1 Megawatt Racks In Data Centers


The demand for performance in an AI data center is causing a huge spike in the amount of power being consumed. Within a rack are a half-dozen SoC components housed in different types of advanced packages and connected with an assortment of blazing-fast interface IP and optical signaling. Manmeet Walia, director of product management for mixed-signal PHY IP in the Synopsys Solutions Group, talks... » read more

A Bench-To-In-Field Telemetry Platform For Data Center Power Management


By Aakash Jani and Venkatesh Santhanagopalan NVIDIA's Blackwell platform delivered roughly 15% lower energy and 13% higher throughput [1]. Those gains came from hardware-firmware co-design that matches operating points to each workload, not a new process node. Most SoCs do not adapt: their margins are set and frozen the day silicon ships, based on the workloads measured at the bench. The mi... » read more

SOCAMM2: Bringing LPDDR5X Benefits To AI Servers


The rapid scaling of artificial intelligence is reshaping nearly every dimension of data center design. While much of the focus has been on GPUs, accelerators and advanced packaging, another constraint is emerging as equally critical: power. As AI models grow larger and more complex, power consumption, not raw compute, is increasingly the limiting factor in system scalability. Modern AI work... » read more

Test Distribution Evolves To Meet AI Challenges


The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) is driving rapid acceleration of the semiconductor market, which analysts now predict will reach $1 trillion this year. Many semiconductor devices will be the GPUs that populate the data centers that run AI workloads. Driven by strong, sustained investments from hyperscaler operators, high-performance computing (HPC)/AI data centers are expected... » read more

Ensuring AI Reliability: Mitigating Silent Data Corruption Risks


Silent Data Corruption (SDC) is an industry challenge affecting data centers worldwide with increasing frequency. This phenomenon stems from untraceable hardware failures that make detection notoriously difficult. SDCs don’t leave any record in system logs or trigger exception mechanisms. The corrupted data they produce can propagate unnoticed, causing cascading failures that often demand ext... » read more

The AI Server Challenge: Testing Power At Scale


Artificial intelligence is most often framed as a story of compute advancements. Faster GPUs, denser accelerators, and advanced process nodes. But behind every AI workload, the most fundamental constraint is power. Fig. 1: AI server market. Source: Grand View Research As AI servers scale to meet data center demand, power delivery is becoming one of the most critical and complex engine... » read more

What Is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) In Data Centers?


In 2024, data centers consumed around 415 terawatt hours (TWh), or about 1.5% of global electricity, says the International Energy Agency. As the backbone of the digital economy, data centers are estimated to consume 2-3% of the world’s electricity by 2030. To manage this consumption, industry leaders have relied on a single metric: Power usage effectiveness (PUE). What is power usage ... » read more

Research Bits: May 5


AI power prediction Researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a prediction tool that can quickly tell data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip. It can be applied to a wide range of hardware configurations. The lightweight estimation model captures the power usage pattern of a GP... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals Marvell acquired Polariton Technologies, a Swiss developer of plasmonics-based silicon photonics devices. Onto Innovation is partnering with Rigaku, combining Onto’s analysis software with Rigaku’s CD-SAXS platform for advanced semiconductor process control. Onto also agreed to acquire a 27% stake in Rigaku for about $710M. Tesla plans to use Intel’s 14A process for its T... » read more

Silicon Photonics Lights The Way To More Efficient Data Centers


Key Takeaways Photonic interconnects potentially increase bandwidth density while significantly reducing power consumption. AI workloads are driving their adoption in data centers. On the other hand, photonic interconnects require a variety of different materials, introducing process compatibility and thermal and mechanical stress issues. Integrated electro-optical I/O modules are th... » read more

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