DRAM Translation Layer, Mechanism for Flexible Address Mapping and Data Migration Within CXL-Based Memory Devices


A technical paper titled “DRAM Translation Layer: Software-Transparent DRAM Power Savings for Disaggregated Memory” was published by researchers at Seoul National University. Abstract: "Memory disaggregation is a promising solution to scale memory capacity and bandwidth shared by multiple server nodes in a flexible and cost-effective manner. DRAM power consumption, which is reported to be... » read more

Is RISC-V Ready For Supercomputing?


RISC-V processors, which until several years ago were considered auxiliary processors for specific functions, appear to be garnering support for an entirely different type of role — high-performance computing. This is still at the discussion stage. Questions remain about the software ecosystem, or whether the chips, boards, and systems are reliable enough. And there are both business and t... » read more

Where Is The Edge AI Market And Ecosystem Headed?


Until recently, most AI was in datacenters and most was training. Things are changing quickly. Projections are AI sales will grow rapidly to $10s of billions by the mid 2020s, with most of the growth in Edge AI Inference. Edge inference applications Where is the Edge Inference market today? Let’s look at the markets from highest throughput to lowest. Edge Servers Recently Nvidia annou... » read more

From SerDes Chiplets To Die-To-Die Interfaces


The demand for ever faster high-speed interfaces has never been quite so pronounced. In our increasingly connected world, petabytes of data are continuously generated by a wide range of devices, systems and IoT endpoints such as vehicles, wearables, smartphones and even appliances. The resulting digital tsunami has prompted industry heavyweights like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon to co... » read more

Carriers Push Datacenter-Style Virtualization


The world’s largest telco carriers are leading a broad movement to bring data center-style virtualization to the core of their telecommunications networks. In an industry known for being extremely conservative when it comes to change, this one appears to be significant. The move has set off a scramble among a number of companies for unified control and forwarding plane designs, starting fr... » read more

Cloud Computing Chips Changing


An explosion in cloud services is making chip design for the server market more challenging, more diverse, and much more competitive. Unlike datacenter number crunching of the past, the cloud addresses a broad range of applications and data types. So while a server chip architecture may work well for one application, it may not be the optimal choice for another. And the more those tasks beco... » read more

Chip Advances Play Big Role In Cloud


Semiconductor engineering teams have been collaborating with key players in the data center ecosystem in recent years, resulting in unforeseen and substantial changes in how data centers are architected and built. That includes everything from which boxes, boards, cards and cables go where, to how much it costs to run them. The result is that bedrock communication technology and standards li... » read more

Need Emulation Now? You’ve Got It


Did you know that the way companies use hardware emulation has changed? Until recently, companies had no choice but to house their emulators in a lab and hard wire them (using lots of wires) to other supporting hardware and workstations dedicated to a single project at a time. The emulator and its set up was accessible to users at only that location and switching between projects was difficu... » read more

Requirements For Datacenter-Ready Emulation


It’s time to look at what the latest trends in emulation are and to review some of the key requirements to make it datacenter-ready. Specifically, I will look at virtualization of external interfaces as well as emulation throughput, specifically the allocation of jobs into emulators. One overarching trend in verification lies in the connection of the engines in what Jim Hogan has dubbed t... » read more

New Metrics For The Cloud


Data centers are beginning to adjust their definition of what makes one server better than another. Rather than comparing benchmarked performance of general-purpose servers, they are adding a new level of granularity based upon what kind of chips work best for certain operations or applications. Those decisions increasingly include everything from the level of redundancy in compute operations, ... » read more

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