K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
The management of a data centre’s hardware is complex as it requires continuous monitoring and management by information technology (IT) staff, which raises operating expenditure. Any upgrades and new business requirements demand further investments and sometimes huge manual intervention.
Listed below are the key technology trends in hardware impacting the data centre theme, as identified by GlobalData.
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As)
Technological change in the semiconductor sector will drive similar transformation in the data centre industry, with the impetus coming from several acquisitions. The largest in the industry is the $40bn acquisition of Arm by Nvidia, which is subject to regulatory approval that may take until 2022. Arm chips are increasingly used in data centres, where their low power draw can be an advantage.
Another key deal is Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) $35bn purchase of Xilinx, which would expand AMD’s rapidly growing data centre business. Another significant deal was announced in January 2021, with Qualcomm buying custom processing start-up Nuvia for $1.4bn. Qualcomm could use Nuvia’s specialism in server processors to advance into communications infrastructure and data centre applications in the future.
RISC-V
A new global chip standard, RISC-V, has begun to produce breakthroughs in chip design. One RISC-V microprocessor design has a clock speed of 5 gigahertz (GHz), considerably above an Intel Xeon server chip, E7, running at 3.2GHz. The RISC-V chip also burns just a single watt of power at 1.1 volts, a fraction of that used by the Intel Xeon. RISC-V is also enhanced by new instruction sets designed to boost its 3D graphics and artificial intelligence (AI) performance.
The RISC-V prototype is gaining interest because it eliminates a bottleneck that can exist with fast memory and slower chips. At the heart of the breakthrough is that the RISC-V architecture is open, unlike CISC, the instruction-set architecture of Intel’s chips. That facilitates new chip design choices to resolve the bottlenecks that are not possible if a chip’s instructions are locked down. The RISC-V instruction set is also much simpler and has fewer than a hundred instructions, which ultimately makes the chip production process simpler and cheaper.
Edge computing
The rise of edge computing will reshape the data centre landscape. Today’s IP networks cannot handle the high-speed data transmissions that tomorrow’s connected devices will require. Data often travels hundreds of miles over a network between end-users or devices and cloud resources in a traditional IP architecture, which results in latency.
Continue reading: https://www.verdict.co.uk/data-centres-technology-trends-hardware/
Listed below are the key technology trends in hardware impacting the data centre theme, as identified by GlobalData.
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As)
Technological change in the semiconductor sector will drive similar transformation in the data centre industry, with the impetus coming from several acquisitions. The largest in the industry is the $40bn acquisition of Arm by Nvidia, which is subject to regulatory approval that may take until 2022. Arm chips are increasingly used in data centres, where their low power draw can be an advantage.
Another key deal is Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) $35bn purchase of Xilinx, which would expand AMD’s rapidly growing data centre business. Another significant deal was announced in January 2021, with Qualcomm buying custom processing start-up Nuvia for $1.4bn. Qualcomm could use Nuvia’s specialism in server processors to advance into communications infrastructure and data centre applications in the future.
RISC-V
A new global chip standard, RISC-V, has begun to produce breakthroughs in chip design. One RISC-V microprocessor design has a clock speed of 5 gigahertz (GHz), considerably above an Intel Xeon server chip, E7, running at 3.2GHz. The RISC-V chip also burns just a single watt of power at 1.1 volts, a fraction of that used by the Intel Xeon. RISC-V is also enhanced by new instruction sets designed to boost its 3D graphics and artificial intelligence (AI) performance.
The RISC-V prototype is gaining interest because it eliminates a bottleneck that can exist with fast memory and slower chips. At the heart of the breakthrough is that the RISC-V architecture is open, unlike CISC, the instruction-set architecture of Intel’s chips. That facilitates new chip design choices to resolve the bottlenecks that are not possible if a chip’s instructions are locked down. The RISC-V instruction set is also much simpler and has fewer than a hundred instructions, which ultimately makes the chip production process simpler and cheaper.
Edge computing
The rise of edge computing will reshape the data centre landscape. Today’s IP networks cannot handle the high-speed data transmissions that tomorrow’s connected devices will require. Data often travels hundreds of miles over a network between end-users or devices and cloud resources in a traditional IP architecture, which results in latency.
Continue reading: https://www.verdict.co.uk/data-centres-technology-trends-hardware/
