For some time I’ve been publishing a Flipboard Magazine at the companies I’ve worked for where I collect interesting articles that come across my RSS feed and aggregate them into a magazine that I publish on a (mostly) weekly basis. It’s a great way to expose the field and go-to-market teams to a lot of information that is relevant to the industry we work in. I also find it useful as a reference point for announcements about products and solutions I’m interested in. So given my current “FunEmployment” situation, I figured I’d just start posting it here on the old blog that has languished for some time. As for the title, well my tenure at Fungible, Inc. has ended. You can read about it on Blocks and Files, but suffice to say, I was caught up in the RIF that just occurred. These things happen, and you can’t dwell on it. So I plan to take a bit of time and start looking for opportunities (If you know of one shoot me a note). Enjoy this weeks edition. If you like it, please subscribe and you will get updates when the magazine publishes.
Ok onto this weeks edition (click the link)
Top Ten Stories For This Week:
- AMD Pensando Giglio DPU for 2023 Salina DPU in 2024 and AMD EPYC
- BRINGING AWS-STYLE DPU OFFLOAD TO THE VMWARE BASE
- Dell Servers with NVIDIA DPUs and VMware vSphere 8 Announced
- AMD’s latest data processing chips to support VMware vSphere 8
- VMware reckons 20% of server cores can come back to work thanks to vSphere 8 and SmartNICs
- NetApp, VMware join forces in Amazon’s cloud
- DETAILS EMERGE ON NVIDIA’S “GRACE” ARM CPU
- CHINA LAUNCHES THE INEVITABLE INDIGENOUS GPU
- Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34
- THE EXPANDING CXL MEMORY HIERARCHY IS INEVITABLE – AND GOOD ENOUGH
Commentary: VMware Explore (the conference formerly known as VMworld) is in full swing this week and I couldn’t help but notice all the announcements from DPU manufacturers who have been working for some time now on integrating into the vSphere ecosystem courtesy of Project Monterey. Having spent roughly the last 17 months focused on the DPU market segment, it’s great to see progress being made with this technology and its potential starting to make its way into a more commercial use case. Lots of stuff in this edition, mostly links from the last two weeks. So you have stuff trickling out from VMware Explore as well as HotChips34. DPU’s are starting to gain more traction in the market. When I first saw Project Monterey in 2020 I was intrigued, and I had also just started as an analyst at Gartner and had an opportunity to see some of the early concepts. At the time, it just didn’t jive with me, but the more I dug into the possibilities the more interested I became. To really understand why things are moving in this direction, you have to go back to 2016 when AWS bought Annapurna Labs, which would eventually become AWS Nitro. James Hamilton (whose work is high on my list of truly amazing things) posted a good video last week about the evolution of Silicon for AWS and its really worth watching because it hones in on the challenges of introducing new silicon into the data center, but it also illustrates why new silicon is needed.
One of the primary reasons I joined Fungible was because I believed that the offloading of compute heavy tasks from the commodity x86 CPU to a specialized processor that was designed to perform data centric tasks faster, more efficiently, securely, and at scale was something that was desperately needed. I still believe that, but that is going to require a blog post all by itself. Enjoy this weeks edition.