Zoox Hayward Start Of Production
Celebrating the Zoox Hayward plant entering its start of production phase. This 220,000 square foot state of the art manufacturing plant in Hayward, California will be capable of assembling 10,000...
View ArticleFlat Datacenter Networks at Scale
The research roots of finding “optimal routing” networks trace back to the late 1970s. Mathematicians defined special kinds of networks called “expanders“. These are graphs with strong connectivity...
View ArticleNational Academy of Engineering
I love all forms of engineering so it’s a pleasure to have just been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Founded in 1964, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is a private,...
View ArticleBlue Current
I am excited to join the Blue Current Board of Directors as Amazon anchors their Series D round. Blue Current has taken a practical approach to safe solid-state batteries and their technology...
View ArticleDarlington Nuclear Generating Station
The Darlington Nuclear Generating Station just outside Toronto has four CANDU nuclear reactors with a total output of 3,512 MW. It generates about 20 percent of Ontario’s electricity needs, enough for...
View ArticleSeagate HAMR
Yesterday, I visited the Seagate Normandale Minnesota hard disk drive wafer fabrication facility. I’m super excited about HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and the areal density it supports....
View ArticleCIDR 2024
I helped kick off CIDR2024 yesterday with the keynote, Constraint Driven Innovation. My core thesis is that constraints force innovation. For example, it was slow hard disks that drove the invention...
View ArticleA Short History of AWS Silicon Innovation
Why would a cloud services company design and deploy custom semiconductors? It definitely wasn’t where I expected we would end up when I joined AWS in 2009 but it’s a decision that has just kept...
View ArticleGraviton3 & EC2 C7g General Availability
Annapurna Labs Graviton3 — Copyright Noah Berger / 2022 Today we’re making the AWS Graviton3 processor generally available in the AWS EC2 C7g Instances. Graviton3 and EC2 C7g Instance Type General...
View ArticleXen-on-Nitro: AWS Nitro for Legacy Instances
On August 25, 2006, we started the public beta of our first ever EC2 instance. Back then, it didn’t even have a name yet, but we latter dubbed it “m1.small.”. Our first customers were able to use the...
View ArticleTesla Project Dojo Overview
Project Dojo Training Tile A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power...
View ArticleAnandtech on AWS Graviton2
Yesterday, Anandtech published what is, by far, the most detailed write-up on the AWS Graviton2 processor. In this article the author, Andrei Frumusanu, compared the Graviton2 with the AMD EPYC 7571...
View ArticleAWS Graviton2
In November of last year, AWS announced the first ARM-based AWS instance type (AWS Designed Processor: Graviton). For me this was a very big deal because I’ve been talking about ARM based servers for...
View Article2019 ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award
Back in late 2008 and early 2009, I had a few projects underway. One was investigating the impact of high temperatures on the longevity and fault rates in servers. We know what it costs to keep a data...
View ArticleTesla Full Self Driving ASIC
Tesla hosted Autonomy Day for Analyst on Monday April 22nd beginning at 11am. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE. It’s a bit unusual for a corporate video in that...
View ArticleAWS Inferentia Machine Learning Processor
On Monday night I described AWS Graviton , the general-purpose AWS-developed server processor with 64-bit Arm that powers the EC2 A1 instance family. The five members of the A1 instance family target...
View ArticleAWS Designed Processor: Graviton
This is an exciting day and one I’ve been looking forward to for more than a decade. As many of you know, the gestation time for a new innovation at AWS can incredibly short. Some of our most...
View Article2017 Turing Award: Dave Patterson & John Hennessy
Earlier this year, Berkeley’s Dave Patterson and Stanford’s John Hennessy won the 2017 Turing Award, the premier award in Computing. From Pioneers of Computer Architecture Receive ACM A.M. Turing...
View ArticleWill ML training drive massive growth in networking?
This originally came up in an earlier blog comment but it’s an interesting question and one not necessarily one restricted to the changes driven by deep learning training and other often GPU-hosted...
View ArticleTensor Processing Unit
For years I’ve been saying that, as more and more workloads migrate to the cloud, the mass concentration of similar workloads make hardware acceleration a requirement rather than an interesting...
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