Amid an AI revolution sweeping through trillion-dollar industries worldwide, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote address ahead of COMPUTEX 2024, in Taipei, outlining what's next for the AI ecosystem. Slated for June 2 at the National Taiwan University Sports Center, the address kicks off before the COMPUTEX trade show scheduled to run from June 3-6 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center. The keynote will be livestreamed at 7 p.m. Taiwan time (4 a.m. PT) on Sunday, June 2, with a replay available at NVIDIA.com.

With over 1,500 exhibitors from 26 countries and an expected crowd of 50,000 attendees, COMPUTEX is one of the world's premier technology events. It has long showcased the vibrant technology ecosystem anchored by Taiwan and has become a launching pad for the cutting-edge systems required to scale AI globally. As a leader in AI, NVIDIA continues to nurture and expand the AI ecosystem. Last year, Huang's keynote and appearances in partner press conferences exemplified NVIDIA's role in helping advance partners across the technology industry.

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

The 58th annual edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2 was the only machine to shake up the top spots, claiming No. 10. Based on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and 2.45GHz working together with an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 80 GB of memory, Voyager-EUS2 also utilizes a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for data transfer.

While there were no other changes to the positions of the systems in the Top10, Perlmutter at NERSC improved its performance to 70.9 Pflop/s. Housed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Perlmutter's increased performance couldn't move it from its previously held No. 5 spot.

Kailh introduced their newest lineup of mechanical keyboard switches at Computex 2018 in the form of the Sun switch. The aim of this lineup was to retain the Cherry MX keycap compatibility with the same stem design, but allow for centralized lighting akin to what Omron did with their light pillars in the Logitech Romer-G and Creative PRES switches. This meant designing new molds for the various switch parts, and also finding a wider spring that together all still work into providing a tactile and clicky switch with a 1.8 mm actuation depth, total travel distance of 3.5 mm, an actuation force of 50 gf and tactile force of 60 gf.

It found little interest, however, with only Hexgears choosing to adopt it to date in their GK760 keyboard. In a move to drum up more business, Kailh have already updated the Sun switch to allow for a clear stem with walls surrounding the stem to help add some dust and spill resistance, with the clear housing now allowing more light to pass through. The rest of the switch is identical, as seen below in samples we received recently (old switch at the left/top of the new switch), although now there is little scope left for a more diffused backlighting experience. Time will tell how the changes work out, and yours truly would have rather seen the older design in use.More pictures follow.

Intel is inching closer to its December 12 "2018 Architecture Day" event targeted at assuring investors and channel partners that its short-term and intermediate-term CPU architecture roadmap looks competitive, by even demonstrating early prototypes of future architectures. One such exhibit revealed a processor demo platform codenamed "Sunnycove." It's not clear if this is a derivative of an upcoming CPU architecture (such as "Ice Lake,") or if it's the first fundamentally new CPU core design since "Nehalem."

The numbers put out by Intel scream "up to 75% more 7-zip performance," without elaborating whether they mean compression, decompression, or encryption. Speaking of the latter, this chip has some serious encryption chops, including support for new encryption instruction-sets that include SHA-NI (secure hash algorithm new instructions), and vector-AES. Much of the chip is designed to accelerate encryption, and its applications could be focused on the enterprise.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced its intent to acquire privately held Cariden Technologies, Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based supplier of network planning, design and traffic management solutions for telecommunications service providers. With global service providers converging their Internet Protocol (IP) and optical networks to address exploding Internet and mobile traffic growth and complex traffic patterns, Cisco's acquisition of Cariden will allow providers to enhance the visibility, programmability and efficiency of their converged networks, while improving service velocity.

Cariden's industry-leading capacity planning and management tools for IP/MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks, which have been deployed by many of the world's leading fixed and mobile network operators, will be integrated into Cisco's Service Provider Networking Group to enable multilayer modeling and optimization of optical transport and IP/MPLS networks. Cariden's products and technology will advance Cisco's nLight technology for IP and optical convergence. The acquisition also supports the company's Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy by providing sophisticated wide area networking (WAN) orchestration capabilities. These capabilities will allow service providers to improve both the programmability of their networks and the utilization of existing network assets across the IP and optical transport layers.

Oracle corporation is on a big buying spree after this year's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a prominent server builder. Oracle wants to strengthen its enterprise IT business with the acquisition of a major chip-maker, right now AMD, IBM (its processor division), and NVIDIA are being named by prominent analysts. "You're going to see us buying chip companies," Ellison, 66, said yesterday at Oracle's annual meeting in San Francisco. Currently its subsidiary, Sun Microsystems has its own processor architecture, the SPARC. Gleacher & Co. analyst Doug Freedman predicts Oracle is chasing AMD, IBM (chip division) and NVIDIA. "You've got to think it's focused on enterprise hardware, on the server," he said. "AMD jumps off the screen."

Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.
"We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined," said Oracle President Safra Catz.

Continuing its momentum and leadership in virtualization technology, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. today released the first video and images demonstrating live migration across three generations of AMD processors on VMware ESX 3.5, including the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor code-named "Istanbul." Live Migration of virtual machines across physical servers is key to providing superior flexibility for managing today's data centers. Additionally, AMD is highlighting its continued, cooperative development efforts with Microsoft as evidenced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, which is available today as a beta and adds support for AMD-V technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing. The new 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor provides scalable performance for both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and has received support from all four global OEMs.

There is a valid reason behind why Safari is growing in browser market-share, apart from the fact that iPhone carries it: it is arguably the fastest browser there is. The fourth beta version that surfaced earlier this week went a few notches ahead of Firefox (Minefield) 3.2a1 and Google Chrome in a review conducted by CNet, to take the top-sport for the fastest web-browser. Internet Explorer (IE) versions 7 and 8, Opera 9.6, Firefox 3, Chrome, Firefox(Minefield) 3.1 Alpha 1 and Safari 4 were put through JavaScript tests using the SunSpider suite. The PC was equipped with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.10 GHz. Safari 4 beta gave IE 7 a sound thrashing at the test, emerging 42 times faster. The performance difference between the two were so vast that the reviewers had to prepare a seperate graph without IE 7 so there could be more resolution in the charts showing the differences between the rest of the contendors. Then again, one must take into account the fact that Chrome and Firefox (Minefield) 3.2 weren't all that behind Safari 4 beta, only a few notches. The scores are denoted by render time in terms of milliseconds. Lesser the better. The scores stand at:

• Safari 4 (Total time: 910 ms)
• Mozilla Minefield 3.2a1 (1,136 ms)
• Google Chrome (1,177 ms)
• Firefox 3 (3,250 ms)
• Opera 9.6 (4,076 ms)
• Internet Explorer 8 (5,839 ms)
• Internet Explorer 7 (39,026 ms)

LG Display has developed a new technology, which in outdoor environments, has the LCD to go into a mode which not only allows the screen to be seen more easily than conventional LCD displays, but also save power in the process. Currently one of the biggest drains on battery life for mobile devices is to power the backlight for the display, which is normally worstened in outdoor environments due to a need to increase the backlight brightness. The new 14.1 inch display from LG actually uses sunlight to illuminate the screen outdoors, the technology has been dubbed Backlight Data Signal Switching Technology and it will be available to see at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2009).

Let's imagine you are planning a huge LAN party right in the middle of nowhere with nearly no infrastructure. Or you are company whose data center needs a temporary upgrade. Or imagine you want to serve a place, that suffers from a natural disaster, with computational power. What do you think might help you out on that? Exactly - Sun's Blackbox, a complete data center designed for rapid redeployment, unmatched flexibility and breakthrough economics stuffed into a 20-foot shipping container.
Introduced last year, in October, the Blackbox is still in a prototype stage, but Sun already decided to turn it into a commercial product. While this prototype is on a tour through the U.S. the guys from Ars Technica attended a guided tour at its stop-off in Seattle, Washington. The detailed review of the Blackbox, and its different compartments, makes the article a very interesting read.

Sun Microsystems, today introduced the Netra X4200 M2 server, Sun's first Network Equipment Building Standard (NEBS) Level 3 Certified Rack Server powered by the AMD Opteron processor and offering the industry's broadest operating system (OS) support, including the Solaris 10 OS, Red Hat and SUSE Linux, and Windows. Based on the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server announced in October 2006, the Netra X4200 M2 server is Sun's first Netra rackmount server developed with industry-standard x64 (x86, 64-bit) architecture. The device can be equipped with up to four 146 GB SAS hard drives, up to two Opteron 2214 HE (2.2 GHz, 68W) processors and up to eight DDR2-667 memory modules for a total capacity of 32 GB. The 2-socket version of the Netra X4200 M2 server is available now, with entry-level pricing starting at $9,845. The 1-socket version is scheduled to be available in May with entry-level pricing starting at $6,145. For more information on the Netra X4200 M2, please visit this page.

25 years ago, the newly founded Sun Microsystems company introduced the first prototype of their workstation to the world. In between these 25 years Sun developed not only the Java technology but contributed to Unix (developed their own Unix: Solaris), designed the Sparc processors, and whatnot. It was quite a successful approach, 11 years after the foundation in 1993 Sun had already shipped over 1 million systems to their customers. Java is everywhere you look and OpenOffice (the former StarOffice) is getting more and more satisfied users.
Therefore Sun, we wish all the best for the next coming decades!

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Intel Corporation today announced a broad strategic alliance centered on Intel's endorsement of the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Sun's commitment to deliver a comprehensive family of enterprise and telecommunications servers and workstations based on Intel Xeon processors. The new Intel-based enterprise systems from Sun will enhance its current X64 portfolio and complement its industry-leading, powerhouse SPARC systems.

For a limited time, Sun is offering a free DVD media kit which includes the Solaris 10 Operating System for both SPARC and x86 platforms as well as Sun Studio 11 software.

Take this opportunity to get familiar with the most advanced operating system on the planet and the tools which enable the highest optimizations and best runtime performance on the Solaris Operating System, bar-none.