Technology
Cloud biz buy-ins prove our Arm processors are ready • The Register
Interview After two years of claiming that its Arm-powered server processors provide better performance and efficiency for cloud applications than Intel or AMD’s, Ampere Computing said real deployments by cloud providers and businesses are proving its chips are the real deal.
The Silicon Valley startup held its Annual Strategy and Product Roadmap Update last week to ostensibly give a product roadmap update. But the only update was the news that Ampere’s 5nm processor due later this year is called Ampere One, it’s sampling that with customers, and it will support PCIe Gen 5 connectivity and DDR5 memory.
Ampere CEO, and former Intel president, Renee James showed off the upcoming Ampere One chip during the roadmap update … Click to enlarge
What the video update really felt like was a message to investors and the industry that Ampere’s high-core-count Altra processors are deployed at several major cloud providers and are already making a big difference for some businesses. After all, Ampere, which has raised a lot of cash from Oracle, confidentially filed for an initial public offering in April.
In an interview with The Register, Ampere chief product officer Jeff Wittich said the startup made customer testimonials the main topic of the presentation to prove that Ampere has executed on its roadmap so far and delivered the goods, literally speaking.
“The real story here is this stuff’s real. We’ve got people using it every day. It’s actually changing their businesses. It’s actually impacting people’s lives. It’s easy to get access to it now. And that became a big part of the story,” said Wittich, who previously worked at Intel for 15 years.
Jeff Wittich pitches a strong Arm future
The name drops in Ampere’s video included Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Equinix Metal, Alibaba Cloud, UCloud, and JD Cloud, all of which have now launched instances powered by Ampere’s Altra chips. German cloud provider Hetzner is planning Ampere-based services, and Cloudflare has been using Ampere chips in servers to handle internet requests faster than x86 silicon.
The roadmap update included testimonials from autonomous vehicle startup Cruise, which said Ampere’s processors were the only ones on the market that could serve its high-throughput needs. Another booster in the video was the Oracle Red Bull Formula One racing team, which said it used Oracle’s Ampere A1 Compute instance to increase the number of simulations it runs to test the aerodynamics of F1 cars by around 25 percent. There was also biomedical software firm Project Ronin, which said it turned to Ampere for its “cost-effective” computing.
Other companies that gave lip service to Ampere included server maker Supermicro, storage provider DataDirect Networks, Chinese tech giant Baidu, and cloud hosting service GleSYS. And that still doesn’t cover all the organizations that Ampere said are supporting its chips.
While Ampere is getting loud about momentum with customers and partners, the startup is staying quiet about any financial details for now. The most we could get from Wittich is that Ampere saw “massive growth” in 2021 and that revenue is growing this year.
“We’re not at a million CPUs a year yet, but that’s the trajectory we’re on, to get there as rapidly as possible so that we really do have the scale that you need for this type of an operation. That’s where we’re looking, and it’s not in the distant future,” he said.
Claims of better performance scaling than Intel, AMD
One major selling point of Ampere’s Altra microprocessors is the fact that they can pack more cores than the 64-core maximum of AMD’s Epyc and the 40-core maximum of Intel’s Xeon. Ampere eclipsed both companies with the 2020 release of the 80-core Altra, and then it went even further in 2021 with the release of the 128-core Altra Max.
These higher core counts make the Altra processors well-suited for the high-density needs of cloud computing, but Wittich said what really makes his biz’s processors better than Epyc or Xeon is that they have less performance variability between each core.
A graph Ampere uses to claim that its chips have far less performance variability than x86 ones. Click to enlarge
Wittich claimed that performance variability is an issue in Xeon and Epyc processors: a software thread running on one CPU core may run slower than if it was on another core, or may run faster, or the same. The result is that users can’t always be sure how fast or slow their software will run on these hosts, though Wittich said cloud providers have developed ways to smooth out these inconsistencies and mitigate the causes of any slowdowns.
“Cloud providers try and move users away from each other. They try and detect this, migrate people. They try and cap the amount of resources that one person can have. It’s not foolproof, and all those things add complexity and overhead,” he opined.
Wittich said these kinds of fixes may hide performance issues of x86 processors from users, but it means that a significant amount of a cloud provider’s capacity is “totally wasted,” which results in extra costs.
Ampere’s Altra processors avoid these variability issues for a few reasons, according to Wittich. For one, all the cores are single-threaded: one hardware thread per CPU core, so performance is guaranteed. Meanwhile, Xeon and Epyc processors typically run two hardware threads through each CPU core as they support simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). If those two hardware threads aren’t in contention, you can get good performance, and if they contend, a slowdown may occur. SMT can be configured by the host server operator.
Wittich said the Altra chips are also more energy efficient, which allows them to sustain the same clock frequency at all times, unlike Xeon or Epyc.
“That’s one of the reasons why we’re able to scale to really high utilization and not drop off. We’ve got the power envelope to do it,” he said.
A graph Ampere uses to claim that its chips have better peformance scaling than x86 chips. Click to enlarge.
Another factor that makes performance consistent between cores, according to Wittich, is that Ampere designed its processors to have larger L1 and L2 caches that are private to each CPU core, which keeps the cores primed with plenty of data and code that can be rapidly accessed, thus avoiding wasting time reaching out to RAM.
“People can keep their data in the cache for longer, which means less variability in performance, because you don’t have to keep going back out to memory because your neighbor wanted the rest of the cache and you evicted all of your cache contents,” he said.
What also helps keep the cores even is the mesh-based interconnect used to connect all the components on Ampere’s chips, Wittich added.
“We’ve done a lot on the mesh front to ensure that we’ve got really consistent performance,” he said. “It’s one reason why today our products are monolithic — not going to say they’re going to be monolithic forever — but what we will do is make sure that when our products move to a disaggregated approach, that our users still have a monolithic experience.”
Ampere’s plan to keep selling old chips alongside new ones
Later this year, Ampere plans to release a 5nm processor, named Ampere One, and the startup is promising it will come with even more cores, higher performance, and better power efficiency than its current Altra chips. Most notably, Ampere One will use a custom, Arm-compatible core designed by the startup, unlike the off-the-shelf core blueprints Ampere licensed from Arm for the Altra family.
Wittich said it was always the plan for Ampere to design its own CPU. “There are a lot of cool things that we’ve done that allows us to scale out to this many cores, not blow past the power budget, and maintain that really, really consistent performance that our users want,” he said.
Customers have been sampling Ampere One since earlier this year, and while Wittich said the processor won’t enter mass production by the end of this year, it will be available in commercial servers by then.
“Once it’s in people’s production data centers, running real live workloads, and we’ve qualified it, that, to me, is the key milestone. And so that’s what we’re driving to for 2022,” he said. “Obviously, we’ll ramp volume as fast as we can to keep pulling in more customers.”
The interesting twist is that in addition to introducing chips on a yearly cadence, Ampere plans to keep selling its older processors well into the future — maybe even the next 10 years for Altra and Altra Max, Wittich suggested. This differs from Intel, which typically supports products from the last one or two generations before discontinuing them. In other words, imagine if Intel was still selling Haswell-based Xeon processors from 2014, and you get the idea for Ampere’s plan.
Wittich said Ampere is doing this because it’s what customers want and it’s necessary so that customers don’t get left behind if they don’t need to update to the latest chip.
“Our customers want the best of both worlds. So they want us to innovate and have a new processor every single year that has new features, but they don’t necessarily want to use that new processor for everything, not on day one,” Wittich said. It sounds somewhat contrary, telling customers it’s OK to keep buying the old boring chips instead of the new shiny ones. But Wittich said it makes the most sense for how customers run their datacenters.
“With all the innovation we’re doing, there’s going to be some innovations that really matter to some people, and then there’s going to be other people that say, ‘you know, I’ll wait for the wait for the one in year two. That’s the basket of innovations that I cared more about,'” he said.
What Ampere will need to contend with, among other things, is the fact that both Intel and AMD plan to release their own cloud-optimized processors in the near future, with the former’s Sierra Forrest chips expected in 2024 and the latter’s Bergamo chips arriving in 2023. But we do like the idea of a world that isn’t dominated by only two major server CPU providers. ®
Technology
Microsoft Drops Windows Cortana App, Increases Advertisements
Microsoft on Friday disclosed it will drop support for Cortana as a standalone app in Windows 10 and 11.
In a note to users, the IT giant said this doesn’t mean the voice-controlled digital assistant is going away completely, and will still be found in some other Redmond products – just not in Windows 10 and 11 as a standalone application.
“This change only impacts Cortana in Windows, and your productivity assistant, Cortana, will continue to be available in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms,” the biz explained.
This isn’t a surprise at all, in a way, because Microsoft has been cramming Copilot-branded AI-powered functionality into every corner of its empire lately. With Cortana, you can open its app and tell it to run programs, find information, update your calendar… all things that these incoming AI features should be able to handle, making the Smurfette-blue digital assistant a little redundant.
“We know that this change may affect some of the ways you work in Windows,” Microsoft continued, “so we want to help you transition smoothly to the new options. Instead of clicking the Cortana icon and launching the app to begin using voice, now you can use voice and satisfy your productivity needs through different tools.”
And those tools are: voice-controlled functionality in Windows 11; the updated Bing search engine with its interactive chat-based interface for looking up info; all that Copilot stuff in Microsoft 365, allowing users to create and edit documents among other things using natural-language instructions; and most importantly Windows Copilot, a chat-based interface for controlling the OS and applications.
As we said, all of which makes the Cortana app redundant and ripe for replacement as Microsoft injects OpenAI’s GPT family of large language models into its products.
We’re told the standalone app support will be ditched in the latter end of this year. Cortana as a personal assistant arrived in 2014 as an answer to Apple’s voice-controlled Siri and Google’s Google Now, having been plucked from the Halo video game franchise.
Cortana fired and ads hired?
Early last month, Twitter user Albacore, perhaps a persistent pain in Microsoft’s side, reported that Redmond was toying with putting in-house ads in Windows 11’s Settings panel – and shared screenshots of test builds featuring those very pitches for Microsoft 365 and storage products in the UI.
And now, as documented by GHacks on Friday, some users who go to the Windows 11 Get Help app will see an in-house ad for the software giant’s Teams Essentials collaboration suite.
I came here for help, not a sales pitch … Screenshot of Windows 11. Hat tip: Ghacks
The Get Help support tool is there to help users who are having problems with or questions about the operating system, such as setting up a scanner or fixing Ethernet connections. At the top of the Get Help app interface – above the heading “We’re here to help” – is the sentence: “Increase productivity and collaboration all while staying organized, using a new meeting solution designed for small businesses.”
Clicking on the “Learn more” link brings the user to the Microsoft Teams Essentials webpage. ($4 per user per month!) Users can thankfully close the ad.
Again, we’re not surprised by this development. Redmond has for months been spamming its own banners and promos here and there throughout Windows in hopes of getting more people to subscribe to Microsoft 365 or sign up for various products and services.
In March 2022 it began testing ads in File Explorer, and there were reports eight months later that they could begin showing up in the Windows 11 sign-out menu. In April this year, there was talk from Microsoft of more ads coming to the Start Menu.
In addition, Microsoft in April updated its Weather app to show ads – as well as the MSN news feed – but removed most of that a month later after users revolted.
Reports in early May based on Albacore’s tweet about ads coming to the Settings page drew similar derision.
“It’s sad and hilarious at the same time,” one netizen opined. “The Settings app is what, 10 years old at this point? It STILL is an incoherent mess that barely replaces the good old Control Panel. Shoving ads in there just shows where their priorities are.”
Another user wondered whether Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI to integrate the upstart’s GPT technologies into its ecosystem, would use this AI muscle to pick and display third-party ads in the operating system.
“Are GPTs going to devolve into the used car salesman of the tech world?” they asked. “I am sure [Amazon’s] Alexa and Google and others are in the same opportunity position.”
Users may not like the ads, but don’t expect Microsoft to pull them if they help bring in more money.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Current
Making Technology Consulting More Accessible To SMEs
By Clint Bailey – Editor ‘Voice of EU’
Vibertron Consulting, based in California, emerged on the scene just a year ago, as a subsidiary of Vibertron, and is rapidly gaining momentum as the preferred integrated technology and strategic consultancy platform in the United States and beyond.
At the helm of Vibertron Consulting is Raza H. Qadri (Ali), a highly accomplished individual with a diverse range of qualifications. With an MBA, a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering, and a third degree in Computer Science, Qadri firmly believes in the importance of formal education as a cornerstone for building a robust and sustainable business.
Having amassed valuable experience across various industries including engineering, media, finance, and technology, as well as successfully founding three startups, Qadri is now putting his theories into practice. He has established a global business-to-business (B2B) remote work platform that offers integrated technology, marketing, and sales consultancy solutions specifically designed for small and medium-sized businesses.
With his expertise and a strong background in multiple fields, Qadri aims to empower businesses by providing comprehensive solutions tailored to their specific needs. The integrated approach of Vibertron Consulting allows clients to leverage technology, strategic marketing, and sales expertise to expand their operations and drive growth.
“An integrated platform is more of a complex business and go-to-market challenge rather than a technical one” Qadri explained, a Pakistani Canadian who moved to Canada 22 years ago.
“There are complexities associated with technical scale and optimization, but with today’s technology we can build a diverse platform using pre-existing components such as integrated services, even though the new technology trend is shifting back to data centre-based digital architecture.”
A Blend Between Marketplace & Integrated Managed Solutions
Founded in 2019, Vibertron presents itself as a hybrid technology company, providing clients with the opportunity to acquire comprehensive remote work, and consulting solutions. Facilitated by an internal database comprising approximately 1,500 thoroughly vetted specialists from the marketing, sales, and technology consulting industries, Vibertron ensures a high level of expertise and professionalism among its professionals. Notably, the specialists within the database possess a minimum requirement of a Master’s degree or 5-7 years of work experience in their respective fields. This stringent selection process ensures that clients can confidently engage with skilled professionals who possess the necessary qualifications and industry knowledge to deliver exceptional results.
“At Vibertron, we pride ourselves on working with top-tier professionals who exemplify integrity and professionalism. We prioritize building a team that upholds these values and ensures a positive client experience. Trust and excellence are at the core of our interactions, guaranteeing that our clients receive exceptional service every step of the way.” Qadri explained.
“To achieve this, we have created a B2B platform that is a blend between a marketplace and a managed professional solutions with two distinct models – one for one-time service buyers and one for clients looking for managed 360° marketing, sales, and technology solutions.”
Keeping It Simple
As stated on Vibertron’s official website, clients seeking integrated technology, marketing, and sales consultancy services can choose from three distinct plans: MCiHT™ (Technology), MCiM™ (Marketing), and MCiS (Sales). Each plan offers tailored solutions to cater to the specific needs and requirements of businesses in these domains.
“In addition to essential features like a social feed, messaging capabilities, and secure payment infrastructure (currently leveraging Stripe and Bank of America), Vibertron recognizes the importance of embracing emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain. By integrating these cutting-edge technologies, we aim to enhance our platform and deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our clients.” Qadri said.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Hybrid Consulting Model
In line with its core objective, Vibertron is strategically preparing to implement an AI-based hybrid co-pilot. This advanced technology will assist clients in acquiring integrated solutions and conducting thorough due diligence. By leveraging blockchain technology, Vibertron aims to validate project credentials, enabling clients to confidently engage with top-tier professionals who possess a proven track record of successfully delivering similar work. Throughout the entire process, Vibertron remains fully committed to supporting clients every step of the way, ensuring a seamless and reliable experience.
“Our ultimate objective is to enhance trust within the consulting industry, recognizing the significant value consultants bring in accelerating progress. However, we have observed numerous distortions arising from market inefficiencies, resulting in a widespread lack of confidence in the role of consultants. By addressing these challenges and fostering transparency and reliability, we aim to rebuild trust and establish consultants as valuable assets for achieving business goals.” Qadri explained.
“We firmly believe that an improved consulting industry, potentially operating on a smaller scale, has the potential to serve as an economic engine, fostering accelerated growth within the global economy. By addressing the challenges and enhancing the efficiency of the consulting sector, we can create a conducive environment for rapid economic advancement on a global scale.”
A Unique Niche Between Consulting & Remote Working
Vibertron Consulting adopts a distinctive business model in which internal Project Managers, acting as Client liaisons, oversee and manage the complete technology, marketing, and sales operations of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). These dedicated Project Managers provide real-time monitoring of teams and deliver the utmost level of consulting service in their respective domains, ensuring that businesses receive exceptional support and guidance.
“We have developed our business suites with SMBs in mind. Consider the expenses and commitment involved in hiring full-time staff for technology or marketing roles. We have revolutionized this dynamic by offering business solutions that cost less than employing even a single full-time professional in these fields. This is a key factor that attracts SMB owners to choose our services for managing their entire technology, marketing, or sales operations. Furthermore, our team comprises highly skilled professionals, and the scope of our services is unmatched by any standard, adding to our appeal in the market.” Qadri added.
Sustainable Growth
Presently, Vibertron operates in Europe, the UK, and the US and is actively engaged in securing seed funding for the consulting segment. Furthermore, the company intends to expand its products and workforce in the US, aiming to hire ten new employees by the end of this year, effectively doubling its team size.
Since its inception, the startup has experienced significant growth, progressing from a team of two to fourteen individuals, successfully completing over 650 projects. Additionally, Vibertron has served 75 LCE clients seeking consulting services in the domains of technology, marketing, and sales. Embracing the age-old adage that “cash is king,” Qadri, a staunch proponent, emphasizes the importance of generating revenue at the earliest stages of the business, fostering sustainability and facilitating further development.
“By prioritizing revenue generation, we aim to deliver enhanced value to customers, provide a better quality of life to our employees, and enable investors to recognize the long-term viability and sustainability of our business model.” he said.
“In the current business landscape, startups driven by growth objectives must adhere to fundamental principles such as maintaining healthy cash flow, establishing stable operational and burn rates, and relying on revenue-backed valuations. These foundational principles serve as crucial guidelines for us towards ensuring the long-term viability and success.”
Funding & Growth
Qadri added, “While securing funding remains an ongoing process for us, as it does for many startups, our position as a profitable business enables us to effectively navigate the transitional period between being considered “too early” and reaching the ideal stage of development. This financial stability provides us with the necessary resilience and flexibility to sustain growth and seize opportunities as they arise.”.
Photo credits: Vibertron.
Clint Bailey a Senior News Editor at ‘Voice of EU’ as well as co-editor of EU-20 magazine. Have a tip? Send him a DM at info@voiceofeu.com.
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