Timothy Prickett Morgan

We live in a weird time. Every GPU and every CPU that AMD and Nvidia can make for the rest of 2026 has already been long since sold even if they have not all been manufactured as yet. And given that, if either company just wanted to stop doing product launches, they could just do that.

There has been a lot of fuss in recent weeks that open weight AI models from China such as Alibaba Qwen, DeepSeek R1, V3, and V4, and Moonshot Kimi K3 are getting up there in terms of capability compared to the closed models such as OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini.

Optical circuit switches are not new and have been used in network technology research labs and in the telecom industry in production for the past two and a half decades. But the time has come for them to move into the scale up network domain in high performance computing clusters according to Salience Labs, which has built an optical circuit switch that is based entirely on silicon photonics technology and that, ironically enough, is derived from advanced research trying to create a photonics computing platform.

This week, AMD held what is now an annual Advancing AI event in Silicon Valley, and there is much talk about money, roadmaps, and product deep dives.

We have been waiting for a long time for Big Blue’s Power Systems business to get a big bump, and it looks like it has finally happened. And a handful of Fortune 100-level companies deferred their System z17 mainframe purchases as they allocated budget to buying servers for AI and generic – generally X86 machines, and certainly not from IBM – as CPU, GPU, DRAM memory, and flash storage prices are all skyrocketing. And last week, when IBM warned about this push out of System z sales, Wall Street predictably freaked all the way out, sending IBM’s stock down 25 percent at one point.

As far as I can tell, no one thought there was going to be a resurgence in the server CPU market thanks to the GenAI boom. Yes, we all thought that the CPUs used in AI host servers would have lots of strong cores for AI hosts and need lots of I/O and memory bandwidth and reasonable capacities. But the emergence of agentic AI and the sandboxes that actually

There is a saying that has been around for the past couple of decades in the datacenter, particularly with large enterprises and then solidified by the hyperscalers and the cloud builders:

The second quarter ended four weeks ago, but the market researchers and analysts of the world – present company included – are still dicing, slicing, and mulling the numbers from the first quarter and putting together forecasts for all of the different facets of the IT sector of the global economy.

For those of us who grew up watching Microsoft DOS on X86 PCs transform into the Windows Server platform along with applications, databases, and middleware, the modern Microsoft – a cloud innovator and an AI force in its own right – is a behemoth to behold. The financial results just sound silly, with market capitalization in the trillions and revenues in the hundreds of billions.

The entry “Bonnell+” Power S1112 server based on the Power11 processor has been shipping for a little more than a week. While we still have not been able to get our hands on updated Power10 entry server pricing as well as the pricing on the new Power S1112, we can tell you a bunch more about the new machine even though IBM has not yet added the Power S1112 to the entry Power11 Redbook.