โHardware is eating softwareโ, thatโs the wonderfully contrarian line that one of my colleagues has been using in his sessions at our annual HPE and Partner pre sales event, TSS, for a few years now. This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that software is making IT infrastructure into a commodity and that any hardware innovation will be doomed to irrelevance behind the {deity} of cheap tin.
I love this because its observable and has in many ways rekindled my love for the industry I work in. We were starting to slip into a rather staid and boring โDual Processor 2U server with latest CPU pleaseโ arena; even the excitingly different scale up systems of the past had been slain in the minds of the scale it out (and innovate by shaving some metal off) brigade. This was all getting a little dull for someone who went from Chemistry and into IT because he was tweaking and overclocking old Pentium PCs to play Quake, buying new motherboards and being stunned by 3DFX cards (it worked out in the end Mum!).
The truth is that in many ways the software that was running on general purpose x86 hardware was fine for back office tasks and leveraged those yearly update cycles of more MHz to go that bit faster for the task at hand. Things have changed significantly however, driven by the data analytics and AI explosion and thus the worm has turned. Just as back in the 90โs where CPU technologies, such as MMX, were immediately eclipsed by 3D accelerators in the eyes of gamers; so today is the era of general purpose CPUs and server designs being eclipsed in favour of task optimised systems.
Iโm sure we are all familiar by now with the rise of the GPU into the realms of HPC and then AI to perform tasks that were simply impossible on CPUs, but even they are finding competition in different types off accelerator designed specifically for some of the tasks GPUs have been dominatingโฆ..GPUs are, ironically, also quite generalised themselves in terms of compute. Should you then wish to go further down the rabbit hole and approach full cross-eyed wondermentโฆthe GPU vendors themselves are now implementing specific purpose accelerators inside their more general purpose devices (i.e. NVDIA TPU) as they arenโt taking this lying down, oh no sir. Then of course you have Intel now back in the high end GPU game, AMD back in the server CPU game, Intel and AMD in the custom chip game, Google and Microsoft in their own chips game, Intel integrating FPGAs and a ton of start-ups looking to be the next best biggest hit in town.
What this all comes down to is a Cambrian Explosion of hardware designed for virtually every use case software could have come up with and, critically, the ability to implement it in an economically viable manner due to an open ecosystem.
This makes my original analogy of gaming accelerators look positively anaemic and back then there were a lot more players in that game (queue wistful music)โฆ3DFX, Matrox, PowerVR, ATI, 3DLabs, NVIDIA and many others.
Looking purely at the โnot a homogenous 2xCPU with some RAM serverโ technologies that HPE is supporting from our partners or developing publicly today then, and this isnโt exhaustive, we have:
Memory Driven Computing
Memory Driven Computing: Dealing with Todayโs exponentially-increasing Data
HPE Labs Memory Driven Computing, Photonics and Gen-Z
Superdome Flex for Memory Driven Today
Accelerators for Artificial Intelligence and Big Data
AMD, Intel, NEC, Myriad X and NVIDIA Accelerators
Function optimised systems
High Performance Computing and AI systems
Edgeline Systems for IOT and the IT Edge
HPE to acquire supercomputing leader, Cray
Compose to task systems
That is some list and even the good old mainstay 2U DL38x server is back to interesting again, Intel CPU with AMD GPU, AMD CPU with NVIDIA GPU, perhaps an AMD CPU with and Intel GPU in the future? Right components for the right outcome is the key message here.
What I donโt think weโll see from this Technology Cambrian explosion is just one successful progenitor, unlike us vertebrates. Flexibility of manufacturing and difference of purpose will mean weโll see ever more variety going forwards and not taper back to a do it all ok x86 system plan. Take another look at the biological Cambrian Explosion picture above and just wonder how (even) stranger life could have been if some of those body types had evolved onwards, we could be walking 10 legged โdogsโ or have six arms (would be useful at airport securityโฆ).
PS - Donโt worry software devotees, you donโt need to get as incensed as the cloud faithful did when we announced โCloudlessโ. Software will be ever more important in ensuring easy utilisation of these bespoke hardware devices, from management to orchestration to platform interaction. Iโll look to cover these in a follow on to this blog, once Iโve finished on the Xbox of courseโฆ.
Alex Haddock
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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Alex_Haddock
I span HPE HybridIT solutions with a strong background in Compute and Composable infrastructure. Focus on partnering.
