Do you mine cryptocurrency? Do you have eight AMD and Nvidia cards? Want to have them all plugged into a single motherboard with PCIe slots to spare? Asus just release the motherboard of your dreams. Behold the grotesque nightmare of expansion that is the Asus B250 Mining Expert!
AMD Attempts Epyc Return to the Data Center
AMD Epyc sounds pretty epic, with epoch-defining memory, I/O, and even cores of a dual-socket server in a single socket. And that’s something to get excited about, especially considering that the Zen cores inside these chips are almost at IPC parity with Intel’s latest, and can handle dual threads like Intel, too.
EMC VFCache (aka “Project Lightning”) Is One Small Step, But an Important One
EMC VFCache (née Project Lightning) is a fairly simple offering: A server-based PCIe flash card that acts as a read cache with no integration with storage arrays or hypervisors. But EMC’s entrance into the host-based flash storage market is a powerful demonstration of the wave of disruption caused by flash-based storage and high-performance computing.
Micron Bursts Into the PCIe SSD Market
PCIe SSDs like Micron’s new P320h offer mindbending performance and enterprise class reliability. Although expensive, these devices are in an entirely different league from any other storage option. Micron promises to bring the PCIe P320h to market at nearly $15 per gigabyte, a substantial discount over other PCIe SSD competitors.
I/O Virtualization Redux (c/o Virtensys)
However, I believe I have found a great use case for I/O virtualization thanks to a presentation from Virtensys during the most recent Portland VMUG meeting.
Aprius: High Bandwidth Ethernet Allowing For Virtual PCIe
Aprius, like many startups, have identified what they believe is a niche market based on the overall concepts of virtualization (not so much server virtualization, ala VMware, but the abstractions that virtualization requires) and the I/O bandwidth capacity increases as 10Gb datacenter Ethernet emerges more and more.