The Channel Company

Sponsored by:

Visit AMD Visit Supermicro

Performance Intensive Computing

Capture the full potential of IT

Research Roundup: Cloud infrastructure, smart supply chains, augmented reality, AI tools

Featured content

Research Roundup: Cloud infrastructure, smart supply chains, augmented reality, AI tools

Get briefed on the latest IT market surveys, forecasts and analysis. 

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:

Cloud infrastructure sales are booming. Most supply-chain managers don’t have an AI strategy yet. VR/AR is making a surprising comeback. And nearly half of U.S. adults use GenAI tools.

That’s some of the latest from leading IT market watchers, survey organizations and analysts. And here’s your research roundup. 

Cloud Infrastructure Booming

The market for cloud infrastructure services is robust, with global sales hitting $90.9 billion in this year’s first quarter, a year-on-year rise of 21%, finds market watcher Canalys.

What’s behind the boom? AI, mostly. Canalys says enterprises realize that to deploy AI applications, they first need to strengthen their cloud power.

Also, cloud providers are working to lower the cost of AI usage, in part by investing in infrastructure. In the year’s first quarter, the big three cloud-service providers—AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—collectively increased their spending on cloud infrastructure by 24%, according to Canalys.

Few Supply Chains Have AI Strategies

While AI has the potential to transform supply chains, fewer than one in four supply-chain leaders (23%) have a formal AI strategy in place. So finds a new survey by research firm Gartner.

And that’s a problem, says Gartner researcher Benjamin Jury. “Without a structured approach,” he warns, “organizations risk creating inefficient systems that struggle to scale and adapt to evolving business demands.”

The Gartner survey was conducted earlier this year. It reached 120 supply-chain leaders who have deployed AI in their organizations within the last year.

How can supply-chain leaders do better with AI? Gartner recommends three moves:

  • Develop a formal supply-chain AI strategy. It should be both defined and documented.
  • Adopt a Run-Grow-Transform framework. By implementing projects in all three states, organizations can better allocate resources and deliver quick results.
  • Invest in AI-ready infrastructure. Do this in collaboration with the CIO and other executives.

Virtual Reality’s Comeback

Remember all the excitement about virtual and augmented reality? It’s back.

The global market for AR/VR headsets rebounded in this year’s first quarter, with unit shipments rising 18% year-on-year, according to research firm IDC.

Meta, which changed its name from Facebook in 2021 to reflect the shift, now leads the AR/VR business with a 51% market share, IDC finds.

What’s behind the VR comeback? “The market is clearly shifting toward more immersive and versatile experiences,” offers Jitesh Ubrani, an IDC research manager.

Ubrani and colleagues expect even bigger gains ahead. IDC predicts global sales of AR/VR headsets will more than double by 2026, rising from about 5 million units this year to more than 10 million units next year.

IDC also expects the market to shift away from AR and VR and instead toward mixed reality (MR) and extended reality (ER). MR appeals mainly to gamers and consumers. ER will be used for gaming, too, but it should also power smart glasses, enabling AI to assist tasks such as identifying objects in photos and providing instant language translations.

IDC predicts smart glasses will enjoy wide appeal among consumers and businesses alike. Just last week, Meta and sunglasses maker Oakley announced what they call Performance AI glasses, featuring a built-in camera and open-ear speakers.

Do You Use GenAI?

The chances either way are almost even. More than one in four U.S. adults (44%) do use Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT at least sometimes. But over half (56%) never use these tools or only rarely.

Similarly, U.S. adults are split on whether AI will make life better or worse: 42% believe AI will make their lives somewhat or much worse, while a very close 44% think AI will make their lives somewhat or much better.

These findings come from a new NBC News poll. Powered by Survey Monkey, the poll was conducted from May 30 to June 10, and it received responses from more than 19,400 U.S. adults.

Respondents were also evenly split when asked about the role of AI in schools. Slightly over half the respondents (53%) said integrating AI tools in the classroom would prepare students for the future. Conversely, nearly as many (47%) said they favor prohibiting AI in the classroom.

The NBC survey found that attitudes toward AI were unaffected by political leanings. The pollsters asked respondents whether they were Republicans, Democrats or Independents. Differences in responses by political leaning were mostly within the poll’s overall margin of error, which NBC News put at plus or minus 2.1%.

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Tech Explainer: What’s special about an AI server?

Featured content

Tech Explainer: What’s special about an AI server?

What’s in an AI server that a general-purpose system lacks?

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:
  • Featured Technologies:

The Era of Artificial Intelligence requires its own class of servers, and rightly so. The AI tech that increasingly powers our businesses, finance, entertainment and scientific research is some of the most resource-intensive in history. Without AI servers, all this would grind to a halt.

But why? What’s so special about AI servers? And how are they able to power successive evolutions of large language models, generative AI, machine learning, and all the other AI-based workloads we’ve come to rely on day in and day out?

Put another way: What do AI servers have that standard servers don’t?

The answer can be summed up in a single word: More.

When it comes to AI servers, it’s all about managing a symphony. The musical instruments include multiple processors, GPUs, memory modules, networking hardware and expansion options.

Sure, your average general-purpose server has many similar components. But both the quantity and performance of each component is considerably lower than those of an AI server. That helps keep the price affordable, heat low, and workload options open. But it certainly doesn’t have the integrated GPU needed to run AI workloads.

Best of the Beasts

Supermicro specializes in the deployment of jaw-dropping power. The company’s newest 8U GPU Server (AS -8126GS-TNMR) is engineered to chew through the world’s toughest AI workloads. It’s powered by dual AMD EPYC processors and eight AMD Instinct MI350X or Instinct MI325X accelerators. This server can tackle AI workloads while staying cool and scaling up to meet increasing demand.

Keeping AI servers from overheating can be a tough job. Even a lowly, multipurpose business server kicks off a lot of heat. Temperatures build up around vital components like the CPU, GPU and storage devices. If that heat hangs around too long, it can lead to performance issues and, eventually, system failure.

Preventing heat-related issues in a single general-purpose server can be accomplished with a few heatsinks and small-diameter fans. But when it comes to high-performance, multi-GPU servers like Supermicro’s new 4U GPU A+ Server (AS -4126GS-NMR-LCC), liquid cooling becomes a must-have.

It’s also vital that AI servers be designed with expansion in mind. When an AI-powered app becomes successful, IT managers must be able to scale up quickly and without interruption.

Supermicro’s H14 8U 8-GPU System sets the standard for scalability. The H14 offers up to 20 storage drives and up to 12 PCI Express 5.0 (PCIe) x16 expansion slots.

Users can fill these high-bandwidth slots with a dizzying array of optional hardware, including:

  • Network Interface Cards (NICs) like the new AI-focused AMD AI NIC for high-speed networking.
  • NVMe storage to provide fast disk access.
  • Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) modules, which can be set up for custom computation and reconfigured after deployment.
  • Monitoring and control management cards. These enable IT staff to power servers on and off remotely, and also access BIOS settings.
  • Additional GPUs to aid in AI training and inferencing.
  • AI Accelerators. The AMD Instinct series is designed to tackle computing for AI, both training and inference.

A Different Class of Silicon

Hardware like the Supermicro GPU Server epitomizes what it means to be an AI server. That’s due in part to the components it’s designed to house. We’re talking about some of the most advanced processing tech available today.

As mentioned above, that tech comes courtesy of AMD, whose 5th Gen AMD EPYC 9005 series processors and recently announced AMD Instinct MI350 Series GPUs are powerful enough to tackle any AI workload.

AMD’s Instinct MI350 accelerators deliver a 4x generation-on-generation AI compute increase and a 35x generational leap in inferencing.

Say the word, and Supermicro will pack your AI Server with dual AMD EPYC processors containing up to 192 cores. They’ll install the latest AMD Instinct M1350X platform with 8 GPUs, fill all 24 DIMM slots with 6TB of DDR5 memory, and add an astonishing 16 NVMe U.2 drives. 

Advances Just Around the Corner

It seems like each new day brings stories about bold advances in AI. Apparently, our new robot friends may have the answer to some very human questions like, how can we cure our most insidious diseases? And how do we deal with the looming threat of climate crisis?

The AI models that could answer those questions—not to mention the ones that will help us find even better movies on Netflix—will require more power as they grow.

To meet those demands, AI server engineers are already experimenting with the next generation of advanced cooling for dense GPU clusters, enhanced hardware-based security, and new, more scalable modular infrastructure.

In fact, AI server designers have begun using their own AI models to create bigger and better AI servers. How very meta.

Do More:

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Meet Supermicro’s newest AI servers, powered by AMD Instinct MI350 Series GPUs

Featured content

Meet Supermicro’s newest AI servers, powered by AMD Instinct MI350 Series GPUs

Supermicro’s new AI servers are powered by a combination of AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:
  • Featured Technologies:

Supermicro didn’t waste any time supporting AMD’s new Instinct MI350 Series GPUs. The same day AMD formally introduced the new GPUs, Supermicro announced two rack-mount servers that support them.

The new servers, members of Supermicro’s H14 generation of GPU optimized solutions, feature dual AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs along with the AMD Instinct MI350 series GPUs. They’re aimed at organizations looking to achieve a formerly tough combination: maximum performance at scale in their AI-driven data centers, but also a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

To make the new servers easy to upgrade and scale, Supermicro has designed the new servers around its proven building-block architecture.

Here’s a quick look at the two new Supermicro servers:

4U liquid-cooled system with AMD Instinct MI355X GPU

This system, model number AS -4126GS-NMR-LCC, comes with a choice of dual AMD EPYC 9005 or 9004 Series CPUs, both with liquid cooling.

On the GPU front, users also have a choice of the AMD Instinct MI325X or brand-new AMD Instinct MI355X. Either way, this server can handle up to 8 GPUs.

Liquid cooling is provided by a single direct-to-chip cold plate. Further cooling comes from 5 heavy-duty fans and an air shroud.

8U air-cooled system with AMD Instinct MI350X GPU

This system, model number AS -8126GS-TNMR, comes with a choice of dual AMD EPYC 9005 or 9004 Series CPUs, both with air cooling.

This system also supports both the AMD Instinct MI325X and AMD Instinct MI350X GPUs. Also like the 4U server, this system supports up to 8 GPUs.

Air cooling is provided by 10 heavy-duty fans and an air shroud.

The two systems also share some features in common. These include PCIe 5.0 connectivity, large memory capacities (up to 2.3TB), and support for both AMD’s ROCm open-source software and AMD Infinity Fabric Link connections for GPUs.

“Supermicro continues to lead the industry with the most experience in delivering high-performance systems designed for AI and HPC applications,” says Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “The addition of the new AMD Instinct MI350 series GPUs to our GPU server lineup strengthens and expands our industry-leading AI solutions and gives customers greater choice and better performance as they design and build the next generation of data centers.”

Do More:

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

AMD presents its vision for the AI future: open, collaborative, for everyone

Featured content

AMD presents its vision for the AI future: open, collaborative, for everyone

Check out the highlights of AMD’s Advancing AI event—including new GPUs, software and developer resources.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:
  • Featured Technologies:

AMD advanced its AI vision at the “Advancing AI” event on June 12. The event, held live in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose, Calif., as well as online, featured presentations by top AMD executives and partners.

As many of the speakers made clear, AMD’s vision for AI is that it be open, developer-friendly, collaborative and useful to all.

AMD certainly believes the market opportunity is huge. During the day’s keynote, CEO Lisa Su said AMD now believes the total addressable market (TAM) for data-center AI will exceed $500 billion by as soon as 2028.

And that’s not all. Su also said she expects AI to move beyond the data center, finding new uses in edge computers, PCs, smartphone and other devices.

To deliver on this vision, Su explained, AMD is taking a three-pronged approach to AI:

  • Offer a broad portfolio of compute solutions.
  • Invest in an open development ecosystem.
  • Deliver full-stack solutions via investments and acquisitions.

The event, lasting over two hours, was also filled with announcements. Here are the highlights.

New: AMD Instinct MI350 Series

At the Advancing AI event, CEO Su formally announced the company’s AMD Instinct MI350 Series GPUs.

There are two models, the MI350X and MI355X. Though both are based on the same silicon, the MI355X supports higher thermals.

These GPUs, Su explained, are based on AMD’s 4th gen Instinct architecture, and each GPU comprises 10 chiplets containing a total of 185 billion transistors. The new Instinct solutions can be used for both AI training and AI inference, and they can also be configured in either liquid- or air-cooled systems.

Su said the MI355X delivers a massive 35x general increase in AI performance over the previous-generation Instinct MI300. For AI training, the Instinct MI355X offers up to 3x more throughput than the Instinct MI300. And in comparison with a leading competitive GPU, the new AMD GPU can create up to 40% more tokens per dollar.

AMD’s event also featured several representatives of companies already using AMD Instinct MI300 GPUs. They included Microsoft, Meta and Oracle.

Introducing ROCm 7 and AMD Developer Cloud

Vamsi Boppana, AMD’s senior VP of AI, announced ROCm 7, the latest version of AMD’s open-source AI software stack. ROCm 7 features improved support for industry-standard frameworks; expanded hardware compatibility; and new development tools, drivers, APIs and libraries to accelerate AI development and deployment.

Earlier in the day, CEO Su said AMD’s software efforts “are all about the developer experience.” To that end, Boppana introduced the AMD Developer Cloud, a new service designed for rapid, high-performance AI development.

He also said AMD is giving developers a 25-hour credit on the Developer Cloud with “no strings.” The new AMD Developer Cloud is generally available now.

Road Map: Instinct MI400, Helios rack, Venice CPU, Vulcano NIC

During the last segment of the AMD event, Su gave attendees a sneak peek at several forthcoming products:

  • Instinct MI400 Series: This GPU is being designed for both large-scale AI inference and training. It will be the heart of the Helios rack solution (see below) and provide what Su described as “the engine for the next generation of AI.” Expect performance of up to 40 petaflops, 432GB of HBM4 memory, and bandwidth of 19.6TB/sec.
  • Helios: The code name for a unified AI rack solution coming in 2026. As Su explained it, Helios will be a rack configuration that functions like a single AI engine, incorporating AMD’s EPYC CPU, Instinct GPU, Pensando Pollara network interface card (NIC) and ROCm software. Specs include up to 72 GPUs in a rack and 31TB of HBM3 memory.
  • Venice: This is the code name for the next generation of AMD EPYC server CPUs, Su said. They’ll be based on a 2nm form, feature up to 256 cores, and offer a 1.7x performance boost over the current generation.
  • Vulcano: A future NIC, it will be built using a 3nm form and feature speeds of up to 800Gb/sec.

Do More:

 

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Research Roundup: Tariffs, the data center next door, agentic supply chains, cyber AI, and ransomware

Featured content

Research Roundup: Tariffs, the data center next door, agentic supply chains, cyber AI, and ransomware

Catch up on the latest IT market research and analysis.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:

U.S. tariffs could slow IT spending worldwide. Many Americans are okay with a data center next door. Supply chains could start making decisions on their own. AI is both a dangerous cyber threat and a great cyber defense. And ransomware continues to morph.

That’s some of the latest from leading IT market watchers. And here’s your research roundup:

Tariff Tremors

Uncertainty related to President Trump’s tariffs has led IT market watcher IDC to lower its estimate for global IT spending this year.

At the start of this year, IDC had expected global IT spending to rise by 10% this year. Then, in March, the company lowered that, saying spending would grow by just 5%. Now IDC, citing rising uncertainty over tariffs, is hedging its bet, pegging growth at anywhere from 5% to 9%.

Regardless of the exact impact on overall IT spending, IDC feels confident that tariffs will indeed have an impact on the IT industry.

In an April blog post, four IDC analysts wrote, “New tariffs will have an inflationary impact on technology prices in the U.S., as well as causing significant disruption to supply chains.”  

The impact of tariffs should be felt most immediately in compute, storage and network hardware as well as datacenter construction, the IDC analysts wrote, adding: “Even sectors such as software and services will be affected if tariffs are longer lived.”

Data Center NIMBY? No

Seven in 10 Americans say they’re comfortable with a data center being built within a few miles of their home—that is, if it’s done sustainably and with community input.

That’s from a survey of 600 U.S. adults conducted for Modine, a provider of thermal-management products.

The survey’s key findings include:

  • Nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say they’d be fine with a data center being built within five miles of their home.
  • Americans’ top concerns about having a data center nearby are: increased energy demand (cited by 63% of respondents); noise pollution (60%); and lower property values (52%).
  • About six in 10 respondents (62%) say they’d like local data-center owners to contribute to community initiatives such as schools and infrastructure.
  • Slightly over half the respondents (55%) favor tax breaks to encourage responsible data-center development.

Agentic AI & Supply Chains

You may have already heard the term agentic AI. It refers to the idea that artificial intelligence systems can operate autonomously, without human intervention.

IT research firm Gartner predicts that fully half of all supply-chain management solutions will include agentic AI capabilities, and by as soon as 2030. This means future supply-chain systems will use intelligent agents to make and act on decisions, all without a human’s oversight.

Further, these agentic AI systems will provide what Gartner calls a virtual workforce. AI agents will assist, offload and augment human work along with more traditional software applications.

Gartner also says agentic AI systems could help supply-chain managers improve efficiency and contribute more to their organizations’ profit growth. Mainly, by enhancing resource efficiency, automating complex tasks, and introducing new business models.

“AI agents will autonomously complete tasks without relying on explicit inputs or predefined outcomes,” says Kaitlynn Sommers, a senior analyst at Gartner. “Agents will continuously learn from real-time data and adapt to evolving conditions and complex demands.”

AI: Both Cyber Friend and Cyber Foe

AI is both the greatest threat to cybersecurity and cybersecurity’s greatest defense, say management consultants McKinsey & Co.

AI is reshaping the cybersecurity landscape, write four McKinsey analysts in a new blog post. This technology brings new opportunities, as well as new threats.

For one, conducting a cyberattack is relatively fast and easy with AI. Criminals can use AI to create convincing phishing emails, fake websites and deepfake videos. They can also use machine learning to observe an attack, then modify their tactics based on the results, making future attacks more effective.

But AI is also what McKinsey calls a “game changer” for cybersecurity defense. Organizations can use AI to detect, react to, and recover from attacks with greater speed. And AI-driven anomaly detection can help organizations detect cyberattacks before they escalate.

Integration of AI into cybersecurity solutions is vital, McKinsey says. Especially because more than nine in 10 AI capabilities will come from third-party vendors. With integration, AI can be added to mainstream cyber tools such as zero trust, SASE and security-posture management.

The State of Ransomware: Slightly Worse

Ransomware is getting worse. In 2024, the percentage of users worldwide who were affected by ransomware increased by nearly half a percentage point, says security firm Kaspersky in 2025 “State of Ransomware” report. That may sound like a small increase, but ransomware criminals focus on quality of their victims rather than the quantity.

The frequency of attacks varies greatly by geographical region, Kaspersky finds. The highest rate is found in the Middle East, where nearly one in 100 users (0.72%) were attacked in 2024. Next worse was APAC, with an attack rate of 0.6%. The global average was 0.44%.

“Ransomware is one of the most pressing cybersecurity threats facing organizations today,” says Dmitry Galov, head of a Kaspersky research center. “Building cyber awareness at every level is just as important as investing in the right technology.”

New ransomware trends identified by Kaspersky:

  • AI use: Ransomware groups are using AI tools to enhance development and evade detection. One example is FunkSec, a group that uses AI to take a contrarian approach to ransomware; instead of attacking a few high-value targets, FunkSec makes many attacks for low ransoms.
  • Ransomware-as-a-Service: Criminals who lack technical development skills can now just buy a ransomware package on the dark web. There are even ransomware platforms that offer malware, tech support and even revenue-sharing affiliate programs.
  • Unconventional vulnerabilities: Attackers are increasingly targeting overlooked entry points. These include IoT devices, smart appliances and misconfigured hardware. In this way, the bad guys can capitalize on expanding attack surfaces created by interconnected systems.
  • LLM proliferation: Criminals can take advantage of large language models sold on the dark web, which lower the technical barriers to creating malicious code, phishing campaigns and social-engineering attacks. One example is LowCode, which provides an AI-assisted drag-and-drop interface for software development.

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Tech Explainer: What’s a NIC? And how can it empower AI?

Featured content

Tech Explainer: What’s a NIC? And how can it empower AI?

With the acceleration of AI, the network interface card is playing a new, leading role.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:
  • Featured Technologies:

The humble network interface card (NIC) is getting a status boost from AI.

At a fundamental level, the NIC enables one computing device to communicate with others across a network. That network could be a rendering farm run by a small multimedia production house, an enterprise-level data center, or a global network like the internet.

From smartphones to supercomputers, most modern devices use a NIC for this purpose. On laptops, phones and other mobile devices, the NIC typically connects via a wireless antenna. For servers in enterprise data centers, it’s more common to connect the hardware infrastructure with Ethernet cables.

Each NIC—or NIC port, in the case of an enterprise NIC—has its own media access control (MAC) address. This unique identifier enables the NIC to send and receive relevant packets. Each packet, in turn, is a small chunk of a much larger data set, enabling it to move at high speeds.

Networking for the Enterprise

At the enterprise level, everything needs to be highly capable and powerful, and the NIC is no exception. Organizations operating full-scale data centers rely on NICs to do far more than just send emails and sniff packets (the term used to describe how a NIC “watches” a data stream, collecting only the data addressed to its MAC address).

Today’s NICs are also designed to handle complex networking tasks onboard, relieving the host CPU so it can work more efficiently. This process, known as smart offloading, relies on several functions:

  • TCP segmentation offloading: This breaks big data into small packets.
  • Checksum offloading: Here, the NIC independently checks for errors in the data.
  • Receive side scaling: This helps balance network traffic across multiple processor cores, preventing them from getting bogged down.
  • Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA): This process bypasses the CPU and sends data directly to GPU memory.

Important as these capabilities are, they become even more vital when dealing with AI and machine learning (ML) workloads. By taking pressure off the CPU, modern NICs enable the rest of the system to focus on running these advanced applications and processing their scads of data.

This symbiotic relationship also helps lower a server’s operating temperature and reduce its power usage. The NIC does this by increasing efficiency throughout the system, especially when it comes to the CPU.

Enter the AI NIC

Countless organizations both big and small are clamoring to stake their claims in the AI era. Some are creating entirely new AI and ML applications; others are using the latest AI tools to develop new products that better serve their customers.

Either way, these organizations must deal with the challenges now facing traditional Ethernet networks in AI clusters. Remember, Ethernet was invented over 50 years ago.

AMD has a solution: a revolutionary NIC it has created for AI workloads, the AMD AI NIC card. Recently released, this NIC card is designed to provide the intense communication capabilities demanded by AI and ML models. That includes tightly coupled parallel processing, rapid data transfers and low-latency communications.

AMD says its AI NIC offers a significant advancement in addressing the issues IT managers face as they attempt to reconcile the broad compatibility of an aging network technology with modern AI workloads. It’s a specialized network accelerator explicitly designed to optimize data transfer within back-end AI networks for GPU-to-GPU communication.

To address the challenges of AI workloads, what’s needed is a network that can support distributed computing over multiple GPU nodes with low jitter and RDMA. The AMD AI NIC is designed to manage the unique communication patterns of AI workloads and offer high throughput across all available links. It also offers congestion avoidance, reduced tail latency, scalable performance, and fast job-completion times.

Validated NIC

Following rigorous validation by the engineers at Supermicro, the AMD AI NIC is now supported on the Supermicro 8U GPU Server (AS -8126GS-TNMR). This behemoth is designed specifically for AI, deep learning, high-performance computing (HPC), industrial automation, retail and climate modeling.

In this configuration, AMD’s smart AI-focused NIC can offload networking tasks. This lets the Supermicro SuperServer’s dual AMD EPYC 9000-series processors run at even higher efficiency.

In the Supermicro server, the new AMD AI NIC occupies one of the myriad PCI Express x16 slots. Other optional high-performance PCIe cards include a CPU-to-GPU interconnect and up to eight AMD Instinct GPU accelerators.

In the NIC of time

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The chain that connects our ever-expanding global network of AI operations is strengthened by the advent of NICs focused on AI.

As NICs grow more powerful, these advanced network interface cards will help fuel the expansion of the AI/ML applications that power our homes, offices, and everything in between. They’ll also help us bypass communication bottlenecks and speed time to market.

For SMBs and enterprises alike, that’s good news indeed.

Do More:

1

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Meet AMD’s new EPYC CPUs for SMBs—and Supermicro servers that support them

Featured content

Meet AMD’s new EPYC CPUs for SMBs—and Supermicro servers that support them

AMD introduced the AMD EPYC 4005 series processors for SMBs and cloud service providers. And Supermicro announced that the new AMD processors are now shipping in several of its servers.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:
  • Featured Technologies:

AMD this week introduced the AMD EPYC 4005 series processors. These are purpose-built CPUs designed to bring enterprise-level features and performance to small and medium businesses.

And Supermicro, wasting no time, also announced that several of its servers are now shipping with the new AMD EPYC 4005 CPUs.

EPYC 4005

The new AMD EPYC 4005 series processors are intended for on-prem users and cloud service providers who need powerful but cost-effective solutions in a 3U height form factor.

Target customers include SMBs, departmental and branch-office server users, and hosted IT service providers. Typical workloads for servers powered by the new CPUs will include general-purpose computing, dedicated hosting, code development, retail edge deployments, and content creation, AMD says.

“We’re delivering the right balance of performance, simplicity, and affordability,” says Derek Dicker, AMD’s corporate VP of enterprise and HPC. “That gives our customers and system partners the ability to deploy enterprise-class solutions that solve everyday business challenges.”

The new processors feature AMD’s ‘Zen 5’ core architecture and come in a single-socket package. Depending on model, they offer anywhere from 6 to 16 cores; up to 192GB of dual-channel DDR5 memory; 28 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 connectivity; and boosted performance of up to 5.7 GHz. One model of the AMD EPYC 4005 line also includes integrated AMD 3D V-Cache tech for a larger 128MB L3 cache and lower latency.

On a standard 42U rack, servers powered by AMD EPYC 4005 can provide up to 2,080 cores (that’s 13 3U servers x 10 nodes/server x 16 cores/node). That level of capacity can reduce a user’s size requirements while also lowering their TCO.

The new AMD CPUs follow the AMD EPYC 4004 series, introduced this time last year. The EPYC 4004 processors, still available from AMD, use the same AM5 socket as the 4005s.

Supermicro Servers

Also this week, Supermicro announced that several of its servers are now shipping with the new AMD EPYC 4005 series processors. Supermicro also introduced a new MicroCloud 3U server that’s available in 10-node and 5-node versions, both powered by the AMD EPYC 4005 CPUs.

"Supermicro continues to deliver first-to-market innovative rack-scale solutions for a wide range of use cases,” says Mory Lin, Supermicro’s VP of IoT, embedded and edge computing.

Like the AMD EPYC 4005 CPUs, the Supermicro servers are intended for SMBs, departmental and branch offices, and hosted IT service providers.

The new Supermicro MicroCloud 10-node server features single-socket AMD processors (your choice of either 4004 or the new 4005) as well as support for one single-width GPU accelerator card.

Supermicro’s new 5-node MicroCloud server also offers a choice of AMD EPYC 4004 or 4005 series processor. In contrast to the 10-node server, the 5-node version supports one double-width GPU accelerator card.

Supermicro has also added support for the new AMD EPYC 4005 series processors to several of its existing server lines. These servers include 1U, 2U and tower servers.

Have SMB, branch or hosting customers looking for affordable compute power? Tell them to:

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Oil & gas spotlight: Fueling up with AI

Featured content

Oil & gas spotlight: Fueling up with AI

AI is helping industry players that include BP, Chevron and Shell automate a wide range of important use cases. To serve them, AMD and Supermicro offer powerful accelerators and servers.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:
  • Featured Technologies:

What’s artificial intelligence good for? For managers in the oil and gas industry, quite a lot.

Industry players that include Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and Chevron are already using machine learning and AI. Use cases include predictive maintenance, seismic data analysis, reservoir management and safety monitoring, says a recent report by Chirag Bharadwaj of consultants Appinventiv.

AI’s potential benefits for oil and gas companies are substantial. Anurag Jain of AI consultants Oyelabs cites estimates of AI lowering oil production costs by up to $5 a barrel with a 25% productivity gain, and increasing oil reserves by as much as 20% with enhanced resource recovery.

Along the same lines is a recent report from market watcher Global Growth Insights. It says adoption of AI in North American oil shale drilling has increased production efficiency by an impressive 20%.

All this has led Jain of Oyelabs to expect a big increase in the oil and gas industry’s AI spend. He predicts the industry’s worldwide spending on AI will rise from $3 billion last year to nearly $5.3 billion in 2028.

Assuming Jain is right, that would put the oil and gas industry’s AI spend at about 15% of its total IT spend. Last year, the industry spent nearly $20 billion on all IT goods and services worldwide, says Global Growth Insights.

Powerful Solutions

All this AI activity in the oil and gas industry hasn’t passed the notice of AMD and Supermicro. They’re on the case.

AMD is offering the industry its AMD Instinct MI300A, an accelerator that combines CPU cores and GPUs to fuel the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) with AI. And Supermicro is offering rackmount servers driven by this AMD accelerator.

Here are some of the benefits the two companies are offering oil and gas companies:

  • An APU multi-chip architecture that enables dense compute, high-bandwidth memory integration, and chips for both CPU and GPU all in one.
  • Up to 2.6x the HPC performance/watt vs. the older AMD Instinct MI250X.
  • Up to 5.1x the AI-training workload performance with INT8 vs. the AMD Instinct MI250X. (INT8 is a fixed-point representation using 8 bits.)
  • Up to 128GB of unified HBM3 memory dedicated to GPUs. (HBM3 is a high-bandwidth memory chip technology that offers increased bandwidth, memory capacity and power efficiency, all in a smaller form factor.)
  • Double-precision power up to 122.6 TFLOPS with FP64 matrix HPC performance. (FP64 is a double-precision floating point format using 64 bits in memory.)
  • Complete, pre-validated solutions that are ready for rack-scale deployment on day one. These offer the choice of either 2U (liquid cooled) or 4U (air cooled) form factors.
     

If you have customers in oil and gas looking to get into AI, tell them about these Supermicro and AMD solutions.

Do More:

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Tech Explainer: What are bare metal servers?

Featured content

Tech Explainer: What are bare metal servers?

Find out why bare metal servers are an important ingredient for cloud services providers—and why they sometimes offer big advantages over virtualized servers.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:

The term “bare metal” is an apt description for a server class that invites ground-up customization. These machines begin as a blank slate of just hardware. Later, they end up with the power to deliver high-performance computing for enterprise-level applications.

Cloud service providers (CSPs) such as AWS and Google Cloud make available bare metal to provide their customers with single-tenancy servers, virtual machines and containers.

Once a bare metal server is deployed, the end user can install any OS and application software that’s supported by the system. Then they can customize the system to suit their unique needs.

To bare, or not to bare

The customization options and raw power available via bare metal servers make them a particularly good solution for resource-intensive workloads. These includes AI training, machine learning, video rendering, 3D modeling, and complex scientific simulations such as those used to predict the effects of climate change.

These kinds of workloads require consistent CPU and GPU power, high-speed storage and a ton of RAM. With these resources in place, users are free to operate massive databases, data lakes and warehouses.

However, bare metal is not the ideal solution for every use case. It can be complex to set up, meaning a deployment can slow organizations looking for a quick turnaround or rapid pivot.

Most users will also need some experience with system management. That’s because setting up bare metal requires IT managers to install and configure an OS and other vital software from scratch.

Bare metal vs. virtual servers

When choosing between bare metal and virtual servers, IT managers must carefully weigh the pros and cons of each solution.

Virtual solutions can be faster and more agile than bare metal. They also cost less. That makes it easier to launch a project quickly, scale it as demand grows, and tear the whole thing down if things don’t go as planned.

Another pro for virtual solutions is the ability to more cost-effectively create a global deployment. This means IT managers can set up a worldwide network of edge locations or global content delivery network (CDN) distribution in minutes.

Bare metal servers don’t always offer the same speedy deployment. Creating a global network of bare metal servers can end up being more expensive and time-consuming than a virtual solution.

The power of single tenancy

So if virtual servers are so compelling, why opt instead for bare metal? The answer has much to do with what’s known as single tenancy.

Each bare metal server is deployed for a single end user. So the user has access to 100% of the server’s resources.

By comparison, virtual servers provisioned by CSPs are nearly always multi-tenant devices. That means users share the hardware and software resources of the server with other users.

This, in turn, can lead to the “noisy neighbor” effect. This occurs when an application or virtual machine uses the majority of available resources, causing performance issues for neighboring users.

Multi-tenancy also introduces additional security concerns. You can’t always be sure your neighbors are good people. On a virtual server, cyber criminals can more easily hack neighboring applications.

Denying access to those neighbors in the first place means single-tenancy bare metal servers present fewer threat vectors.

Is bare metal really bare?

No, not 100%. But it’s not far off.

As far as the customer of a cloud service provider is concerned, bare metal servers come as bare as they can possibly be.

But CSPs need a way to keep track of usage so they can charge customers accordingly. This is accomplished with a thin layer of software that exists outside the end user’s environment, and it may use a certain (low) number of cores on each CPU.

Using this software, the CSP can monitor server uptime and track bandwidth, processing and storage resources. The management software layer also empowers the provider to provision and reboot the system should the need arise.

Evolving Solutions

Enterprise-grade IT infrastructure is evolving at breakneck speed. That includes bare metal servers, which become faster and more flexible with the release of new processing and storage tech.

That could signal more cost-effective solutions for SMBs hoping to become enterprises if their products achieve mass adoption. After all, the world’s best app will always fail if you can’t serve the data fast enough.

Do More:

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

To make room for AI, modernize your data center

Featured content

To make room for AI, modernize your data center

A new report finds the latest AMD-powered Supermicro servers can modernize the data center, lowering TCO and making room for AI systems.

Learn More about this topic
  • Applications:
  • Featured Technologies:

Did you know that dramatic improvements in processor power can enable your corporate customers to lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) by consolidate servers and modernizing their data centers?

Server consolidation is a hot topic in the context of AI. Many data centers are full and running with all the power that’s available. So how can they make room for new AI systems? Also, how can they get the kind of power that today’s AI systems require?

One answer: with consolidation. 

Four in One

All this is especially relevant in light of a new report from Principled Technologies.

The report, prepared for AMD, finds that an organization that upgrades to new Supermicro servers powered by the current 5th generation AMD EPYC processors can consolidate servers on a 4:1 ratio.

In other words, the level of performance that previously required four older servers can now be delivered with just one.

Further, Principled found that organizations that make this upgrade can also free up data-center space; lower operating costs by up to $2.8 million over five years; shrink power-consumption levels; and reduce the maintenance load on sys admins.

Testing Procedures

Here’s how Principled figured all this out. To start, they obtained two systems:

Next, Principled’s researchers compared the transactional database performance of the two servers. They did this with HammerDB TPROC-C, an open-source benchmarking tool for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads.

To ensure the systems were sufficiently loaded, Principled also measured both servers’ CPU and power utilization rates, pushing both servers to 80% CPU core utilization.

Then Principled calculated a consolidation ratio. That is, how many of the older servers would be needed to do the same level of work done by just 1 new server?

Finally, Principled calculated the expected 5-year costs for software licensing, power, space and maintenance. These calculations were made for both the older and new Supermicro servers, so they could be compared.

The Results

So what did Principled find? Here are the key results:

  • Performance upgrades: The new servers, based on AMD 5th Gen EPYC processors, is much more powerful. To match the database performance of just 1 new server, the testers required 4 of the older servers.
  • Lower operating costs: Consolidating those four older servers onto just one new server could lower an organization’s TCO by over 60%, saving up to an estimated $2.8 million over five years. The estimated 5-year TCO for the legacy server was $4.68 million, compared with $1.78 million for the new system.
  • Lower software license costs: Much of the savings would come from consolidating software licenses. They’re typically charged on a per-core basis, and the new test server needed only about a third as many cores as did the four older systems: 96 cores on the new system, compared with a total of 256 cores on the four older servers.
  • Reduced power consumption: To run the same benchmark, the new system needed only about 40% of the power required by the four older servers.
  • Lower space and cooling requirements: Space savings were calculated by comparing data-center footprint costs, taking into account the 4:1 consolidation and rack space needed. Cooling costs were factored in, too. The savings here were pretty dramatic, even if the figures were relatively low. The new system’s space costs were just $476, or 75% lower than the legacy system’s cost of $1,904.
  • Reduced maintenance costs: This was estimated with the assumption that one full-time sys admin with an annual salary of roughly $100K is responsible for 100 servers. The savings here brought a cost of over $26K for the older setup down to about $6,500 for the new, for a reduction of 75%.

Implicit in the results, though not actually calculated, is the way these reductions could also free up funding, floor space and other resources that organizations can then use for new AI systems.

So if your customers are grappling with finding new resources for AI, tell them about these test results. Upgrading to servers based on the latest processors could be the answer.

Do More:

 

 

 

Featured videos

Events


Find AMD & Supermicro Elsewhere

Related Content

Pages