Daily Video: AMD Aims to Reinvigorate x86 Server Business

Today’s topics include a major market strategy shift at AMD, Google’s renewed effort to promote diversity in the workplace, new server chips from Intel and a preview of Microsoft’s Office 365 Import Service.

AMD President and CEO Lisa Su and other company executives recently announced that AMD’s data center will now be one of the three legs of a stool—the others being gaming and immersive computing—that will bring AMD not only back to profitability, but to sustained profitability.

What’s more, the primary focus of that effort will be the x86 server space. The company is eschewing many low-margin businesses, such as low-cost PCs, to invest in areas that require high-performance computing. The x86 server space—particularly with the growing compute-intensive workloads like big data analytics—is one of those areas.

By pledging to invest $150 million in workplace diversity this year, Google has stepped up its efforts to recruit more women and minorities into an employee base that the company has admitted is under-represented in both categories.

In an interview with USA Today, Nancy Lee, Google vice president of people operations, noted the company spent $115 million on promoting diversity in 2014 and was on track to spend another $150 million doing the same this year.

Teradata has introduced enhancements to its database to help enterprises achieve fast query performance for operational and analytical workloads. The company’s tweaks to the Teradata Database’s hybrid row and column capabilities provide quicker access to data stored on columnar tables, which drive faster query performance to deliver the day that supports agile business decision making.

Teradata has made it possible to pinpoint single-row data retrieval for fast tactical queries, which reduces unnecessary row scanning.

Microsoft has announced a public preview of Office 365 Import Service, a new offering that allows organizations to quickly import their Personal Storage Table files into Exchange Online, the company’s cloud-based hosted email platform. PST is a file format used by Microsoft to store email messages, tasks, calendar events and other items.

Danny Popper, program manager for the Office 365 Information Protection Team, explained that the import service has options for both small and large data sets. It currently only works with PST files, but Microsoft expects to support more data types in the future.