud storage servers, providing high-speed data storage for multiple sharing users. The latest TerraMaster U12 rackmount server features an upgraded processor, up to a quad-core Intel Xeon, and 8 GB of DDR4 memory that's upgradeable to 64 GB maximum. The rackmount server also comes with two PCIe X16 Gen3 slots offering upgrade options such as 10 GbE NIC cards and RAID cards. Also, users can configure and upgrade the CPU and memory to enhance performance as required.