The Next Platform
The Once And Future FPGA Maker Altera

Back in 2015, when we were launching The Next Platform, a lot of stuff was going on all at the same time, which is part of the zeitgeist that we were tapping into and that we wanted to chronical upon and participate within. …

The Once And Future FPGA Maker Altera was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Synopsys Shepards Circuits Towards 1.6T Ethernet

The Ethernet roadmap has had a few bumps and potholes in the four and a half decades since the 10M generation was first published in 1980. …

Synopsys Shepards Circuits Towards 1.6T Ethernet was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Kubernetes Clusters Have Massive Overprovisioning Of Compute And Memory

In the ten years since Google released Kubernetes to the open source community, it has become the dominant platform for orchestrating and managing software containers and microservices, along the way muscling out competitors like Docker Swarm and Mesosphere. …

Kubernetes Clusters Have Massive Overprovisioning Of Compute And Memory was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
The AI Wave Finally Starts Lifting Dell And HPE

It is beginning to look like the Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprose, the world’s two biggest original equipment manufacturers, are finally going to start benefitting from the generative AI wave, mainly because they are finally getting enough allocations of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD that they can start addressing the needs of customers who don’t happen to be among the hyperscalers and largest cloud builders. …

The AI Wave Finally Starts Lifting Dell And HPE was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Anthropic Fires Off Performance And Price Salvos In AI War

It is a strange time in the generative AI revolution, with things changing on so many vectors so quickly it is hard to figure out what all of this hardware and software and people-hours costs and what it might be worth when it comes to transforming, well, just about everything. …

Anthropic Fires Off Performance And Price Salvos In AI War was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
There Is Still A Place For FPGAs In The Datacenter

By the time that the founders of Achronix, who were all techies from Cornell University, decided to found their own FPGA company twenty years ago, FPGAs had already been in the field for twenty years and the market was dominated by Xilinx (now part of AMD) and Altera (still part of Intel until it gets spun out sometime in the future). …

There Is Still A Place For FPGAs In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Pushing PCI-Express Switches And Retimers To Boost Server Bandwidth

Things would go a whole lot better for server designs if we had a two year or better still a four year moratorium on adding faster compute engines to machines. …

Pushing PCI-Express Switches And Retimers To Boost Server Bandwidth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
A Tale Of Two Nvidia Eos Supercomputers

Note: This story augments and corrects information that originally appeared in Half Eos’d: Even Nvidia Can’t Get Enough H100s For Is Supercomputers, which was published on February 15. …

A Tale Of Two Nvidia Eos Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
AMD Flexing Spartan FPGA Muscles In Clouds And At Edges

The edge is continuing to become a place where IT infrastructure vendors need to be, and that includes chip makers, all of whom have strategies to push their silicon to where the data is increasingly being generated and needs to be stored, processed, and analyzed. …

AMD Flexing Spartan FPGA Muscles In Clouds And At Edges was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Couchbase Joins The Vector Search In Database Fray

As we have noted before, vector databases aren’t new even though people talk about them that way, and in fact can trace their origins back a few decades. …

Couchbase Joins The Vector Search In Database Fray was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
HexaMesh: Chiplet Topologies Inspired By Nature

With the reticle limit for chip manufacturing pretty much set in stone (pun intended) at 26 millimeters by 33 millimeters down to 2 nanometer transistor sizes with extreme ultraviolet lithography techniques and being cut in half to 26 millimeters by 16.5 millimeters for the High-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography needed to push below 2 nanometer transistor sizes, chiplets are inevitable and monolithic dies are absolutely going to become a thing of the past. …

HexaMesh: Chiplet Topologies Inspired By Nature was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
The Cloud Outgrows Linux, And Sparks A New Operating System

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. …

The Cloud Outgrows Linux, And Sparks A New Operating System was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Inside The Massive GPU Buildout At Meta Platforms

If you handle hundreds of trillions of AI model executions per day, and are going to change that by one or two orders of magnitude as GenAI goes mainstream, you are going to need GPUs. …

Inside The Massive GPU Buildout At Meta Platforms was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Cerebras Goes Hyperscale With Third Gen Waferscale Supercomputers

It is a pity that we can’t make silicon wafers any larger than 300 millimeters in diameter. …

Cerebras Goes Hyperscale With Third Gen Waferscale Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
With Blackwell GPUs, AI Gets Cheaper And Easier, Competing With Nvidia Gets Harder

If you want to take on Nvidia on its home turf of AI processing, then you had better bring more than your A game. …

With Blackwell GPUs, AI Gets Cheaper And Easier, Competing With Nvidia Gets Harder was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
How Nvidia Blackwell Systems Attack 1 Trillion Parameter AI Models

We like datacenter compute engines here at The Next Platform, but as the name implies, what we really like are platforms – how compute, storage, networking, and systems software are brought together to create a platform on which to build applications. …

How Nvidia Blackwell Systems Attack 1 Trillion Parameter AI Models was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
AWS And Nvidia Reboot “Ceiba” Supercomputer For Blackwell GPUs

Last November, we got a sneak peak at a supercomputer called “Ceiba” that would be built jointly by Nvidia and Amazon Web Services, based on its then-new GH200 Grace-Hopper CPU-GPU compute complexes, its NVLink Switch 3 memory fabric for GPUs, and the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA2) Ethernet interconnect that is custom designed by AWS to link racks of machines to each other. …

AWS And Nvidia Reboot “Ceiba” Supercomputer For Blackwell GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Next Platform
Hyperscalers Bringing Nvidia’s Grace-Blackwell Superchip To Their Clouds

At his company’s GTC 2024 Technical Conference this week, Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang, unveiled the chip maker’s massive Blackwell GPUs and accompanying NVLink networking systems, promising a future where hyperscale cloud providers, HPC centers, and other organizations of size and means can meet the rapidly increasing compute demands driven by the emergence of generative AI. …

Hyperscalers Bringing Nvidia’s Grace-Blackwell Superchip To Their Clouds was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.