Since taking over AMD's enterprise chip business in 2014, Forrest Norrod has built the perennial also-ran into a CPU powerhouse. Now that AMD is truly a major player in CPUs, the company has broadened into network adapters (acquiring Xilinx and Pensando for DPUs) and is seeing traction in ML. The Next Platform sat down with Norrod for an in-depth interview covering the competition with Intel, the development of CXL, why they bought Xilinx and Pensando, and what the future holds. This is something we've been covering for years here at Gestalt IT, so what more does this interview tell us? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

Time Stamps:  

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow Gestalt IT

Intel Innovation 2022 is happening this week and that means lots of coverage of the things that Intel is talking about and showing off. Pat Gelsinger has been on the job for a little less than two years and he's been working tirelessly to keep Intel relevant. From the admission that Moore's Law isn't dead just yet but may involve chiplets to the end of Optane and the anticipation for Sapphire Rapids there is a lot of buzz going on. Stephen, there's a lot to discuss around the announcements but let's start with a simple appraisal - How does Intel look two years into the Pat Era? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

Time Stamps:  

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow Gestalt IT

Oracle released it’s fiscal 2023 Q1 results and it showed massive year-on-year cloud-revenue growth. The numbers could only mean one thing – Oracle is set to win the race against other cloud vendors. With its accelerated growth, it may very well one-up Google Cloud and become the fastest growing cloud vendor in the industry. This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.

Time Stamps:  

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow our Guest Hosts:

Follow Gestalt IT

MLCommons released the latest wave of machine learning training and inferencing benchmarks, and Nvidia's next-generaltion H100 really aced the results, delivering up to 4.5 times the performance of the leading Nvidia A100. But there are some other gems in the results, including a surprisingly strong showing for the Biren Technology BR104 and good enough performance from Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon to eliminate the market for low-performing inferencing hardware. What do the MLPerf results tell us? This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

Time Stamps:  

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow Gestalt IT

The United States turned up the heat on China last week, announcing that export or sale of advanced GPUs from Nvidia and AMD would not be allowed. This escalation of the trade war also reflects the war in Ukraine, with western governments seeking to keep most technology out of Russian hands. But this comes just as two Chinese firms have announced advanced GPU designs of their own. Will this move hold China back or will it backfire? This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.  

Time Stamps:

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow our Guest Host:

Follow Gestalt IT

VMware's annual conference is taking place in San Francisco this week, and Stephen Foskett is on-site to cover the event for Gestalt IT. It's been a tumultuous event, the first from VMware since the pandemic, and it's returning with a new name and theme. VMware Explore is different from VMworld in many ways, not least for the focus on multi-cloud management and entierprise IT developers, but we're also trying to see the future, since the company will soon be purchased by Broadcom. Along with vSphere 8, which integrates Project Monterey, we're seeing a beefed-up Tanzu and a new reporting suite called Aria.

Time Stamps:

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow Gestalt IT

Chipmaker Qualcomm is aiming to jump back into the server CPU market. The avenue is coming from last year's acquisition of Nuvia. We covered this deal on the Rundown last January and mentioned that the company was founded by former Apple engineers that wanted to focus on bring ARM to the datacenter. At first the acquistion seemed to refocus Nuvia on mobile device CPUs but Qualcomm appears to be looking to the future and restarting development efforts on servers. Qualcomm has a big market for System-on-a-Chip solutions for mobile devices but with the market for ARM CPUs in the cloud becoming hotter, is it time for a new player to enter and try and upset the balance? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

Time Stamps:  

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow Gestalt IT

Flash Memory Summit happened last week but we didn't want to let it go by without having our own storage expert comment on some of the announcements there. Lots of talk around CXL happened along with the ever-present discussion of the impending issues with Intel Optane, as covered by Stephen on the Gestalt IT Checksum. Oh, and that tiny little 128TB SSD that Samsung showed off. Stephen, what were your big takeaways from Flash Memory Summit? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

Time Stamps:

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow Gestalt IT

It's Black Hat and DEFCON week and it wouldn't be a show without the disclosure of a few big bugs. The winner so far seems to be a new exploit found in Intel's SGX memory encryption technology. Per pre-briefing ahead of a talk happening today, security researchers found a flaw in the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) that allows them to read uninitialized memory that could contain stale data before it's cleared by the CPU. Unlike Spectre and Meltdown, this isn't a side channel attack. It's a flaw in the CPU architecture. This means that attackers can recover data very quickly. Tests showed a 128-bit AES encryption key could be recovered in less than 2 seconds with 94% accuracy and a 1024-bit RSA key could be nabbed in about a minute and a half with 74% accuracy. Intel is saying the exploit is on their 10th, 11th, and 12th gen processors which includes Ice Lake but no mention of Sapphire Rapids. This and more on this week's episode of the Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.  

The name Optane is one that should be familiar to almost everyone in the IT industry. Heralded by some as a revolution in computer architecture, the promise of persistent memory seemed to always be just over the horizon. That horizon has faded away this week as Intel made mention in their Q2 earnings report of a winding down of the Optane memory business buried in a forward-looking footnote statuement. The impairment to the bottom line amounted to $559 million which was more than the total quarterly revenue loss reported. Stephen, there's a lot to unpack here. Why is Intel doing away with Optane? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

Time Stamps:  

Follow our hosts on Social Media

Follow Gestalt IT