This week is NVIDIA GTC, or as Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman called it “the Woodstock of AI”. There’s been a lot of discussion about the ascendant NVIDIA and how they plan on capitalizing on a hot market.
NVIDIA unveiled Blackwell, their newest architecture. The chip was named after American mathematician David Blackwell and math is most definitely the strong suit of this product line. It has 208 billion transistors to power a second-generation transformer engine for accelerating inferencing. There is also support for fifth-generation NVLink and NVLink Switch connectivity for GPU clusters with speeds of up to 1.8 terabytes per second of bidirectional throughput, which means Blackwell could process the entire bandwidth of the Internet in just 11 units. Blackwell is being integrated into The GB100 and GB200 superchip systems which focus on Tensor core performance and can be combined into new clusters of water-cooled units of up to 72 Blackwell GPUs.
1:18 – CHIPS Act Package is Worth $19.5 Billion
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced a $19.5 billion funding package for Intel to support chip manufacturing in Oregon, Arizona, Ohio, and New Mexico. With a focus on advanced manufacturing, chip packaging, and high-risk research and development, the initiative leverages loans and tax credits as well as $8.5 billion in grants. We’ve been talking about the CHIPS act and Intel’s manufacturing investments for a while, so what’s the news here?
Read More: $19.5 Billion CHIPS Act Package For Intel Is A Diversified Bet
6:12 – Zscaler Acquires Zero-Trust AI Pioneer Avalor
Zscaler is expanding their security offerings that include AI by acquiring startup Avalor Security. The deal is reported to total $310 million in cash and equity. Avalor’s main offering acts as a source of truth for security assets. The goal is to use the Avalor Data Fabric for Security to augment their zero trust platform with the integrations that Avalor provides out of the box.
Read More: The Future of Security Risk Management and Operations is Data and AI
9:05 – Broadcom and Astera Labs Competing in PCIe and Retimer Space
The market for specialized server components is seeing some heated competition this week. Retimers are part of the PCIe spec that allow signal boosting for electrical impulses to span longer distances and larger areas. This is critical in the AI market because the footprint of these systems is growing at a massive rate and expanding outside the traditional footprint of a 1U or 2U server. Broadcom started the race with their Vantage lineup of PCIe Gen 5 and 6 and CXL retimers. The next week Astera Labs, which has been a huge player in the market, filed for a $4.5 billion IPO and unveiled their own lineup of PCIe Gen 6 retimers.
Read More: Astera Labs Fires Back at Broadcom with Aries 6 Retimer for PCIe Gen6
Read More: Broadcom Fires a Shot at Astera Labs with New PCIe and CXL Retimers
Read More: Astera Labs IPO will reveal how much investors want in on AI
13:03 – Broadcom Announces First Co-Packaged Optics for Scalable AI Systems
Broadcom announced the new Bailly Ethernet switch this week. The big new feature for this platform is co-packaged optics. This new process for creating switch connections consumes 70% less power while providing a huge increase of efficiency. The total throughput of Bailly is 51.2 terabits per second and is based on Tomahawk 5 silicon. The unit has a maximum of 128 ports of 400 gigabit Ethernet. Dr. Near Margalit stated that pluggable optics accounted for almost 50% of the power consumption of the switch, which necessitated the design choice to have a co-packaged optic design.
17:35 – Mustafa Suleyman to Lead Copilot for Microsoft
Microsoft has a new Pilot for Copilot. Mustafa Suleyman is joining the company and createing a new unit called Microsoft AI, which is focused on Copilot and other consumer-focused AI solutions. Suleyman was the co-founder of DeepMind and was most recently as Inflection AI, a rival to OpenAI. Most of Suleyman’s staff will be joining him in the move, including Karen Simonyan who was Chief Scientist at Inflection. The existing Copilot team will report to Mustafa going forward. The move is seen as a way to help Microsoft keep their lead in the AI space as companies like Google try to carve out their own niche for this huge market.
Read More: Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot
21:50 – Selector AIOps Solution Integrates GenAI
Selector AI has released their newest update for Spring 2024. Included are a host of new tools to help accelerate AIOps for teams that want to leverage GenAI advances. There is a new copilot tool to help summarize incidents and automate remediation. There is also now the capability of directly collecting configuration and metric data for the platform to help provide feedback and aid in troubleshooting efforts. Selector also now has the capability to create a digital twin of the target infrastructure for testing and evaluation.
Read More: Selector Combines Generative AI and Native Monitoring Capabilities to Transform IT Operations
25:22 – NVIDIA GTC News and NVIDIA Blackwell Systems
This week is NVIDIA GTC, or as Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman called it “the Woodstock of AI”. There’s been a lot of discussion about the ascendant NVIDIA and how they plan on capitalizing on a hot market.
NVIDIA unveiled Blackwell, their newest architecture. The chip was named after American mathematician David Blackwell and math is most definitely the strong suit of this product line. It has 208 billion transistors to power a second-generation transformer engine for accelerating inferencing. There is also support for fifth-generation NVLink and NVLink Switch connectivity for GPU clusters with speeds of up to 1.8 terabytes per second of bidirectional throughput, which means Blackwell could process the entire bandwidth of the Internet in just 11 units. Blackwell is being integrated into The GB100 and GB200 superchip systems which focus on Tensor core performance and can be combined into new clusters of water-cooled units of up to 72 Blackwell GPUs.
Read More: How NVIDIA Blackwell Systems Attack 1 Trillion Parameter AI Models
39:52 – The Weeks Ahead
Security Field Day 11 – April 10 – 11
Edge Field Day 3 – May 1 – 2
Mobile Field Day 11 – May 15 – 16
AppDev Field Day 1 – May 29 – 30
The Six Five Summit – June 11 – 13
Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day are now part of The Futurum Group.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is your look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.
