Jeff Burt

Nvidia is rolling out its new Tesla K20 family of GPU accelerators for high-performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing environments, offering the scientific community what officials said are more powerful and energy-efficient accelerators for their workloads. Nvidia officials, who unveiled the GPU accelerators Nov. 12 at the SC12 supercomputing show in Salt Lake City, noted that […]

Cray’s massive Titan system is now the world’s fastest supercomputer, knocking off IBM’s Sequoia after only six months in the top position. The Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers was released Nov. 12 at the SC12 supercomputing show in Salt Lake City, and Titan—a Cray XK7 system installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in […]

Supercomputer maker Cray is buying rival Appro for $25 million, a move that will expand Cray’s capabilities in the computer cluster market. Cray executives announced the deal Nov. 9, the same day they released the company’s financial numbers from the third quarter and a day after unveiling the next generation of supercomputers with the introduction […]

Itanium 9500 Intel’s newest high-end Itanium processor, formerly code-named Poulson, offer significant improvements in performance, scalability and energy efficiency. It also holds 3.1 billion transistors. A Closer Look at Itanium Among the key enhancements to the Itanium 9500 is a doubling of the number of processing cores, from four to eight, over the current Itanium […]

Cray, which has used Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices for most of their supercomputers, is now embracing Intel chips for its new XC30 supercomputer line. The XC30—which had been code-named Cascade—is Cray’s next-generation supercomputer product line, and the first of the XC portfolio, which will replace the current XE and XK brands as the […]

Intel officials are unveiling the Itanium 9500 Series chips, the latest iteration of the company’s controversial high-end server processor family, and stressing that this is only the latest step in a road map that will stretch through most of the decade. At an event Nov. 8 in San Francisco, Rory McInerney, vice president and general […]

LifeSize Communications continues to add to the UVC video collaboration platform it rolled out earlier this year, with the most recent enhancements including support for more virtualization options, greater management capabilities and a larger number of endpoints that can connect into the environment. Officials with LifeSize, which is owned by Logitech, announced the improvements Nov. […]

Enterasys Networks is rolling out a new WiFi solution that is aimed at helping organizations deal with the rapid influx of mobile devices onto their wireless networks fueled by the rise of such trends as mobile computing and bring your own device (BYOD). Enterasys’ IdentiFi—which is the wireless part of the company’s larger OneFabric Edge […]

ARM Holdings and Imagination Technologies are divvying up longtime mobile chip designer MIPS Technologies in a move that will bolster each company’s capabilities in the increasingly competitive space. Imagination will buy the business of MIPS and 82 of the patents to its MIPS architecture for about $60 million. The acquisition will enable Imagination, which is […]

Advanced Micro Devices officials, a week after announcing that the company will soon start to make server chips based on ARM Holdings designs, is now unveiling its fastest x86-based Opteron server processors. AMD on Nov. 5 rolled out the Opteron 6300 Series family of processors, aimed at performance-sensitive two- and four-socket servers running in virtualized […]

Brocade is expanding its software-defined networking capabilities by buying Vyatta, whose products and operating system touch on network virtualization, SDNs, and both private and public clouds. The acquisition, announced Nov. 5, will boost Brocade’s efforts to become a leader in the booming SDN and network virtualization market, which is seeing growing activity among both established […]

Intel’s looming competition with ARM in low-power servers came into clearer focus this week. Most significant was the announcement by executives with Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s traditional rival in x86-based processors, that the company will begin making 64-bit ARM chips, as well. AMD will marry the low-power chip designs with the interconnect fabric the company […]