Today, AMD announced 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors power the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute E6 Standard shapes. 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors, the world's best server CPUs for enterprise, AI and cloud, enable OCI Compute E6 shapes to deliver up to a 2X increase in cost to performance, compared to the previous E5 instance generation based on testing by OCI.

The new OCI Compute E6 shapes build on the success of the previous E5 generation to deliver leadership performance and cost efficiency for general-purpose and compute-intensive workloads. These OCI shapes add to the selection of more than a thousand compute instances powered by AMD EPYC processors across all major cloud service providers.

Welcome Coven members, old and new. We—at Chucklefish and Robotality—are so excited to finally pull back the curtain and share a glimpse of what we've been brewing in the studio these past few years. Witchbrook has been a true labour of love, crafted by our small team here at Chucklefish (with some recent, incredible help from our friends at Robotality!). It's been a journey of hundreds of hours poured into art, music, and code, and we're beyond excited to give you a first look at the magical world of Witchbrook.

We'll also have a fresh edition of The Oracle, our in-game newspaper with a new editor at the helm, where you can catch up on the latest happenings in the sunny seaside city of Mossport, releasing in the next few days. It's your gateway to staying connected with the in-world happenings, so be sure to sign up here. Over the next few months, we'll be sharing more gameplay, details, and fun surprises. In the meantime, we'd love for you to join us and the rest of the community over on Discord. We pride ourselves on having a warm and welcoming community, and would love for folks to join us on our journey.

SoftBank Group Corp. today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company, in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.5 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Ampere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Group and retain its name. As part of the transaction, Ampere's lead investors—Carlyle and Oracle Corp.—are selling their respective positions in Ampere.

As SoftBank Group broadens its AI infrastructure investments in ventures such as Cristal intelligence and Stargate, the acquisition will help enhance SoftBank Group's capabilities in key areas and accelerate its growth initiatives. "The future of Artificial Super Intelligence requires breakthrough computing power," said Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp. "Ampere's expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision, and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the United States."

AMD's Instinct MI355X accelerators for AI workloads are gaining traction, and Oracle just became one of the bigger customers. According to Oracle's latest financial results, the company noted that it had acquired 30,000 AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators. "In Q3, we signed a multi billion dollar contract with AMD to build a cluster of 30,000 of their latest MI355X GPUs," noted Larry Ellison, adding that "And all four of the leading cloud security companies, CrowdStrike, Cyber Reason, Newfold Digital and Palo Alto, they all decided to move to the Oracle Cloud. But perhaps most importantly, Oracle has developed a new product called the AI data platform that enables our huge install base of database customers to use the latest AI models from OpenAI, XAI and Meta to analyze all of the data they have stored in their millions of existing Oracle databases. By using Oracle version 23 AI's vector capabilities, customers can automatically put all of their existing data into the vector format that is understood by AI models. This allows those AI models to learn, understand and analyze every aspect of your company or government agency, instantly unlocking the value in your data while keeping your data private and secure."

AMD's Instinct MI355X accelerator introduces the CDNA4 architecture on TSMC's N3 process node with a focus on AI workload acceleration. The chiplet-based GPU delivers 2.3 petaflops of FP16 compute and 4.6 petaflops of FP8 compute, marking a 77% performance increase over the MI300X series. The MI355X's key advancement comes through support for reduced-precision FP4 and FP6 numerical formats, enabling up to 9.2 petaflops of FP4 compute. Memory specifications include 288 GB of HBM3E across eight stacks, providing 8 TB/s of total bandwidth. Production timelines place the MI355X's market entry in the second half of 2025, continuing AMD's annual cadence for data center GPU launches. By second half, Oracle will likely prepare data center space for these GPUs and just power them on once AMD ships these accelerators.

If you're looking for innovative use of AI technology, look to the cloud. Gartner reports, "73% of respondents to the 2024 Gartner CIO and Tech Executive Survey have increased funding for AI." And IDC says that AI: "will have a cumulative global economic impact of $19.9 trillion through 2030." But end users aren't running most of those AI workloads on their own hardware. Instead, they are largely relying on cloud service providers and large technology companies to provide the infrastructure for their AI efforts. This approach makes sense since most organizations are already heavily reliant the cloud. According to O'Reilly, more than 90% of companies are using public cloud services. And they aren't moving just a few workloads to the cloud. That same report shows a 175% growth in cloud-native interest, indicating that companies are committing heavily to the cloud.

As a result of this demand for infrastructure to power AI initiatives, cloud service providers are finding it necessary to rapidly scale up their data centers. IDC predicts: "the surging demand for AI workloads will lead to a significant increase in datacenter capacity, energy consumption, and carbon emissions, with AI datacenter capacity projected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.5% through 2027." While this surge creates massive opportunities for service providers, it also introduces some challenges. Providing the computing power necessary to support AI initiatives at scale, reliably and cost-effectively is difficult. Many providers have found that deploying AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct GPUs can help them overcome those challenges. Here's a quick look at three service providers who are using AMD chips to accelerate AI advancements.

Businesses across every industry are rolling out AI services this year. For Microsoft, Oracle, Perplexity, Snap and hundreds of other leading companies, using the NVIDIA AI inference platform—a full stack comprising world-class silicon, systems and software—is the key to delivering high-throughput and low-latency inference and enabling great user experiences while lowering cost. NVIDIA's advancements in inference software optimization and the NVIDIA Hopper platform are helping industries serve the latest generative AI models, delivering excellent user experiences while optimizing total cost of ownership. The Hopper platform also helps deliver up to 15x more energy efficiency for inference workloads compared to previous generations.

AI inference is notoriously difficult, as it requires many steps to strike the right balance between throughput and user experience. But the underlying goal is simple: generate more tokens at a lower cost. Tokens represent words in a large language model (LLM) system—and with AI inference services typically charging for every million tokens generated, this goal offers the most visible return on AI investments and energy used per task. Full-stack software optimization offers the key to improving AI inference performance and achieving this goal.

On Tuesday, the newly inaugurated United States president, Donald Trump, announced a massive AI infrastructure expansion in the US called Stargate Project. Stargate is an idea that brings private investments across the US land, with up to 500 billion US dollars committed to the project over the next four years. This is single-handedly one of the most significant infrastructure projects ever planned, and this time it is all about AI and data centers. The initial phase involves deploying 100 billion US Dollars immediately, while the remaining 400 billion will be deployed periodically over the next four years. OpenAI and SoftBank are leading this project, with Softbank's CEO Masayoshi Son being the project's chairman. Major equity partners include SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. Major technology partners who will supply the know-how, planning, software, and hardware are Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI.

Leading the entire operation will be up to OpenAI, who is gaining operational lead in the project, while Softbank oversees financial planning. Interestingly, the buildout has already begun. OpenAI is currently exploring a few sites in Abilene, Texas, which includes ten 500,000 sq. ft. data centers with 20 planned for the future. Interestingly, the infrastructure expansion will most likely be present in every US state that can provide ample land and power capacity. OpenAI is looking for partners to help with the massive data centers' power, land, and construction. The most significant impact of this project will be on the power grid, which will require additional buildout and implementation of small nuclear reactors running locally nearby to satisfy the power draw from hundreds of thousands and even millions of GPUs. OpenAI is praising NVIDIA for its almost decade-long partnership, meaning that most GPUs will likely be NVIDIA-sourced.

Intel Corp. (INTC) and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group bringing together technology leaders to shape the future of the world's most widely used computing architecture. x86 is uniquely positioned to meet customers' emerging needs by delivering superior performance and seamless interoperability across hardware and software platforms. The group will focus on identifying new ways to expand the x86 ecosystem by enabling compatibility across platforms, simplifying software development, and providing developers with a platform to identify architectural needs and features to create innovative and scalable solutions for the future.

For over four decades, x86 has served as the bedrock of modern computing, establishing itself as the preferred architecture in data centers and PCs worldwide. In today's evolving landscape - characterized by dynamic AI workloads, custom chiplets, and advancements in 3D packaging and system architectures - the importance of a robust and expanding x86 ecosystem is more crucial than ever.

AMD today announced that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has chosen AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators with ROCm open software to power its newest OCI Compute Supercluster instance called BM.GPU.MI300X.8. For AI models that can comprise hundreds of billions of parameters, the OCI Supercluster with AMD MI300X supports up to 16,384 GPUs in a single cluster by harnessing the same ultrafast network fabric technology used by other accelerators on OCI. Designed to run demanding AI workloads including large language model (LLM) inference and training that requires high throughput with leading memory capacity and bandwidth, these OCI bare metal instances have already been adopted by companies including Fireworks AI.

"AMD Instinct MI300X and ROCm open software continue to gain momentum as trusted solutions for powering the most critical OCI AI workloads," said Andrew Dieckmann, corporate vice president and general manager, Data Center GPU Business, AMD. "As these solutions expand further into growing AI-intensive markets, the combination will benefit OCI customers with high performance, efficiency, and greater system design flexibility."

Oracle today announced the first zettascale cloud computing clusters accelerated by the NVIDIA Blackwell platform. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is now taking orders for the largest AI supercomputer in the cloud—available with up to 131,072 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.

"We have one of the broadest AI infrastructure offerings and are supporting customers that are running some of the most demanding AI workloads in the cloud," said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "With Oracle's distributed cloud, customers have the flexibility to deploy cloud and AI services wherever they choose while preserving the highest levels of data and AI sovereignty."

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."

TrendForce underscores that the primary momentum for server shipments this year remains with American CSPs. However, due to persistently high inflation and elevated corporate financing costs curtailing capital expenditures, overall demand has not yet returned to pre-pandemic growth levels. Global server shipments are estimated to reach approximately. 13.654 million units in 2024, an increase of about 2.05% YoY. Meanwhile, the market continues to focus on the deployment of AI servers, with their shipment share estimated at around 12.1%.

Foxconn is expected to see the highest growth rate, with an estimated annual increase of about 5-7%. This growth includes significant orders such as Dell's 16G platform, AWS Graviton 3 and 4, Google Genoa, and Microsoft Gen9. In terms of AI server orders, Foxconn has made notable inroads with Oracle and has also secured some AWS ASIC orders.

Today at the "Advancing AI" event, AMD was joined by industry leaders including Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, Arista, Broadcom and Cisco to showcase how these companies are working with AMD to deliver advanced AI solutions spanning from cloud to enterprise and PCs. AMD launched multiple new products at the event, including the AMD Instinct MI300 Series data center AI accelerators, ROCm 6 open software stack with significant optimizations and new features supporting Large Language Models (LLMs) and Ryzen 8040 Series processors with Ryzen AI.

"AI is the future of computing and AMD is uniquely positioned to power the end-to-end infrastructure that will define this AI era, from massive cloud installations to enterprise clusters and AI-enabled intelligent embedded devices and PCs," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We are seeing very strong demand for our new Instinct MI300 GPUs, which are the highest-performance accelerators in the world for generative AI. We are also building significant momentum for our data center AI solutions with the largest cloud companies, the industry's top server providers, and the most innovative AI startups ꟷ who we are working closely with to rapidly bring Instinct MI300 solutions to market that will dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation across the entire AI ecosystem."

Training generative AI models just got easier. NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing platform and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software are now available in Oracle Cloud Marketplace, making it possible for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers to access high-performance accelerated computing and software to run secure, stable and supported production AI in just a few clicks. The addition - an industry first - brings new capabilities for end-to-end development and deployment on Oracle Cloud. Enterprises can get started from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace to train models on DGX Cloud, and then deploy their applications on OCI with NVIDIA AI Enterprise.

Oracle Cloud and NVIDIA Lift Industries Into Era of AI
Thousands of enterprises around the world rely on OCI to power the applications that drive their businesses. Its customers include leaders across industries such as healthcare, scientific research, financial services, telecommunications and more. Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a catalog of solutions that offers customers flexible consumption models and simple billing. Its addition of DGX Cloud and NVIDIA AI Enterprise lets OCI customers use their existing cloud credits to integrate NVIDIA's leading AI supercomputing platform and software into their development and deployment pipelines. With DGX Cloud, OCI customers can train models for generative AI applications like intelligent chatbots, search, summarization and content generation.

GIGABYTE Technology, Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and an industry leader in high-performance servers, server motherboards, and workstations, today announced four new GIGABYTE R-series servers for AmpereOne Family of processors for cloud-native computing where high compute density per rack and power-efficiency matter.

For cloud-native computing, hyperscalers or cloud service providers (CSPs) rely on predictable high-performance, scalable infrastructure, and power efficient nodes. GIGABYTE servers running the AmpereOne Family platform achieve those expectations, but this is not the first time GIGABYTE has worked with Ampere Computing. The partnership first started in 2020 with the launch of the Ampere Altra platform. And this new family of AmpereOne processors will not supersede the Altra platform, rather it is an extension of what Arm architecture is capable of by Ampere Computing. For instance, the CPU core count goes beyond 128 cores in Altra to 136-192 cores in AmpereOne for new levels of performance and VM density. On top of that, the private L2 cache per core has doubled and there is support for DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5.

The recent development of AI models that are more capable than ever has led to a massive demand for hardware infrastructure that powers them. As the dominant player in the industry with its GPU and CPU-GPU solutions, NVIDIA has reportedly discussed leasing data center space to power its own cloud service for these AI applications. Called NVIDIA Cloud DGX, it will reportedly put the company right up against its clients, which are cloud service providers (CSPs) as well. Companies like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle actively acquire NVIDIA GPUs to power their GPU-accelerated cloud instances. According to the report, this has been developing for a few years.

Additionally, it is worth noting that NVIDIA already owns parts for its potential data center infrastructure. This includes NVIDIA DGX and HGX units, which can just be interconnected in a data center, with cloud provisioning so developers can access NVIDIA's instances. A great benefit that would attract the end-user is that NVIDIA could potentially lower the price point of its offerings, as they are acquiring GPUs for much less compared to the CSPs that receive them with a profit margin that NVIDIA imposes. This can attract potential customers, leaving hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google without a moat in the cloud game. Of course, until this project is official, we should take this information with a grain of salt.

Oracle has announced their next generation Ampere A2 Compute Instances based on the latest AmpereOne processor, with availability starting later this year. According to Oracle, the new instances will deliver up to 44% more price-performance compared to x86 offerings and are ideal for AI inference, databases, web services, media transcoding workloads and run-time language support, such as GO and Java.

In related news, several new customers including industry leading real-time video service companies 8x8 and Phenix, along with AI startups like Wallaroo, said they are migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Ampere as more and more companies seek to maximize price, performance and energy efficiency.

The Government of the Netherlands has agreed to incorporate Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in its cloud service offerings for government agencies as part of a renewal of its existing service contract with Oracle. OCI's commercial public cloud regions will enable the National Government to take advantage of the many benefits cloud computing offers, including scalability, security, flexibility, and reliable performance.

The renewal of the agreement includes a version of the standard cloud terms and conditions as well as a Data Processing Agreement based on the government's Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) of available cloud services. "This renewed agreement with Oracle marks an important milestone in our strategic collaboration," said Richard Wiersema, director operations, DICTU of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate and strategic supplier manager, Oracle for the Dutch government. "With Oracle, we as the national government have an important partner in house that helps us achieve our digital goals and enables us to meet the needs of Dutch society. The cloud plays a crucial role in meeting these objectives."

Oracle has been part of the Linux community for 25 years. Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it. Our Linux engineering team makes significant contributions to the kernel, file systems, and tools. We push all that work back to mainline so that every Linux distribution can include it. We are proud those contributions are part of the reason Linux is now so very capable, benefiting not just Oracle customers, but all users.

In 2006, we launched what is now called Oracle Linux, a RHEL compatible distribution and support offering that is used widely, and powers Oracle's engineered systems and our cloud infrastructure. We chose to be RHEL compatible because we did not want to fragment the Linux community. Our effort to remain compatible has been enormously successful. In all the years since launch, we have had almost no compatibility bugs filed. Customers and ISVs can switch to Oracle Linux from RHEL without modifying their applications, and we certify Oracle software products on RHEL even though they are built and tested on Oracle Linux only, never on RHEL.

Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison last week announced a substantial spending spree on new equipment as he prepares his business for a cloud computing service expansion that will be aimed at attracting a "new wave" of artificial intelligence (AI) companies. He made this announcement at a recent Ampere event: "This year, Oracle will buy GPUs and CPUs from three companies...We will buy GPUs from NVIDIA, and we're buying billions of dollars of those. We will spend three times that on CPUs from Ampere and AMD. We still spend more money on conventional compute." His cloud division is said to be gearing up to take on larger competition—namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. Oracle is hoping to outmaneuver these major players by focusing on the construction of fast networks, capable of shifting around huge volumes of data—the end goal being the creation of its own ChatGPT-type model.

Ellison's expressed that he was leaving Team Blue behind—Oracle has invested heavily in Ampere Computing—a startup founded by ex-Intel folks: "It's a major commitment to move to a new supplier. We've moved to a new architecture...We think that this is the future. The old Intel x86 architecture, after many decades in the market, is reaching its limit." Oracle's database software has been updated to run on Ampere's Arm-based chips, Ellison posits that these grant greater power efficiency when compared to AMD and NVIDIA enterprise processors. There will be some reliance on "x86-64" going forward, since Oracle's next-gen Exadata X10M platform was recently announced with the integration of Team Red's EPYC 9004 series processors—a company spokesman stated that these server CPUs offer higher core counts and "extreme scale and dramatically improved price performance," when compared to older Intel Xeon systems.

Oracle today announced the addition of generative AI-powered capabilities within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). Supported by the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) generative AI service, the new capabilities are embedded in existing HR processes to drive faster business value, improve productivity, enhance the candidate and employee experience, and streamline HR processes.

"Generative AI is boosting productivity and unlocking a new world of skills, ideas, and creativity that can have an immediate impact in the workplace," said Chris Leone, executive vice president, applications development, Oracle Cloud HCM. "With the ability to summarize, author, and recommend content, generative AI helps to reduce friction as employees complete important HR functions. For example, with the new embedded generative AI capabilities in Oracle Cloud HCM, our customers will be able to take advantage of large language models to drastically reduce the time required to complete tasks, improve the employee experience, enhance the accuracy of workforce insights, and ultimately increase business value."

Oracle today introduced the latest generation of the Oracle Exadata platforms, the X10M, delivering unrivaled performance and availability for all Oracle Database workloads. Starting at the same price as the previous generation, these platforms support higher levels of database consolidation with more capacity and offer dramatically greater value than previous generations. Thousands of organizations, large and small, run their most critical and demanding workloads on Oracle Exadata including the majority of the largest financial, telecom, and retail businesses in the world.

"Our 12th generation Oracle Exadata X10M continues our strategy to provide customers with extreme scale, performance, and value, and we will make it available everywhere—in the cloud and on-premises," said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Mission-Critical Database Technologies, Oracle. "Customers that choose cloud deployments also benefit from running Oracle Autonomous Database, which further lowers costs by delivering true pay-per-use and eliminating database and infrastructure administration."

Ampere Computing today announced a new AmpereOne Family of processors with up to 192 single threaded Ampere cores - the highest core count in the industry. This is the first product from Ampere based on the company's new custom core, built from the ground up and leveraging the company's internal IP. CEO Renée James, who founded Ampere Computing to offer a modern alternative to the industry with processors designed specifically for both efficiency and performance in the Cloud, said there was a fundamental shift happening that required a new approach.

"Every few decades of compute there has emerged a driving application or use of performance that sets a new bar of what is required of performance," James said. "The current driving uses are AI and connected everything combined with our continued use and desire for streaming media. We cannot continue to use power as a proxy for performance in the data center. At Ampere, we design our products to maximize performance at a sustainable power, so we can continue to drive the future of the industry."

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2023 -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Foundation to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language and its community of TLA+ practitioners. Inaugural members include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and Microsoft. TLA+ is a high-level language for modeling programs and systems, especially concurrent and distributed ones. TLA+ has been successfully used by companies to verify complex software systems, reducing errors and improving reliability. The language helps detect design flaws early in the development process, saving time and resources.

TLA+ and its tools are useful for eliminating fundamental design errors, which are hard to find and expensive to correct in code. The language is based on the idea that the best way to describe things precisely is with simple mathematics. The language was invented decades ago by the pioneering computer scientist Leslie Lamport, now a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research. After years of Lamport's stewardship and Microsoft's support, TLA+ has found a new home at the Linux Foundation.

NVIDIA has recently reported its Q4 earnings, and the earnings call following the report contains exciting details about the company and its plans to open up to new possibilities. NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has stated that the company is on track to become an AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) provider, which technically makes it a cloud service provider (CSP). "Today, I want to share with you the next level of our business model to help put AI within reach of every enterprise customer. We are partnering with major service -- cloud service providers to offer NVIDIA AI cloud services, offered directly by NVIDIA and through our network of go-to-market partners, and hosted within the world's largest clouds." Said Mr. Huang, adding that "NVIDIA AI as a service offers enterprises easy access to the world's most advanced AI platform, while remaining close to the storage, networking, security and cloud services offered by the world's most advanced clouds. Customers can engage NVIDIA AI cloud services at the AI supercomputer, acceleration library software, or pretrained AI model layers."

In addition to enrolling other CSPs into the race, NVIDIA is also going to offer DGX machines on demand in the cloud. Using select CSPs, you can get access to an entire DGX and harness the computing power for AI research purposes. Mr. Huang noted "NVIDIA DGX is an AI supercomputer, and the blueprint of AI factories being built around the world. AI supercomputers are hard and time-consuming to build. Today, we are announcing the NVIDIA DGX Cloud, the fastest and easiest way to have your own DGX AI supercomputer, just open your browser. NVIDIA DGX Cloud is already available through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, and others on the way."