Page 9 - Can AI take education to a new level
P. 9
EDITOR’S COMMENT
Computer Weekly, HOME
10 Exchange Square,
Home 9th Floor (West),
London EC2A 2BR
News Telephone: 020 7186 1400 Server chips upstaged as AI steals show
Editor in chief: Bryan Glick
bglick@techtarget.com
How the chip sector
Managing editor (technology): Cliff Saran
is gearing up for
csaran@techtarget.com
the AI revolution
Investigations editor: Bill Goodwin rtificial intelligence (AI) has become the new Moore’s Law. Semiconductor manufacturers may strive to double processing
wgoodwin@techtarget.com power every two years, but that is not what their largest customers actually need.
How ISC2 aims
Senior editor, EMEA: Karl Flinders
to overcome A Google, Meta and Microsoft are extending the life of their servers in a bid to reduce the cost of operating cloud infrastructure.
kflinders@techtarget.com
cyber barriers Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, summed this up in the company’s latest quarterly earnings when she revealed Meta could see
Senior editor, UK: Caroline Donnelly
cdonnelly@techtarget.com little performance gain from new server chips. Instead, the hyperscalers are focused on the next growth opportunity – AI.
Editor’s commentx Scroxton Nvidia has set the benchmark for AI chips, pivoting its business to provide highly parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) and a
Security editor: Ale
ascroxton@techtarget.com
programming environment to power machine learning and artificial intelligence inference. Rival AMD is gearing up to unveil a new AI
Networking editor: Joe O’Halloran
Buyer’s guide product roadmap in December. Google has its TPU, a custom-designed AI accelerator, which it claims is faster than Nvidia GPUs. And
johalloran@techtarget.com
to the future of Microsoft has developed its own AI accelerator chip, Maia, designed specifically for the Azure hardware stack.
Management editor: Lis Evenstad
business software
levenstad@techtarget.com The big loser in this race to win AI workloads is Intel. The company has posted dire quarterly earnings, due, in part, to its biggest
Storage editor: Antony Adshead customers – the hyperscalers – scaling back on x86 server upgrades.
Harnessing large
aadshead@techtarget.com
language models The PC market is also in decline. The latest data from IDC shows that PC shipments continued to fall during the third quarter of 2023
Business applications editor: Brian McKenna
for education
bmckenna@techtarget.com as global volumes declined by 7.6% year over year with 68.2 million PCs shipped. Linn Huang, research vice-president for devices and
Business editor: Clare McDonald displays at IDC, believes generative AI could be a watershed moment for the PC industry.
cmcdonald@techtarget.com On the server chip front, Intel is now ramping up its AI plans. It has announced work on a new supercomputer, Aurora, with Argonne
Senior reporter: Sebastian Klovig Skelton National Laboratory and industry partners to create what it describes as “state-of-the-art foundational AI models for science”. Aurora
sklovigskelton@techtarget.com
uses the Intel Max Series GPU architecture. The likes of HPE are also joining the AI party. Nvidia is working with HPE’s Cray super-
Production editor: Claire Cormack
ccormack@techtarget.com computer division on a family of AI-optimised supercomputers based on its Grace Hopper GH200 Superchips.
Deputy production editor (UK): But beyond specialist HPC hardware for AI, server shipments are expected to be relatively modest. This, as Meta’s Li suggests,
Jaime Lee Daniels
jdaniels@techtarget.com shows server hardware is good enough to run existing enterprise workloads, but the product mix from the major server manufacturers
Deputy production editor (EMEA/APAC): is not able to meet the AI requirements of enterprise customers. Clearly, the market will shift as server manufacturers try to become
Ryan Priest more relevant in the age of AI workloads, with AI acceleration hardware likely to top many IT leaders’ shopping lists. n
rpriest@techtarget.com
Vice-president of sales, EMEA: Jat Hayer
07557 433681 | jhayer@techtarget.com Cliff Saran, managing editor (technology)
Read the latest Computer Weekly blogs online.
computerweekly.com 21-27 November 2023 9