What Data Center Chipmakers Can Learn From Automotive


Automotive OEMs are demanding their semiconductor suppliers achieve a nearly unmeasurable target of 10 defective parts per billion (DPPB). Whether this is realistic remains to be seen, but systems companies are looking to emulate that level of quality for their data center SoCs. Building to that quality level is more expensive up front, although ultimately it can save costs versus having to ... » read more

Cooling The Data Center


Since British mathematician and entrepreneur Clive Humby coined the rallying cry, “Data is the new oil,” some 20 years ago, it has been an upbeat phrase at data science conferences. But in engineering circles, that increasingly includes a daily grind of hardware challenges, and chief among them is how to cool the places where all that data is processed and stored. An estimated 65 zettaby... » read more

Spark On AWS Graviton2 Best Practices: K-Means Clustering Case Study


This report focuses on how to tune a Spark application to run on a cluster of instances. We define the concepts for the cluster/Spark parameters, and explain how to configure them given a specific set of resources. We use a K-Means machine learning algorithm as a case study to analyze and tune the parameters to achieve the required performance while optimally using the available resources. W... » read more

CXL-Based Memory Pooling System Meets Cloud Performance Goals And Significantly Reduces DRAM Cost


A technical paper titled "Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms" was published by researchers at Virginia Tech, Intel, Microsoft Azure, Google, and Stone Co. Abstract "Public cloud providers seek to meet stringent performance requirements and low hardware cost. A key driver of performance and cost is main memory. Memory pooling promises to improve DRAM utilization and t... » read more

Looking Inside Of Chips


Shai Cohen, co-founder and CEO of proteanTecs, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to boost reliability and add resiliency into chips and advanced packaging. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Several years ago, no one was thinking about on-chip monitoring. What's changed? Cohen: Today it is obvious that a solution is needed for optimizing performanc... » read more

Samsung PM9A3 All Flash Reference Platform


Software Defined Storage continues to gain momentum in the modern datacenter storage market. As datacenter storage in- frastructures and technologies evolve, the need for speed and flexibility in the storage system becomes evident. NVMe is at the forefront of these advancements. Weka is a software defined storage system that is designed to meet the needs of today’s I/O intensive workloads. It... » read more

Research Bits: Dec. 13


Electronic-photonic interface for data centers Engineers at Caltech and the University of Southampton integrated an electronic and photonic chip for high-speed communication in data centers. "There are more than 2,700 data centers in the U.S. and more than 8,000 worldwide, with towers of servers stacked on top of each other to manage the load of thousands of terabytes of data going in and o... » read more

Boosting Data Center Memory Performance In The Zettabyte Era With HBM3


We are living in the Zettabyte era, a term first coined by Cisco. Most of the world’s data has been created over the past few years and it is not set to slow down any time soon. Data has become not just big, but enormous! In fact, according to the IDC Global Datasphere 2022-2026 Forecast, the amount of data generated over the next 5 years will be at least 2x the amount of data generated over ... » read more

Profile-Guided HW/SW Mechanism To Efficiently Reduce Branch Mispredictions In Data Center Applications (Best Paper Award)


A new technical paper titled "Whisper: Profile-Guided Branch Misprediction Elimination for Data Center Applications" was published by researchers at University of Michigan, ARM, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Texas A&M University. This work was awarded a best paper award at October's 2022 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)/Association for Computing Machin... » read more

Ensuring Data Integrity And Performance Of High-Speed Data Transmission


In key electronics applications such as data centers, automotive, and 5G, the data speed and volume are increasing at an exponential rate. Data centers require data transmission (Figure 1) as high as 112Gbps, which can be achieved only using PAM4 signaling. The automotive industry is dealing with the challenges of transferring data between various electronic control units (ECUs) at a very high ... » read more

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