IT Computing
Just over a year ago, NVIDIA announced its intentions to acquire Mellanox, a leading datacenter networking and interconnect provider. And, after going through some prolonged regulatory hurdles, including approval by the Chinese government as well as a waiting period in the United States, NVIDIA has now closed on the deal as of this morning. All told, NVIDIA is pricing the final acquisition at a cool 7 billion dollars, all in cash. Overall, in the intervening year, NVIDIA’s reasoning for acquiring the networking provider has not changed: the company believes that a more vertically integrated product stack that includes high-speed networking hardware will allow them to further grow their business, especially as GPU-powered supercomputers and other HPC clusters get more prominent. To that end, it’s hard...
OpenCompute servers and AMD Open 3.0
Remember our review of Facebook's first OpenCompute Server? Facebook designed a server for their own purposes, but quickly released all the specs to the community. The result was a...
10 by Johan De Gelas on 1/16/2013Behind the Scenes of AnandTech's Server Tests [Video]
We've been quietly testing doing more video content on the site over the past year. I've done a few reviews over at our YouTube channel, and we also host...
30 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/18/2012Updating the 2012 AnandTech SMB / SOHO NAS Testbed
In early September, we published a piece detailing our SMB / SOHO NAS testbed. Subsequently, we received extensive feedback from readers regarding the testbed as well as the proposed...
24 by Ganesh T S on 11/29/2012AnandTech/Intel S3700 Roundtable Discussion & Webcast Videos Live
Intel invited me to attend SC12 and participate in a webcast for the launch of its new DC S3700 SSD. I joined Roger Peene from Intel's SSD Solutions and...
33 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/16/2012The Xeon Phi at work at TACC
The Xeon Phi family of co-processors was announced in June, but Intel finally disclosed additional details about the first shipping implementation of Larrabee. In this short article we'll go...
47 by Johan De Gelas on 11/14/2012Synology Launches SAS-Enabled Flagship 10-bay 2U RS10613xs+ NAS and RX1213sas Expander
Synology is a well respected brand in the low to mid-range NAS market. However, they missed a high-end flagship in their lineup to compete against products such as the...
4 by Ganesh T S on 11/13/2012Titan Takes #1 Spot on Top500 List with 17.59 Petaflops in LINPACK
Last month I took a tour of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and visited the final stages of the assembly of the Titan supercomputer. Titan brings together 18,688 compute nodes...
20 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/12/2012The Intel SSD DC S3700 (200GB) Review
When Intel arrived on the scene with its first SSD, it touted superiority in controller, firmware and NAND as the reason it was able to so significantly outperform the...
30 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2012The Intel SSD DC S3700: Intel's 3rd Generation Controller Analyzed
Today Intel is announcing its first SSD based on its own custom 6Gbps SATA controller. This new controller completely abandons the architecture of the old X25-M/320/710 SSDs and adopts...
43 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/5/2012AMD Launches Opteron 6300 series with "Piledriver" cores
Today AMD unveiled its new Opteron 6300 series server processors, code name "Abu Dhabi". The Opteron 6300 contains the new Piledriver cores, an evolutionary improvement of the Bulldozer cores. We...
22 by Johan De Gelas on 11/5/2012Inside the Titan Supercomputer: 299K AMD x86 Cores and 18.6K NVIDIA GPUs
Earlier this month I drove out to Oak Ridge, Tennessee to pay a visit to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). I'd never been to a national lab before...
130 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/31/2012ARM's Cortex A57 and Cortex A53: The First 64-bit ARMv8 CPU Cores
Yesterday AMD revealed that in 2014 it would begin production of its first ARMv8 based 64-bit Opteron CPUs. At the time we didn't know what core AMD would use...
118 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/30/2012AMD Will Build 64-bit ARM based Opteron CPUs for Servers, Production in 2014
Last year AMD officially became an ARM licensee, although the deal wasn't publicized at the time. Fast forward to June 2012 and we saw the first fruits of that...
32 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/29/2012Iomega StorCenter NAS Lineup Refresh: 2-bay px2-300d and 4-bay ix4-300d
Iomega's network storage family consists of three lineups: ARM-based EZ single-bay network attached hard disk for home users ARM-based ix series for value-focused consumers x86-based px series for performance-focused consumers (These come...
16 by Ganesh T S on 10/18/2012Boston Viridis ARM Server Gets x86 Binary Translation Support
We covered the launch of the Calxeda-based Boston Viridis ARM server back in July. The server is makings its appearance at the UK IP EXPO 2012. Boston has been...
14 by Ganesh T S & Johan De Gelas on 10/18/2012Synology Launches 12-bay DS2413+ and Wi-Fi Enabled 2-bay DS213air
Synology has been on a tear lately, with product launches happening in quick succession. Approximately a month back, we had the launch of the 2013 2-bay lineup (DS213 and...
14 by Ganesh T S on 10/2/2012Making Sense of the Intel Haswell Transactional Synchronization eXtensions
Intel has released additional information regarding the Transactional Synchronization technology (TSX) inside their upcoming Haswell processor; it's basically an instruction set architecture (ISA) extension to make hardware accelerated transactional...
29 by Johan De Gelas on 9/20/2012ioSafe N2: A Disaster Proof NAS with Synology DSM
ioSafe used to manufacture disaster proof NAS solutions / backup appliances such as the ioSafe R4. The R4s used to cost upwards of $10K, weighed more than 120 lbs...
15 by Ganesh T S on 9/18/2012Synology Launches DS413 and DS413j 4-Bay NAS Units
A couple of weeks back, we covered Synology's launch of the 2013 2-bay NAS lineup, the DS213 and the DS213+. The most interesting aspect of the launch was the...
7 by Ganesh T S on 9/18/2012Breaking the SATA Barrier: SATA Express and SFF-8639 Connectors
Pretty much all high-end client SSDs have no issues saturating the current 6Gbps SATA interface. We've talked about a move to PCIe based SSDs but these are the connectors...
20 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/13/2012