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Modern workloads are overloading hardware systems, and the CPUs in the market today aren’t up to the task. In this episode of On-Premise IT Podcast recorded on the premises of the Cloud Field Day event in California, host Stephen Foskett is joined by Thomas LaRock, Shala Warner, and Jim Czuprynski from the IT world, to talk about innovation in hardware. The discussion addresses the burning question of whether investing in more specialized hardware will solve the problem. Hear the panel explain how hardware innovation is intertwined with software innovation, and how the two components come together to power cutting-edge workloads.
Podcast Information:
- Stephen Foskett is the Publisher of Gestalt IT and Organizer of Tech Field Day, now part of The Futurum Group. Find Stephen’s writing at Gestalt IT and connect with him on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter.
- Thomas LaRock is a data professional technical advocate who specializes in data science. You can connect with Thomas on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter and read more on his website.
- Shala Warner is a Cloud Architect and a DevOps Engineer. You can connect with Shala on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter and learn more about her on her website.
- Jim Czuprynski is the Chief Storyteller at Zero Defect Computing. You can connect with Jim on LinkedIn or on Mastodon and learn more about him on his website.
Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day are now part of The Futurum Group.
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In this episode you talk about the intermediary between hardware and software. That already exists. It’s called firmware. (I believe someone blurted it out briefly.) The ability to update firmware on a hardware component has allowed developers to change the functionality while maintaining the high speed of processing in hardware. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are great examples of this.
The specialized hardware (“accelerators”) that you’re talking about also has been around for a long time and it’s called an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). There is always a pendulum-like swing between using generic CPUs and ASICs. ASIC are very fast but only work on specific tasks, are costly, and take a while to develop. General CPUs are produced in huge volumes which lowers the price, handle many tasks, but are slower due to this generalization. There will always be opportunities to use ASICs to speed up processing.
Broadcom chips are widely used especially in networking but the application that Broadcom is talking about is specially designed to offload work (a great application is security) from the main CPU. This concept has also been around for a long time. One of the earlier examples of the offload is with the Cisco CIP. This allowed the overhead associated with processing TCP/IP traffic to be offloaded from the IBM mainframe host.