Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

The post Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China appeared first on VR World.

Last week ARM invited a group of journalists and analysts to Austin Texas to hear about their server, mobile, and wearable developments. ARM and their partners presented in-depth explanations of their version of the ARM architecture.

On the first day of the conference, HP’s Dwight Barron gave an overview of their Moonshot system.  They have been refining the specifications since its late 2009 inauguration.

Moonshot’s design differs from the traditional servers which have been the general-purpose workhorses of the data center. These boxes have proved to be jacks-of-all-trades, able to run operations for organizations of every shape and size. They started with proprietary operating systems and a warehouse sized room with less computing power than today’s smartphones. In the past, one could choose from several operating systems and server architectures. Today, operating system options are limited and most run on the Intel x86 architecture.

Barron explained that the cloud and mobile applications have changed the assumptions of traditional IT departments. Now IT has to balance rack space density, power consumption, thermal efficiency, and costs. Power is one of the major controlling factors in the data center.

The cloud uses more power than Japan.

The microserver SoC (System on a Chip) typically has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 15 to 20 Watts or below, compared to 90 plus Watts for a high-end server. The microserver chassis has the circuitry related to networking, storage, and cluster communications along with integrated cooling and power supply. Thus, the shared resources reduce the complexity of the overall design.

Barron showed a typical dual processor, HPC server motherboard versus the SoC based Server motherboard. The dual processor general purpose motherboard requires system RAM for the processors, dual GPU’s with their RAM as well as the overhead of a PCIe switch, storage controller, and NICs. Each of those separate chipsets consumes power and creates heat. The SoC server motherboard starts with an integrated die having all those features in silicon, which greatly reduces required power and significantly decreases heat. The SoC cartridge and the Moonshot integration will reduce the latency of the wires between the traditional HPC server’s sub-systems.

New era app focused silicon

To prove that Moonshot is a viable approach, HP put in a production configuration. At the HP.COM website there are approximately 100 applications for browsing and downloads. HP.COM’s website gets approximately 300 million hits per day. It was running on 46 HP legacy servers consuming just over 115,000 Watts per day. Replacing that legacy configuration with six Moonshot systems lowered the power consumption to 6,000 Watts and reduced the rack space usage by 89 percent.

HP 300m hits 94% less power

Barron gave a lengthy explanation of why mobile users and cloud services require application focused silicon for the servers. HP will offer server cartridges from multiple vendors – AMD, Applied Micro, Intel, and Texas Instruments. Applied Micro and Texas Instruments are based on the ARM architecture. This provides customers with the option of picking a server cartridge tailored for specific services, like High Performance Computing (HPC), gaming, telecommunications, finance, seismic imaging, Big Data analysis, web serving, and video analysis, to name a few.

TI  has developed hybrid ARM processors that mix anywhere from one to four Cortex-A15 (32-bit) cores with one to eight TMS320C66x digital signal processors into a single SoC. These combinations in the Moonshot can be used in application specific work such as pure cloud infrastructure workloads – servers, switches, routers, network control planes, and telecommunication switches with applications such as VoIP and LTE.

Applied Micro’s X-Gene 1 eight core SoC with ECC (error-correcting code) memory. The platform is capable of running a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) software stack. The X-Gene implements the ARMv8 ISA which is a full 64-bit architecture that is backwards compatible with 32-bit ARMv7. The CPU features hardware virtualization acceleration, MMU virtualization, and advanced SIMD instructions.

Barron said that ARM architecture and HP’s Moonshot will bring new performance levels and reduced power consumption to the data centers.

There was an interesting announcement in last Friday’s Digitimes. “Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) will establish a joint venture specifically for producing servers for cloud computing and offering related supporting services, according to Foxconn.”
“The partnership reflects innovation in HP’s server business model through combining Foxconn’s R&D capability and manufacturing expertise, with HP’s market leadership in cloud computing products and related services to enable both companies to offer cloud computing solutions which will change existing market game-playing rules, HP CEO Meg Whitman said.”

Paul Teich, CTO and Senior Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy, said, “HP and Foxconn’s partnership should help both of them address substantial challenges in continuing cloud computing R&D investment in spite of purchasing pressures that might lead to a ‘race to the bottom’ for prices and margins.”

BSN is planning a hands-on evaluation of the performance of an HP Moonshot with the Applied Micro X-gene cartridge. We will let you know the results as we did with our May 2011 comparison of ARM to x86.

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