2019 Year in Review – Al Rasheed

Al Rasheed takes a look back at a busy 2019 in this post. It was truly a year of accomplishments, with new certifications and getting involved with more tech community groups. We were lucky enough to have Al as a delegate at several Field Day events throughout the year. We can’t wait to see him at more in 2020.

Need Memory, Intel’s Optane DC PM to the Rescue

Intel’s Optane DC PM was one of the highlight announcements from Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data Centric Innovation Day. In this post, Ray Lucchesi breaks down how Optane works in memory on a server. This allows for up to to 3TB of Optane memory per socket, with latency roughly between DRAM and traditional NAND Flash. He breaks down the different modes the storage-class memory can operate in, what the durability looks like, and how it will impact enterprise applications.

The Intel Event and What It Means for the Future

Nathaniel Avery attended Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day as a delegate for our Tech Field Day Exclusive. He not only got to hear all the big announcements from it, but see in-depth technical presentations as well. For Nathaniel, any one of the announcements would have been big news. By launching major new products and updates across compute, persistent storage, and networking, he sees it as a huge overall leap in server capability.

California’s Latest Gold Rush – Google and Intel Dig in to Tap the AI Business Market Seam

Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day had no dearth of prominent announcements. So much so that some with the biggest impact might have gotten lost in the media narrative. Kurt Marko thinks one of the major announcements was Intel integrating AI-optimizations into their new Scalable Xeons with DL Boost. This allows Intel to use their x86 data center dominance into AI inferencing engines. For a deeper dive into this, be sure to check out the full video from our Tech Field Day Exclusive at the event.

Servers Running Too Slow, Just Add All the Cores!

Denny Cherry was a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day, where he got to see a lot of major announcements from the company. One that stood out was the updates to the Scalable Xeon line, which now offer up to 56 cores. Throw in support for hyperthreading and up to 8 CPUs on a single motherboard, and you can throw around some serious core counts. Denny sees these as new CPUs as excellent solutions for public cloud providers, who can now easily add compute density in a manageable power envelope.

Intel’s New DL Boost for DL AI Inferencing

As a delegate attending the Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day, Ray Lucchesi heard a lot of major announcements from Intel. In this post, he’s focusing on one announcement that didn’t get the most press after the event: DL Boost. This provides a new 8-bit integer instruction that accelerate DL inferencing. This is a major step to stay relevant in the data center, because Intel estimates that more than 50% of AI workloads will involve inferencing before too long. Ray breaks down the technical implementation and where it may run into some potential issues. It’s a great overview.