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.

Micron Technology, a leader in innovative data center solutions, today announced it has achieved its qualification sample milestone for the Micron CZ120 memory expansion modules using Compute Express Link (CXL). Micron is the first in the industry to achieve this milestone, which accelerates the adoption of CXL solutions within the data center to tackle the growing memory challenges stemming from existing data-intensive workloads and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads.

Using a new and emerging CXL standard, the CZ120 required substantial hardware testing for reliability, quality and performance across CPU providers and OEMs, along with comprehensive software testing for compatibility and compliance with OS and hypervisor vendors. This achievement reflects the collaboration and commitment across the data center ecosystem to validate the advantages of CXL memory. By testing the combined products for interoperability and compatibility across hardware and software, the Micron CZ120 memory expansion modules satisfy the rigorous standards for reliability, quality and performance required by customers' data centers.

In a interesting discovery that sent a series of shockwaves through the Linux community, Andres Freund, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, located a malicious backdoor in the widely used compression tool called "xz Utils." The backdoor, introduced in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of the utility, can break the robust encryption provided by the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, allowing unauthorized access to affected systems. What Andres Freund found is that the latest version of xz Utils is taking 0.5 seconds in SSH on his system, while the older system with the older version took 0.1 seconds for simple processing, prompting the user to investigate and later send a widespread act for caution. While there are no confirmed reports of the backdoored versions being incorporated into production releases of major Linux distributions, the incident has raised serious concerns among users and developers alike.

Red Hat and Debian, two of the most well-known Linux distribution developers, have reported that their recently published beta releases, including Fedora 40, Fedora Rawhide, and Debian testing, unstable, and experimental distributions, used at least one of the affected versions of xz Utils. According to Red Hat officials, the first signs of the backdoor were introduced in a February 23 update, which added obfuscated (unreadable) code to xz Utils. A subsequent update the following day introduced functions for deobfuscating the code and injecting it into code libraries during the utility's update process. The malicious code has been cleverly hidden only in the tarballs, which target upstream releases of Linux distributions.

Chinese e-commerce and cloud giant Alibaba announced its plans to launch a server-grade RISC-V processor later this year, and it showcased a RISC-V-powered laptop running an open-source operating system. The announcements were made by Alibaba's research division, the Damo Academy, at the recent Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference in Shenzhen. The upcoming server-class processor called the Xuantie C930, is expected to be launched by the end of 2024. While specific details about the chip have not been disclosed, it is anticipated to cater to AI and server workloads. This development is part of Alibaba's ongoing efforts to expand its RISC-V portfolio and reduce reliance on foreign chip technologies amidst US export restrictions. To complement the C930, Alibaba is also preparing a Xuantie 907 matrix processing unit for AI, which could be an IP block inside an SoC like the C930 or an SoC of its own.

In addition to the C930, Alibaba showcased the RuyiBOOK, a laptop powered by the company's existing T-Head C910 processor. The C910, previously designed for edge servers, AI, and telecommunications applications, has been adapted for use in laptops. Strangely, the RuyiBOOK laptop runs on the openEuler operating system, an open-source version of Huawei's EulerOS, which is based on Red Hat Linux. The laptop also features Alibaba's collaboration suite, Ding Talk, and the open-source office software Libre Office, demonstrating its potential to cater to the needs of Chinese knowledge workers and consumers without relying on foreign software. Zhang Jianfeng, president of the Damo Academy, emphasized the increasing demand for new computing power and the potential for RISC-V to enter a period of "application explosion." Alibaba plans to continue investing in RISC-V research and development and fostering collaboration within the industry to promote innovation and growth in the RISC-V ecosystem, lessening reliance on US-sourced technology.

ZOTAC Technology Limited, a global leader in innovative technology solutions, expands its product portfolio with the GPU Server Series. The first series of products in ZOTAC's Enterprise lineup offers organizations affordable and high-performance computing solutions for a wide range of demanding applications, from core-to-edge inferencing and data visualization to model training, HPC modeling, and simulation.

The ZOTAC series of GPU Servers comes in a diverse range of form factors and configurations, featuring both Tower Workstations and Rack Mount Servers, as well as both Intel and AMD processor configurations. With support for up to 10 GPUs, modular design for easier access to internal hardware, a high space-to-performance ratio, and industry-standard features like redundant power supplies and extensive cooling options, ZOTAC's enterprise solutions can ensure optimal performance and durability, even under sustained intense workloads.

IBM has announced IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, extending the latest performance, security and AI capabilities of LinuxONE to small and medium sized businesses and within new data center environments. The pre-configured rack mount system is designed to offer cost savings and to remove client guess work when spinning up workloads quickly and getting started with the platform to address new and traditional use cases such as digital assets, medical imaging with AI, and workload consolidation.

Building an integrated hybrid cloud strategy for today and years to come
As businesses move their products and services online quickly, oftentimes, they are left with a hybrid cloud environment created by default, with siloed stacks that are not conducive to alignment across businesses or the introduction of AI. In a recent IBM IBV survey, 84% of executives asked acknowledged their enterprise struggles in eliminating silo-to-silo handoffs. And 78% of responding executives said that an inadequate operating model impedes successful adoption of their multicloud platform. With the pressure to accelerate and scale the impact of data and AI across the enterprise - and improve business outcomes - another approach that organizations can take is to more carefully identify which workloads should be on-premises vs in the cloud.

It's been one year since IBM integrated Red Hat storage product roadmaps and teams into IBM Storage. In that time, organizations have been faced with unprecedented data challenges to scale AI due to the rapid growth of data in more locations and formats, but with poorer quality. Helping clients combat this problem has meant modernizing their infrastructure with cutting-edge solutions as a part of their digital transformations. Largely, this involves delivering consistent application and data storage across on-premises and cloud environments. Also, crucially, this includes helping clients adopt cloud-native architectures to realize the benefits of public cloud like cost, speed, and elasticity. Formerly Red Hat Ceph—now IBM Storage Ceph—a state-of-the-art open-source software-defined storage platform, is a keystone in this effort.

Software-defined storage (SDS) has emerged as a transformative force when it comes to data management, offering a host of advantages over traditional legacy storage arrays including extreme flexibility and scalability that are well-suited to handle modern uses cases like generative AI. With IBM Storage Ceph, storage resources are abstracted from the underlying hardware, allowing for dynamic allocation and efficient utilization of data storage. This flexibility not only simplifies management but also enhances agility in adapting to evolving business needs and scaling compute and capacity as new workloads are introduced. This self-healing and self-managing platform is designed to deliver unified file, block, and object storage services at scale on industry standard hardware. Unified storage helps provide clients a bridge from legacy applications running on independent file or block storage to a common platform that includes those and object storage in a single appliance.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that for the first time in the industry, it has successfully verified Compute Express Link (CXL) memory operations in a real user environment with open-source software provider Red Hat, leading the expansion of its CXL ecosystem. Due to the exponential growth of data throughput and memory requirements for emerging fields like generative AI, autonomous driving and in-memory databases (IMDBs), the demand for systems with greater memory bandwidth and capacity is also increasing. CXL is a unified interface standard that connects various processors, such as CPUs, GPUs and memory devices through a PCIe interface that can serve as a solution for limitations in existing systems in terms of speed, latency and expandability.

"Samsung has been working closely with a wide range of industry partners in areas from software, data centers and servers to chipset providers, and has been at the forefront of building up the CXL memory ecosystem," said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. "Our CXL partnership with Red Hat is an exemplary case of collaboration between advanced software and hardware, which will enrich and accelerate the CXL ecosystem as a whole."

To help bridge the growing gap between modern systems and the legacy technology still in use around the world, global industrial computing specialists, OnLogic (www.onlogic.com), have released the Helix 511 Edge Computer. Designed for use in manufacturing, automation, energy management, and other edge and IoT applications, the Helix 511 easily interfaces with on-site systems thanks to a broad selection of modern and legacy connectivity options.

"We frequently have conversations with customers who are struggling to update their technology infrastructure simply because they can't connect existing systems to newer, more powerful and more capable devices," says OnLogic Product Manager, Hunter Golden. "The embedded computing space has traditionally lagged behind when it comes to adopting new technologies. We want to shift that paradigm while still allowing innovators to access and exchange data with their existing equipment. In many cases, you don't need to rip and replace everything, you just need a Helix 511."

In response to the increasing demand for powerful computing that can be relied on in a wide range of even the most challenging installation environments, leading industrial computing manufacturer and solution provider, OnLogic (www.onlogic.com), has unveiled their Helix 401 fanless industrial computer. The compact device is designed for use in edge computing, industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT), and many other emerging applications and will make its public debut at Embedded World 2023.

"You may never see them, but industrial computers are everywhere, working diligently to power technology solutions of every shape and size. These systems need to be small and reliable while still being just as powerful as high-end desktop machines," says Mike Walsh, Senior Product Manager at OnLogic. "The Helix 401 balances size and performance while providing a wide range of configuration possibilities to help users tailor it to their specific application. It's small enough to fit in your hand, similar in size to Intel's popular NUC, but capable enough to drive advanced automation solutions and power the next great smart agriculture, building automation or energy management innovation."

For more than a decade, Intel and its partners have been on a mission to virtualize the world's networks, from the core to the RAN (radio access network) and out to the edge, moving them from fixed-function hardware onto programmable, software-defined platforms, making networks more agile while driving down their complexity and cost.

Now operators are looking to cross the next chasm in delivering cloud-native functionality for automating, managing and responding to an increasingly diverse mix of data and services, providing organizations with the intelligence needed at the edge of their operations. Today, Intel announced a range of products and solutions driving this transition and broad industry support from leading operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs).

On Day 2 of Intel Innovation, Intel illustrated how its efforts and investments to foster an open ecosystem catalyze community innovation, from silicon to systems to apps and across all levels of the software stack. Through an expanding array of platforms, tools and solutions, Intel is focused on helping developers become more productive and more capable of realizing their potential for positive social good. The company introduced new tools to support developers in artificial intelligence, security and quantum computing, and announced the first customers of its new Project Amber attestation service.

"We are making good on our software-first strategy by empowering an open ecosystem that will enable us to collectively and continuously innovate," said Intel Chief Technology Officer Greg Lavender. "We are committed members of the developer community and our breadth and depth of hardware and software assets facilitate the scaling of opportunities for all through co-innovation and collaboration."

The demand for data is insatiable, from 5G to the cloud to smart cities. As a society we want more autonomy, information to fuel our decisions and habits, and connection - to people, stories, and experiences.

To address these demands, the cloud infrastructure of tomorrow will need to handle the coming data explosion and the effective processing of evermore complex workloads … all while increasing power efficiency and minimizing carbon footprint. It's why the industry is increasingly looking to the performance, power efficiency, specialized processing and workload acceleration enabled by Arm Neoverse to redefine and transform the world's computing infrastructure.

Samsung Electronics and Red Hat today announced a broad collaboration on software technologies for next-generation memory solutions. The partnership will focus on the development and validation of open source software for existing and emerging memory and storage products, including NVMe SSDs; CXL memory; computational memory/storage (HBM-PIM, Smart SSDs) and fabrics — in building an expansive ecosystem for closely integrated memory hardware and software. The exponential growth of data driven by AI, AR and the fast-approaching metaverse is bringing disruptive changes to memory designs, requiring more sophisticated software technologies that better link with the latest hardware advancements.

"Samsung and Red Hat will make a concerted effort to define and standardize memory software solutions that embrace evolving server and memory hardware, while building a more robust memory ecosystem," said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President and Head of the Memory Application Engineering Team at Samsung Electronics. "We will invite partners from across the IT industry to join us in expanding the software-hardware memory ecosystem to create greater customer value."

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the new IBM Power E1080 server, the first in a new family of servers based on the new IBM Power10 processor, designed specifically for hybrid cloud environments. The IBM Power10-equipped E1080 server is engineered to be one of the most secured server platforms and is designed to help clients operate a secured, frictionless hybrid cloud experience across their entire IT infrastructure.

The IBM Power E1080 server is launching at a critical time for IT. As organizations around the world continue to adapt to unpredictable changes in consumer behaviors and needs, they need a platform that can deliver their applications and insights securely where and when they need them. The IBM Institute of Business Value's 2021 CEO Study found that, of the 3,000 CEOs surveyed, 56% emphasized the need to enhance operational agility and flexibility when asked what they'll most aggressively pursue over the next two to three years.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced an intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology. The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. As the first project governed by the new foundation, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The Open 3D Engine enables developers and content creators to build 3D experiences unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events. A developer preview of O3DE is available on GitHub today. For more information and/or to contribute, please visit: https://o3de.org

3D engines are used to create a range of virtual experiences, including games and simulations, by providing capabilities such as 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing. Many developers are seeking ways to build their intellectual property on top of an open source engine where the roadmap is highly visible, openly governed, and collaborative to the community as a whole. More developers look to be able to create or augment their current technological foundations with highly collaborative solutions that can be used in any development environment. O3DE introduces a new ecosystem for developers and content creators to innovate, build, share, and distribute immersive 3D worlds that will inspire their users with rich experiences that bring the imaginations of their creators to life.

More than 250 million computers are sold each year and NetMarketShare reports that 2.87 percent - roughly 7.2 million users - are using those computers to run Linux. Once thought of as a niche IT crowd, this user base of data scientists, developers, application engineers, scientists and more is growing - stepping into sought-after roles across multiple industries and becoming essential within their companies. Now, I'm excited to share Lenovo is moving to certify the full workstation portfolio for top Linux distributions from Ubuntu and Red Hat - every model, every configuration.

While many users prefer to customize their own machines - either on hardware without an OS or by wiping an existing client OS, then configuring and installing Linux - this can raise uncertainty with system stability, restricted performance, compatibility, end-user productivity and even IT support for devices. Now that these users are making their way out of the proverbial shadows and onto the enterprise floor, the demand is high for an out-of-the-box solution that removes the barrier for deployment of enterprise-grade hardware within a Linux software ecosystem.

Lenovo's ageless ThinkPad line of business laptops have been known to be fiercely Wintel, but the company is diversifying both its hardware- and software- feature-sets, beginning with AMD "Picasso" powered ThinkPad T-series models, and now a big announcement along the sidelines of the Red Hat Summit - ThinkPads with Fedora 32 Workstation operating system pre-installed.

A new line of upcoming ThinkPads will ship with Fedora 32 Workstation pre-installed, along with preparation for the end-user to install proprietary software, such as NVIDIA GeForce official drivers, at first startup. Out of the box, the ThinkPads will include open-source software, pointing to OSS repositories. Fedora is an open-source (out of the box) free-software derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and includes a flavor optimized for desktops, notebooks, and workstations, Fedora Workstation. Since the announcement comes from the Fedora team, we don't have hardware specifications of the ThinkPads, yet.A video presentation by the Fedora Project follows.

Red Hat Systemd (system and service manager) lead developer Lennart Poettering discovered that AMD A6-6310 "Beema" SoC that's popular among low-cost notebooks, has a faulty implementation of the RdRand random-number generation instruction. The processor's hardware random number generator (RNG) loses "randomness" after the machine resumes from a suspended state (i.e. waking up the notebook from sleep by opening its lid while it's powered on). Modern computers rely on RNGs for "entropy," critical to generation of unpredictable keys on the fly for SSL. However, the entropy source needn't be hardware, and isn't so by default. Software RNGs exist, and by default the Linux kernel does not use RdRand to generate entropy. Windows is not known to use RdRand for basic ACPI functions such as suspend/resume; however a faulty hardware RNG is not without implications for the platform, and applications that run on it.

Users on GitHub and Bugzilla report that with this bug, you cannot make a machine suspend a second time after waking it up from a suspended state, if your kernel uses RdRand. Commit cc83d51 to Systemd introduced optional randomness generation based on RdRand instruction. So, if RdRand instruction is present, it is used to generate UUIDs for invocation IDs. Michael Larabel of Phoronix comments that the RdRand bug is only found on older generations of AMD processors, "Excavator" and older; and does not affect the latest "Zen" processors. This bug report chronicles what's wrong with RdRand on the affected processors, as does this Linux kernel bugzilla thread. By avoiding RdRand usage on the system as part of generating a UUID, the reported systemd issue no longer happens. Red Hat is working on a solution to this bug.

IBM and Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source cloud software, announced today that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.

"The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market," said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. "IBM will become the world's #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability affecting all modern Intel Core and Xeon processors, which is an exploit of a performance optimization feature called "lazy FP state restore," which can be exploited to sniff out sensitive information, including cryptographic keys used to protect sensitive data. The flaw affects all x86 micro-architectures by Intel, "Sandy Bridge" and later.

The "lazy FP state restore" feature is a set of commands used to temporarily store or restore the FPU states of applications running "lazily" (as opposed to "eagerly"). Red Hat put out an advisory stating that numbers held in FPU registers could be used to access sensitive information about the activities of other applications, including encryption keys. Intel began working with popular OS vendors to quickly roll out software patches against the vulnerability.

A group of leading technology companies today announced the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today's bottlenecks. The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx.

Modern computer systems have been built around the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast but volatile. As new storage class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal. The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low latency storage class memory, and demand for rack scale resource pools require a new approach to data access.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today will make the first public demonstration of Apache Hadoop running on an ARM Cortex-A57-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor. In a technical session at the JavaOne conference to be delivered this afternoon by AMD corporate fellow Leendert van Doorn, the company will show how the expanding AMD Opteron A-Series server software ecosystem now includes Hadoop, the Java-based framework for storage and large-scale data processing. In addition, Henrik Stahl, vice president, Java product management and Internet of Things at Oracle, will join van Doorn on stage to discuss Oracle's support for AMD's 64-bit ARM server architecture.

Hadoop, a distributed processing technology used primarily for big data analysis, is a rapidly expanding market expected to reach upward of $50 billion by 2020. The combination of 64-bit ARM-based servers and Hadoop is designed to accelerate the changing economics of large-scale computing by enabling distributed processing across clusters of ARM-based servers. Running on the recently announced AMD Opteron A1100 development platform, the demonstration will feature Apache Hadoop running on the Oracle JDK. Leendert will also show multiple nodes running the same demonstration using Linux environments based on Fedora technology from the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora community and the community supported OpenSUSE Project.

Red Hat Summit 2014 -- AMD today announced another major milestone in the development of its enterprise software ecosystem with the first public demonstration of its second-generation AMD Opteron X-Series APU, codenamed "Berlin," running a Linux environment based on the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored, community-driven Linux distribution, providing a familiar, enterprise class operating environment to developers and IT administrators worldwide. This is important to companies looking to transition to x86 APU servers but who are reluctant to introduce new tools and software platforms to their IT environments. This demonstration also represents a significant step forward in expanding the footprint of x86 APU accelerated performance within the data center.

AMD's premiere demonstration of "Berlin" will showcase the world's first Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) featured server APU ahead of its official launch later this year. The demonstration features advancements incorporated in "Project Sumatra" that enable Java applications to take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs) within AMD server APUs. The combination of Linux and Java on AMD APU platforms provides an ideal platform for server-based multimedia workloads and general purpose GPU compute that will help drive new levels of workload efficiency in the data center. AMD also will demonstrate software-based on OpenCL and OpenGL on "Berlin."

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced a significant upgrade to its enterprise software portfolio with a new version of its FlashSoft software for Windows Server and Linux operating systems. FlashSoft 3.2 server-side solid state caching software complements and enhances the performance of existing applications, and server and storage systems.

"Solid state storage strategies are changing the economics of data management. The challenge, however, is adding enterprise flash technology without major disruptions to ongoing IT operations," said Jeff Boles, senior analyst and director of Lab Validation Services, The Taneja Group. "SanDisk's FlashSoft software efficiently integrates solid state cache into servers without changing where data is stored or the features and capabilities of a consolidated storage approach. This 'disruptionless' approach dramatically simplifies the introduction of solid state, and allows SanDisk customers to immediately address performance challenges without changing existing storage strategies."