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

Data Centers Need High Reliability Semiconductors


“In the world of designing cars, planes, AI factories … you’ve got to be perfect," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on CNBC last month. "And the reason for this is because there is so much at stake.” Cars and planes need to be extremely reliable because people die if they aren’t. In AI data centers, no one dies when systems fail, but the economic impact is gigantic because Amazon, Goog... » read more

Achieving Reliable 2m+ DAC Connectivity For AI Scale Networks With 224G PHY IP


As artificial intelligence workloads and hyperscale data centers continue to evolve, the requirements for networking infrastructure are becoming increasingly stringent. High-speed, reliable connectivity is essential to support the massive data flow and low-latency demands of AI-scale environments. Passive direct attach copper (DACs) remains an attractive choice for hyperscalers and system vendo... » read more

Taking Data Center Serviceability To The Next Level


It is no secret that Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads are driving an exponential growth in the scale of supercomputers and data centers. Training the latest LLM (Large Language Model), for instance, typically requires thousands of specialized processing cores running at full speed. As these models get more advanced with each generation, they need additional compute performance to absorb a... » read more

Integrating Energy Efficiency Considerations Into Your Design From The Beginning


Data center networking is responsible for consuming about 1% of the global electricity supply. With the advent and integration of AI into various sectors, the pressure on both hardware and software infrastructures, necessitated by neural networks and extensive language models, is expected to increase significantly. The burgeoning energy consumption by hyperscale data centers emerges as an ur... » 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

Hunting For Hardware-Related Errors In Data Centers


The semiconductor industry is urgently pursuing design, monitoring, and testing strategies to help identify and eliminate hardware defects that can cause catastrophic errors. Corrupt execution errors, also known as silent data errors, cannot be fully isolated at test — even with system-level testing — because they occur only under specific conditions. To sort out the environmental condit... » read more

How The Electronics Industry Can Shape A More Sustainable, Energy-Efficient World


By Piyush Sancheti and Godwin Maben We’re already experiencing the effects of our world’s changing climate—devastating wildfires, prolonged droughts, torrential flooding, just to name a few examples. Global energy consumption is increasing, raising carbon dioxide levels and triggering extreme weather conditions. Two key forces driving these trends are the shift to hyperscale datacenter... » read more

Finding the Scope of CXL-Enabled Tiered Memory System in Production


This new technical paper titled "TPP: Transparent Page Placement for CXL-Enabled Tiered Memory" is presented by researchers at University of Michigan and Meta Inc. Abstract (partial) "We propose a novel OS-level application-transparent page placement mechanism (TPP) for efficient memory management. TPP employs a lightweight mechanism to identify and place hot and cold pages to appropriate... » read more

GDDR6 Memory On The Leading Edge


With the accelerating growth in data traffic, it is unsurprising that the number of hyperscale data centers keeps rocketing skyward. According to analysts at the Synergy Research Group, in nine months (Q2’20 to Q1’21), 84 new hyperscale data centers came online bringing the total worldwide to 625. Hyperscaler capex set a record $150B over the last four quarters eclipsing the $121B spent in ... » read more

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