Intel just finalized the launch date of its 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" server processors. The company plans to launch them on January 10, 2023. The new processors will be launched at a special event dedicated to the company's various new Data Center (group) innovations, which cover server processors, new networking innovations, possible launches from Intel's ecosystem partners, and more.

A lot is riding on the success of "Sapphire Rapids," as they see the introduction of Intel's new high-performance CPU core on in the enterprise segment at core-counts of up to 60-core/120-thread per socket; along with cutting-edge new I/O that includes DDR5 memory, PCI-Express Gen 5, next-gen CXL, and on-package HBM memory on certain variants.

AMD appears to like to play coy when it comes to new product announcements, or at least the reveal of upcoming product announcements. Just as with its November 3rd event, the company has put out a miniscule teaser for its November 10th announcement of what the company is simply calling "the unveiling of our next-gen server processors" on Twitter. The event will kick off at 10 am Pacific time and it appears there will be a live stream, as AMD is inviting people to watch the event online. It's highly likely that we're talking about new EPYC parts here, as the event is called "together we advance_data centers".

According to the latest TrendForce research, pandemic-induced materials shortages abated in the second half of this year and the supply and delivery of short-term materials has recovered significantly. However, assuming materials supply is secure and demand can be met, the annual growth rate of server shipments in 2023 is estimated to be only 3.7%, which is lower than 5.1% in 2022.

TrendForce indicates that this growth slowdown is due to three factors. First, once material mismatch issues had eased, buyers began adjusting previously placed purchase order overruns. Thus, ODM orders also decreased but this will not affect the 2022 shipment volume of whole servers for the time being. Second, due to the impact of rising inflation and weakness in the overall economy, corporate capital investment may trend more conservative and IT-related investment will emphasize flexibility, such as the replacement of certain server terminals with cloud services. Third, geopolitical changes will drive the continuing emergence of demand for small-scale data centers and previous construction of hyperscale data centers will slow. The recent ban on military/HPC servers issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce on October 7 has a very low market share in terms of its application category, so the impact on the overall server market is limited at present. However, if the scope of the ban is expanded further in the future, it will herald a more significant slowdown risk for China's server shipment momentum in 2023.

Supermicro, a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing that NEC Corporation has selected over 116 Supermicro GPU servers that contain dual socket 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and each with eight NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPUs. As a result, the Supermicro GPU server line can include the latest and most powerful Intel Xeon scalable processors and the most advanced AI GPUs from NVIDIA.

"Supermicro is thrilled to deliver an additional 580 PFLOPS of AI training power to its worldwide AI installations," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO, Supermicro. "Supermicro GPU servers have been installed at NEC Corporation and are used to conduct state-of-the-art AI research. Our servers are designed for the most demanding AI workloads using the highest-performing CPUs and GPUs. We continue to work with leading customers worldwide to achieve their business objectives faster and more efficiently with our advanced rack-scale server solutions."

GIGABYTE released three of the first Socket AM5 server motherboards and barebones, letting you build small-business/home servers using AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors. These boards may feature a client-segment CPU socket, but come with server-grade components for 24/7 or high-uptime operation, and remote-management features. The three are based on the AMD B650E chipset, which means it gets full PCI-Express Gen 5 (for an x16 slot and an x4 Gen 5 NVMe).

The MC13-LE0 and MC13-LE1 motherboards are built in the Micro-ATX form-factor, but with a design optimized for rack airflow. Both boards feature an identical PCB layout, but differ in their network connectivity options. The MC13-LE1 offers two 10 GbE interfaces driven by an Intel X710 controller; while the MC13-LE0 gives you two 1 GbE interfaces, each driven by an Intel i210. Both boards offer an ASPEED AST2600 remote-management chip with its dedicated 1 GbE port; one M.2 PCIe Gen 5 slot, a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 slot, and four SATA 6 Gbps ports. The W332-Z00 is an M-ATX tower server/workstation barebones (you add your own processor, DDR5 memory, and storage). This features a different motherboard than the MC13-LE#, with two M.2 PCIe Gen 5 slots, and Realtek-supplied remote-management and 2.5 GbE chips.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, GPUs, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, is extending its lead in accelerated compute infrastructure again with a full line of new systems optimized for NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs- encompassing over 20 product options. With a large portfolio of NVIDIA-Certified Systems, Supermicro is now leveraging the new NVIDIA H100 PCI-E and NVIDIA H100 SXM GPUs.

"Today, Supermicro introduced GPU-based servers with the new NVIDIA H100," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO of Supermicro. "We continue to offer the most comprehensive portfolio in the industry today and can deliver these systems in a range of sizes, including 8U, 5U, 4U, 2U, and 1U options. We also offer the latest GPU in our SuperBlades, workstations, and the Universal GPU systems. Customers can expect up to 30x performance gains for AI inferencing compared to previous GPU generations of accelerators for certain AI applications. Our GPU servers' innovative airflow designs result in reduced fan speeds, less power consumption, lower noise levels, and a lower total cost of ownership."

ASUS, the leading IT company in server systems, server motherboards and workstations, today announced its presence at NVIDIA GTC - a developer conference for the era of AI and the metaverse. ASUS will focus on three demonstrations outlining its strategic developments in AI, including: the methodology behind ASUS MLPerf Training v2.0 results that achieved multiple breakthrough records; a success story exploring the building of an academic AI data center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia; and a research AI data center created in conjunction with the National Health Research Institute in Taiwan.

MLPerf benchmark results help advance machine-learning performance and efficiency, allowing researchers to evaluate the efficacy of AI training and inference based on specific server configurations. Since joining MLCommons in 2021, ASUS has gained multiple breakthrough records in the data center closed division across six AI-benchmark tasks in AI training and inferencing MLPerf Training v2.0. At the ASUS GTC session, senior ASUS software engineers will share the methodology for achieving these world-class results—as well as the company's efforts to deliver more efficient AI workflows through machine learning.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced new high-density, Arm-based compute servers for cloud-native applications using Ampere Altra processors that support dual socket configurations with up to 256 CPU cores. The GIGABYTE R-series servers already have unique storage options, and the new servers (R182-P91, R282-P91, and R282-P92) extend the depth of support for NVMe (Gen4) SSDs on the Arm platform. For scalable, high-density compute, the last new server, H262-P61, also has no thermal limitations, as it can sustain peak, consistent performance by providing optimal airflow. This multi-node H-series server supports eight CPUs, which translates to as many as 1,024 Arm-based CPU cores in a traditional 2U server. Working off the strengths of the latest Arm architecture for System on Chip (SoC) solutions, Ampere Altra and Altra Max processors are now supported in both single and dual-socket configurations by GIGABYTE.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, is announcing its most advanced GPU server, incorporating eight NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Due to its advanced airflow design, the new high-end GPU system will allow increased inlet temperatures, reducing a data center's overall Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) while maintaining the absolute highest performance profile. In addition, Supermicro is expanding its GPU server lineup with this new Universal GPU server, which is already the largest in the industry. Supermicro now offers three distinct Universal GPU systems: the 4U,5U, and new 8U 8GPU server. The Universal GPU platforms support both current and future Intel and AMD CPUs -- up to 400 W, 350 W, and higher.

"Supermicro is leading the industry with an extremely flexible and high-performance GPU server, which features the powerful NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPU," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO, of Supermicro. "This new server will support the next generation of CPUs and GPUs and is designed with maximum cooling capacity using the same chassis. We constantly look for innovative ways to deliver total IT Solutions to our growing customer base."

According to TrendForce research, material supply improvement and spiking demand for enterprise SSDs from North American hyperscale data center and enterprise clients in 2Q22 coupled with the Kioxia contamination incident in 1Q22 prompted customers to ramp up procurement to avoid future supply shortages. Manufacturers also give priority to meeting the needs of server customers due to the high pricing of enterprise SSD. In the second quarter, overall revenue of the enterprise SSD market increased by 31.3% to US$7.32 billion.

As the market leader, Samsung has grown its enterprise SSD revenue to US$3.26 billion with the recovery of enterprise SSD procurement. Especially in the second quarter, when orders for other consumer products continued to decline, enterprise SSD became the company's outlet for reducing production capacity. At present, Samsung has been continuously investing in the development of next-generation transmission specification products such as the CXL 2.0 product released at the Flash Summit in early August, in order to maintain a leading position in the market.

Qualcomm is a company well known for designing processors going inside a vast majority of smartphones. However, the San Diego company has been making attempts to break out of its vision to focus on smartphones and establish new markets where it could show its potential for efficient processor design. According to Bloomberg's insights, Qualcomm is planning to re-enter the server market and try again to compete in the now very diverse space. In 2014, Qualcomm announced that the company is developing an Arm ISA-based CPU that will target servers and be an excellent alternative for cloud service providers looking at efficient designs called Centriq. Later on, in November of 2017, the company announced the first CPU Centriq 2400, which had 48 custom Falkor cores, six-channel DDR4 memory, and 60 MB of L3 cache.

What happened later is that the changing management of the company slowly abandoned the project, and the Arm CPU market was a bit of a dead-end for many projects. However, in recent years, many companies began designing Arm processors, and now the market is ready for a player like Qualcomm to re-enter this space. With the acquisition of Nuvia Inc., which developed crazy fast CPU IPs under the leadership of industry veterans, these designs could soon see the light of the day. It is reported that Qualcomm is in talks with Amazon's AWS cloud division, which has agreed to take a look at Qualcomm's offerings.

EK Fluid Works, a high-performance workstation manufacturer, is expanding its Compute Series with a rackmount liquid-cooled GPU server, the X7000-RM. The EK Fluid Works Compute Series X7000-RM is tailor-made for high-compute density applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, rendering farms, and scientific compute simulations.

What separates the X7000-RM from similar GPU server solutions is EK's renowned liquid cooling and high compute density. It offers 175% more GPU computational power than air-cooled servers of similar size while maintaining 100% of its performance output no matter the intensity or duration of the task. The standard X7000-RM 5U chassis can be equipped with an AMD EPYC Milan-X 64 Core CPU, up to 2 TB of DDR4 RAM, and up to seven NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPUs for the ultimate heavy-duty GPU computational power. Intel Xeon Scalable single and dual socket solutions are also possible, but such configurations are limited to a maximum of five GPUs.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $51.9 billion and increased 12% (up 16% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $20.5 billion and increased 8% (up 14% in constant currency)
• Net income was $16.7 billion and increased 2% (up 7% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.23 and increased 3% (up 8% in constant currency)

"We see real opportunity to help every customer in every industry use digital technology to overcome today's challenges and emerge stronger," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "No company is better positioned than Microsoft to help organizations deliver on their digital imperative - so they can do more with less."

Inspur Information, a leading IT infrastructure solutions provider, is rolling out full-stack liquid-cooled products, with cold plate liquid-cooling technology being available in all of its products including general-purpose servers, high-density servers, rack servers, and AI servers. This is another major step in Inspur Information's march towards being carbon neutral following its unveiling of Asia's largest development and manufacturing facility for liquid-cooled data centers.

As Green, low-carbon and sustainable development has become the international consensus, nearly 130 countries and regions around the world have set the goal of being carbon neutral. In 2022, with "All in Liquid-Cooling" incorporated into its strategy, Inspur Information has incorporated cold plate liquid-cooling technology into all of its products (general-purpose servers, high-density servers, rack servers, and AI servers), which can be fully customized for a diverse array of scenarios.

Server manufacturer Inventec unveils Mategress, the highest density storage JBOD with 42 SATA drives in a 2U enclosure to meet industry needs while improving efficiency with reduced costs. As demands for storage skyrockets, data centers are facing space and performance concerns in delivering higher quality of service and reliability. Mategress addresses both these issues with its unique high density in a small frame, dramatically reducing the cost for storage centers.

The Inventec Mategress storage server is a standard 2U high rack mount system, supporting 42 3.5" hot-swappable Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives with easy serviceability. It offers a higher maximum storage capacity than other similar products with full redundancy and flexible input/output (I/O) expansibility or expandability.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it is the first major server provider to deliver a new line of cloud-native compute solutions using processors from Ampere. The new HPE solutions provide service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with an agile, extensible, and trusted compute foundation to drive innovation.

Available in Q3 2022, the new HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 server is the first in a series of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers that deliver next-generation compute performance with higher power efficiency using Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max cloud-native processors.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, supports two new Intel-based accelerators for demanding cloud gaming, media delivery, AI and ML workloads, enabling customers to deploy the latest acceleration technology from Intel and Intel Habana. "Supermicro continues to work closely with Intel and Habana Labs to deliver a range of server solutions supporting Arctic Sound-M and Gaudi 2 that address the demanding needs of organizations that require highly efficient media delivery and AI training," said Charles Liang, president and CEO. "We continue to collaborate with leading technology suppliers to deliver application-optimized total system solutions for complex workloads while also increasing system performance."

Supermicro can quickly bring to market new technologies by using a Building Block Solutions approach to designing new systems. This methodology allows new GPUs and acceleration technology to be easily placed into existing designs or, when necessary, quickly adapt an existing design when needed for higher-performing components. "Supermicro helps deliver advanced AI and media processing with systems that leverage our latest Gaudi 2 and Arctic Sound-M accelerators," stated Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel. "Supermicro's Gaudi AI Training Server will accelerate deep learning training in some of the fastest growing workloads in the datacenter."

AMD and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One (F1) Team today showcased how AMD EPYC processors improved aerodynamics testing capacity, contributing to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team winning its eighth Constructors' Championship in the 2021 racing season. By using AMD EPYC processors, the team was able to achieve a 20 percent performance improvement for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workloads that were used to model and test aerodynamic flow of their F1 car.

"We are proud to partner with the reigning Constructors' Champions, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, operating at the cutting edge of racing and technology," said, Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, AMD. "For F1 teams, having the most effective computational analysis of aerodynamics can mean the difference between winning and losing a race. With AMD EPYC processors, the Mercedes-AMG F1 team can iterate on vehicle design faster and more efficiently than their previous system."

Global shipments of traditional PCs, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, declined 5.1% in the first quarter of 2022 (1Q22) but exceeded earlier forecasts, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The PC market is coming off two years of double-digit growth, so while the first quarter decline is a change in this momentum, it doesn't mean the industry is in a downward spiral. Despite ongoing supply chain and logistical challenges, vendors still shipped 80.5 million PCs during the quarter. The 1Q22 volume marks the seventh consecutive quarter where global shipments surpassed 80 million, a feat not seen since 2012.

"The focus shouldn't be on the year-over-year decline in PC volumes because that was to be expected. The focus should be on the PC industry managing to ship more than 80 million PCs at a time when logistics and supply chain are still a mess, accompanied by numerous geopolitical and pandemic-related challenges," said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "We have witnessed some slowdown in both the education and consumer markets, but all indicators show demand for commercial PCs remains very strong. We also believe that the consumer market will pick up again in the near future. The result of 1Q22 was PC shipment volumes that were near record levels for a first quarter."

According to TrendForce research, corporate demand for digital transformation including artificial intelligence and high-performance computing has accelerated in recent years, which has led to increasing adoption of cloud computing. In order to improve service flexibility, the world's major cloud service providers have gradually introduced ARM-based servers. The penetration rate of ARM architecture in data center servers is expected to reach 22% by 2025.

In the past few years, ARM architecture processors have matured in the fields of mobile terminals and Internet of Things but progress in the server field has been relatively slow. However, companies have diversified cloud workloads in recent years and the market has begun to pay attention to the benefits ARM architecture processing can provide to data centers. TrendForce believes that ARM-based processors have three major advantages. First, they can support diverse and rapidly changing workloads and are more scalability and cost-effective. Second, ARM-based processors provide higher customization for different niche markets with a more flexible ecosystem. Third, physical footprint is relatively small which meets the needs of today's micro data centers.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, today announced availability of high-performance server platforms supporting new 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology for the modern data center. "The modern data center requires a powerful foundation to balance compute, storage, memory and IO that can efficiently manage growing volumes in the digital transformation trend," said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's Server Infrastructure Business Unit. "TYAN's industry-leading server platforms powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology give our customers better energy efficiency and increased performance for a current and future of highly complex workloads."

"3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology continue to drive a new standard for the modern data center with breakthrough performance for technical computing workloads due to 768 MB of L3 cache, enabling faster time-to-results on targeted workloads. Fully socket compatible with our 3rd Gen AMD EPYC platforms, customers can adopt these processors to transform their data center operations to achieve faster product development along with exceptional energy savings," said Ram Peddibhotla, corporate vice president, EPYC product management, AMD.

Server processors tend to be one of the most profitable businesses for AMD and Intel. Thus, investment groups and analysts closely monitor happenings in the server and data center world. A report from Mizuho Securities (investment bank) Managing Director Jordan Klein states that many upcoming changes on the server processor front are coming this year. Mr. Klein cites sources over at Insupur Systems, one of the most prominent server vendors. More precisely, Dolly Wu is the VP and GM of Datacenter/Cloud at Inspur. According to the report, AMD and Intel will change their strategy in the server market going forward in 2022.

As far as AMD is concerned, the company plans to increase the pricing of its EPYC processors by 10-30%. This increase should be a bit easier on the strategic cloud customers. The report also indicates that as the demand far exceeds the supply of EPYC processors, AMD increases prices and makes a "take it or leave it" offer, resulting in most customers accepting the increased costs. Another interesting tidbit from the report was the talk about Intel. The blue team laid out its strategy to launch highly-anticipated Sapphire Rapids Xeons in Q2 of 2022. However, it will maybe get delayed to Q3 of 2022. Intel doesn't plan to increase prices to remain competitive with AMD, so the server space will see Intel fighting to regain the lost market share.

The new normal ushered in by the pandemic will not only become the driving force of digital transformation but will also continue to drive the server market in 2022, according to TrendForce's investigations. It is worth noting that potential unmet demand in 2021 and the risk of future server component shortages will become medium and long-term variables that influence the market. Analyzing the shipment volume of completed servers, a growth rate of approximately 4-5% in completed server shipments is expected next year with primary shipment dynamics remaining concentrated in North American data centers with an annual growth rate of approximately 13-14%. From the supply chain perspective, the ODM Direct business model has gradually replaced the business model of the traditional server market, giving cloud service providers the ability to respond quickly to market changes. However, based on the unpredictability of the market, TrendForce assumes two forecasts for server growth trends. One, the supply situation of key components is effectively improved. Two, the supply situation of key components is exacerbated.

AMD announced today that IBM Cloud has chosen 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to expand its bare metal service offerings designed to power customers' demanding workloads and solutions. The new servers, featuring 128 cores, up to 4 TB of memory and 10 NVMe drives per server, give users full access to high-end, dual-socket performance with AMD EPYC 7763 processors; a first for IBM Cloud in a dual-socket platform.

"Our customers have a high demand for computing processing power and the new 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors provide the high levels of performance and scalability we were looking for," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, vice president, IBM Cloud. "Our collaboration with AMD has helped us deliver our highest core counts and bandwidth ever available for IBM Cloud customers, to offer top market performance for today and tomorrow's demanding workloads."

"IBM Cloud customers regularly running compute-intensive workloads can see an immediate benefit to speed and scalability by upgrading to 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, while helping to deliver a secure experience for end-users," said Lynn Comp, corporate vice president, Cloud Business Group, AMD. "Our continued collaboration with IBM Cloud is further validation of the strong standing AMD holds in the market as we deliver topline solutions that promote a seamless experience for cloud partners and their customers."

GIGABYTE Technology, today announced at OCP Summit support for the Ampere Altra Max processor and unveiled the new GIGABYTE high-density server, H262-P60, that embodies performance and scalability for HPC clusters and HCI. The Ampere Altra processor has also shown great power efficiency in cloud and edge applications while gaining momentum as it uses Arm architecture to give x86 a run for its money.

The competitiveness of Ampere Altra processors and ARMv8 64-bit architecture has become even more apparent as the Ampere Altra Max processor maintains the same 250 W TDP as Ampere Altra and is pin-to-pin compatible, yet it is able to add 60% more cores for up to 128 cores. For networking, storage, or accelerators the single socket supports 128 PCIe lanes, while the dual socket configuration for Altra Max will support 192 PCIe lanes. The H262-P60 will ship with updated support for Altra Max.