Pat Gelsinger isn’t done cutting just yet. This week brought news of two big changes for Intel. The first was news that Intel will no longer be developing networking switches. You may recall that Intel picked up startup Barefoot Networks back in 2019 and was integrating the Tofino ASIC in a number of products. Intel’s offerings had been facing stiff competition from Nvidia, Broadcom, and others and the move comes as Intel is trying to restructure after a massive loss in Q4 of 2022. Intel has said that the IPUs are going to be a focus area now. Also announced was the end of the Pathfinder for RISC-V program. The announcement came as a surprise to those in the program, only having been disclosed by a notice on the project’s webpage. Intel had been extending an olive branch to the RISC-V community to try and encourage development on the platform that Intel could leverage in their own offerings, such as allowing the code to run on FPGAs. The program was started back in August of 2022 and was supported by most of the large RISC-V companies. Stephen, how do these latest cuts stack up against the moves that Intel has been making? This and more on the Rundown.
0:46 | Dell Orchestrates Acquisition of Cloudify
Dell has picked up an exciting new company to add to their growing cloud services offering. Cloudify is an Israeli startup that focuses on cloud orchestration and automation. The company, which reportedly competed with Dell’s own Enstratius solution, was quietly purchased by Dell for around $100 million. The acquistion was so hush hush, in fact, that Dell didn’t even publicly acknowledge it until SEC paperwork pertaining to stock grants was found by reporters. Stephen, does this mean Dell is solidly working to increase their offerings for customers looking for hybrid cloud solutions?
Read More: Dell has acquired cloud orchestration startup Cloudify, sources tell us for up to $100M
3:14 | Sysdig Rocks Ransomware with Falco
Sysdig is a big name in the container security space and part of the reason why is the way they’ve embraced open source tools. One of those is Falco, a container build and runtime monitor. This open source offering can feed Sysdig with information like IP addresses used by containers, connections, and other types of information. That data can be analyzed by Sysdig to find things that shouldn’t be happening in your container farm. Tom, how important is it to find these problems quickly?
Read More: Sysdig’s open-source Falco draws on AIOps, data security to fight ransomware
6:02 | WD Doubles Up on Drive Actuators
Western Digital has a fun new drive on the market. The DC HS760 data center drive is a traditional rotating disk that has some pretty impressive throughput numbers. It’s traditional in all but one sense. The HS760 is a dual actuator drive, meaning it contains two read/write heads. The drive is actually seen by the host OS as two different drives that are addressable. This allows the system to have up to 582Mbps of I/O throughput. The new drive is aimed at workloads which have a mixture of reads and writes as opposed to a heavy tilt toward one end of the scale. Stephen, what is the advantage of having dual actuators in a traditional drive?
Read More: Western Digital quietly producing dual-actuator disk drives
10:45 | Huawei Loses Out on Chip Exports For Real This Time
If it seems like the US has been banning Huawei from getting access to chips and tech from US sources you’re not crazy. Ever since 2019 the US has been trying to lock the Chinese networking giant out of the market. With every modification of the original order comes an evasion such as buying from new unaffected suppliers or limping along with limited export licenses from Qualcomm and Intel. Qualcomm even created speccial versions of their SoCs to comply with the 5G export ban in place. The US has decided enough is enough and are signaling they will outright ban export licenses for Huawei in the coming months. Tech comanies are already grumbling about the potential loss of such a huge customer. The ban would affect new licenses being granted and begin to wind down the existing licenses. Tom, is the US playing hardball here? Or is this the last act in a long play?
Read More: No more export licenses: US plans to fully cut off Huawei from chip suppliers
15:14 | Intel Punts Pathfinder and Nixes Networking Business
Pat Gelsinger isn’t done cutting just yet. This week brought news of two big changes for Intel. The first was news that Intel will no longer be developing networking switches. You may recall that Intel picked up startup Barefoot Networks back in 2019 and was integrating the Tofino ASIC in a number of products. Intel’s offerings had been facing stiff competition from Nvidia, Broadcom, and others and the move comes as Intel is trying to restructure after a massive loss in Q4 of 2022. Intel has said that the IPUs are going to be a focus area now. Also announced was the end of the Pathfinder for RISC-V program. The announcement came as a surprise to those in the program, only having been disclosed by a notice on the project’s webpage. Intel had been extending an olive branch to the RISC-V community to try and encourage development on the platform that Intel could leverage in their own offerings, such as allowing the code to run on FPGAs. The program was started back in August of 2022 and was supported by most of the large RISC-V companies. Stephen, how do these latest cuts stack up against the moves that Intel has been making?
Read More: Intel Sunsets Network Switch Biz, Kills RISC-V Pathfinder Program (Updated)
Read More: Intel is halting development of the networking chip it got from Barefoot Networks
26:58 | The Weeks Ahead
Cisco Live EMEA – February 7 – February 8, 2023
Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023
Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023
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