This is a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from AMD and ARM in the server market, alternative processor architectures, supply chain, PCIe 5.0, and even some of the goings-on at this month's Consumer Electronics Show.

00:00 Start the show!
01:40 The Server Market: AMD Server market share numbers, Intel's current situation, and the impact of supply chain disruptions
10:38 AMD and Intel introduce new client parts: how much of this bleeds over into the server space?
17:33 ARM in the Server Market: Is this just a hyperscaler phenomia? Will we see expansion in 2022?
27:50 Where does RISC-V Play?
30:40 Disrupting storage: VAST Data, PCIe 5, and does CXL-attached memory supplant Intel Optane?
36:19 Consumption-based infrastructure in 2022
38:24 Over-and-Out

This episode goes deep into the value that Arm9 and Neoverse bring to data center workloads, as hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talk with Arm's Brian Jeff, Senior Director of Product Management for Arm's infrastructure business.

The group has a wide-ranging conversation about what's motivated some of the architectural enhancements delivered in Arm9, the shifting enterprise landscape, and where Neoverse fits into it all.

Special Guest: Brian Jeff.

Links:

• Matt's Forbes Column on the Arm Neoverse Launch — Arm’s Neoverse microarchitecture focuses on supporting the needs of the datacenter, This includes everything from high throughput switching to low power radio access networks, from general-purpose computing to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Think of Neoverse as taking the underlying ArmV9 architecture and tailoring it for the datacenter through modifications and specific instructions.

Hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, both senior technology analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, talk about what AMD's launch means to the server industry. The guys also find time to talk about the latest infrastructure market numbers. On the latest DataCentric podcast.

What's it mean for the enterprise server market overall? And how is 2021 starting to shape up? Hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talk about it on this episode of DataCentric.

00:00 Let's start
03:01 Arm-based processors in the cloud: where's it going? Does it impact Arm server adoption? Will there be Arm-based general purpose servers?
14:15 Forget about Arm, what about AMD? Will they hit 15% server share in 2021?
18:15 Intel has had a monopoly in the nascent 3D XPOINT (Intel Optane) business, despite co-inventing the technology with Micron. Does that change in 2021?
20:50 Nutanix gained new private equity backing in 2020, changing CEOs, and positioning itself for.... something... in 2021. One of our hosts think its an HPE acquistion.
25:31 How impactful will the various OEM's as-a-service offerings be in 2021? Let the boys tell you.
30:20 A contrary prediction about the future of Nvidia's quest to absorb Arm
35:37 In-person conferences will come roaring back. Or not.

That's it! Tune in wherever you find podcasts.

Intel delivered solid numbers, but were punished by both guidance and disclosure of some execution problems in rolling out its next generation, 7nm, processors. Solid numbers for the quarter none-the-less, with a surprising bright spot in Intel's NSG memory group.

AMD, who has become a solid competitor to Intel across nearly every segment, is firing on all cylindars, expecially in the DataCentric Server world.

All while IBM seems to be finding its groove with freshman CEO Arvind Krishna, as IBM's Cloud and Red Hat businesses are standouts. IBM Z-series and Storage also remain particularly strong.

All of this, and more, on this episode of DataCentric

00:00 - Let's kick it off!
01:21 - Intel Earnings Analysis
20:08 - AMD Earnings Discussion
43:38 - IBM Earnings
57:34 - See you Next Time!

Join hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, both senior analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, as they digest it all.

01:08 Attending Virtual Conferences
05:50 AMD EPYC & HCI and Edge Computiong
08:50 AMD EPYC & Nvidia's New A100
13:16 We don't talk about HPE Earnings
21:35 Lenovo continues to show strength
30:00 The End.

The HCI space is also continuing its hot streak, with VSAN delivering $900M in bookings to Vmware, while Nutanix also continues to grow at a nearly 50% growth rate. But are they leaving room on the edge and in ROBO for more single-focused competitors like Scale Computing?

The ARM cloud market saw a major new introduction this past week with Ampere's announcement of it's 80-core server part targeting the hyperscale market, but was disappointingly sparse with benchmark numbers. Who wins & loses here? Matt & Steve talk about it.

Finally, on the backside of AMD financial analyst day we talk about AMD's continual and aggressive push in the server market, their giant win with HPE for a massive DOE supercomputing project, & everyone's push against Nvidia for enterprise AI.

It's a lot. Skip to your favorite sections:

01:42 Infrastructure Market
14:22 HCI Market
24:54 Ampere brings ARM into the Hyperscaled Data Center
34:40 AMD continues its surge forward. Should Intel be worried?
43:38 Matt & Steve's closing thoughts.
48:29 The End.

Links:

• Dell Technologies Earnings Presentation
• HPE Earnings Presentation
• Vmware Earnings Presentation
• HPE/Cray & AMD win DOE's El Capitan Supercomputer Bid
• Inside Ampere's Altra 80-core ARM part (from servethehome.com)
• Intel's Jim Keller reads "mean tweets"
• Jim Keller video podcast with Lex Fridmen (youtube)

Timeline:

04:15 New Edge offerings from Dell Technologies
14:55 Huawei and the Edge
18:25 HPE Proliant Microserver Gen 10
23:24 New Entry-Level EPYC parts from AMD
24:12 Lenovo Earnings
34:29 Tidying Up

Links:

• Dell Introduces New Edge Products
• Lenovo Delivers Record Earnings
• AMD Expand EPYC Lineup

01:50 Is the VMWare multi-core license change really a big deal?
06:40 Intel Earnings recap
09:30 AMD Earnings
11:35 Lisa Su joins Cisco's board + what's going on with Cisco's server business?
16;42 What are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft's earnings tell us about the state of the cloud market?
19:26 Thinking about Cloud & On-Prem As-a-Service
24:07 That's a wrap!

Links:

• Cisco Appoints Dr Lisa Su to the BoD — Cisco Systems, Inc. appointed AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su to its board of directors on Monday, January 27th. What does this mean for Cisco? And how does AMD benefit from this appointment? This quick take will attempt to answer these questions and more.
• What AMD and Intel numbers tell us about the DataCenter Business — Earnings season is in full swing—both AMD and Intel announced 4th quarter (and annual) results recently. Both companies claimed strong quarters with robust growth. The following few paragraphs will attempt to dissect those numbers in a little more detail and provide some guidance on what these numbers say about the 2020 business outlook.

02:21 Silicon Architecture is no longer a buying critera for servers -- it's all about matching capabilities to workloads (whether x86 or ARM)
09:50 The Public Cloud providers will begin a cycle of acquistions to move their offerings up-the-stack.
19:30 The big OEMs will stop talking about servers and storage and instead both double-down on consumption-based compute models, and deliver more workload-specific solution stacks.
28:20 It's not the year of edge (yet), but 5G is deploying and it will be the year that Edge impacts IT planning for the following years.
35:46 The End!

00:50 Silicon is Sexy Again! Whether we're talking about AMD, ARM, Ampere, NVIDIA, Intel, or one of the emerging players, we're talking about chips.
03:13 The Year of AI Enablement, both applications & inference, with a coming battle for the inference market
05:38 OEMs are Moving to Solution Sales & Application Stacks
08:30 There's a Fight Brewing for On-Prem As-as-Service
13:45 Kubernetes dominated the headlines, but is it here to stay?
16:25 More as-a-service, as we dig deeper into consumption based computing
21:22 The End.

There's also chip news as AMD delivers a stellar quarter, Intel has a benchmark oops (and then recovers), and lots of discussion of ARM and Edge. Join us for our unique perspective.

Times:
00:00 Microsoft Ignite: Azure News
13:24 AMD’s stellar quarter
19:00 Intel’s Benchmark Oops
24:35 VMWorld Europe
27:00 ARM at the Edge & in the Datacenter
32:00 NVIDIA GTC DC + NV at the Edge
46:43 That's all!

Links:

• Five most significant announcements from Microsoft Ignite
• VMWorld Europe Announcements
• AMD Earnings
• Intel's Misleading Benchmarks?

Here's a general timeline for the discussion, though the topics overlap, so you owe it to yourself to listent to the entire thing.

00:00 Intros
02:20 Big Themes & Announcements from TechCon
03:50 Patrick's views of TechCon from a server, storage, and networking perspective
06:00 ARM at the Edge
10:30 ARM in the Server Market
14:05 ARM in the HPC and other Server-Adjacent Spaces
17:28 ARM in power and performance hungry applications
22:00 Does OpenPOWER and IBM's recent Open Sourcing moves matter?
24:10 Does heated AMD/Intel competition open the door for ARM to gain traction against those players?
27:17 What's Patrick Kennedy and Serve the Home looking forward to in 2020
32:20 Let's talk about Inspur & "Inspur-like" players
38:00 What's Serve the Home doing Differently in the review space?
41:00 Overarching takeaways

Special Guest: Patrick Kennedy.

Links:

• Serve the Home

Red Hat might be owned by IBM, but its about helping enterprises manage digital transformation, focused on where "opportunity and innovation intersect". Steve's a little dense on this topic, and Matt helps him understand what Red Hat's up to.

Pure Storage holds its annual conference in Austin, where they announce new products and supplement others. It's all about delivering a consistent data-driven expeirence to enteprises, and IT practitioners seem to be on-board. We also talk about partying back-stage with Weezer.

Beyond that, there are Optane-related storage announcements from Dell and Oracle, while Huawei releases the highest-capacity flash array in the world.

Times:
00:00 Start!
01:45 Red Hat Summit - Digital Tranformation!
14:40 Pure Accelerate (and Weezer!) - New QLC Flash Array, Optane Caching, Consumption-Based, Cloud Volumes!
26:20 Huawei Ships the Worlds Largest All Flash Storage Array
28:40 IBM Ships a Really Fast Storage Array for MainFrame
31:00 Dell updates its PowerMax storage with Optane persistent memory for both read & write.
35:40 Oracle also puts Optane in a storage box, if you want to buy an Oracle box.

36:30 Dell puts AMD's Epyc Rome CPU in a couple of new servers
42:25 Where are the guys focused over the next few weeks?

00:00 AMD's EPYC Rome server launch: How does it stack up? Is Intel really being threatened?
21:30 Lenovo released very solid earnings for last quarter, continuing an impressive run of datacenter growth. Let's talk about that.
32:24 The End.

Even in the face of an uncertain server market, Dell Technologies released positive earnings. Matt & Steve go into thiose

Is Nutanix heading towards the rocks, or just experiencing natural transition pains? Nutanix also relased earnings, which weren't postive. Do down earnings and the loss of a key executive point to Nutanix heading towards the rocks? Or are we just watching a painful transition to a new business model? Only time will really tell, but Steve & Matt talk about it anyway!

Computex is very consumer focused, but there was drama on the AMD/Intel front, as the x86 CPU wars are heating up. Intel takes exception to AMD's claims of 2X performance on some supercomputer numbers, while AMD goes big in HPC. Matt also gives us an explanation of what's really happening when AMD says that they're cutting off x86 "technology transfer" to it's China JV.

All that, and Steve's thinking about starting a Twitch feed that highlights his tractor -- a real life video game.

Timeline:

01:10 Apple World Wide Developers Conference -- anything for IT? (hint: not really)
02:50 Inside IDC Server Market Numbers
12:00 Inside Dell Technologies Earnings Numbers
15:20 Let's talk about Nutanix's earnings and outlook
24:55 Computex: AMD, Intel, and more
38:33 Steve's Twitch Channel -- available soon
41:10 That's a wrap!

00:46 News: CES, IBM Quantum Computing, & Huawei builds a server ARM part
03:20 Trend: ARM in the DataCenter? It certainly seems to be getting traction, but is it real?
05:46 Trend: Is Cloud Storage maturing in 2019?
09:16 Trend: Edge Computing, micro-datacenters in the wilderness
12:14 Trend: AI a mainstream enterprise workload? Probaby not. At least right now.
15:24 Trend: The continuing march toward insane densities, storage and compute.
18:15 Trend: AMD in the datacenter? We won't make a prediction, but watch these guys.
21:40 Trend: Lenovo is a serious datacenter player.
27:20 Wrapping up: Where are Matt & Steve heading over the next few weeks? IBM THINK, for one.