Linley Data Center Conference: FPGAs and ARMs in the Cloud

Next week, February 9-10, is the Linley Data Center Conference in the Santa Clara Hyatt, which hopefully will be cleared of Superbowl madness by then. It is one of four conferences that the Linley Group runs each year. Named after Linley Gwenapp (whose name I can never see without thinking it must be an anagram of Gwyneth Paltrow), the Linley Group is is the current incarnation of what used to be Michael Slater's Microprocessor Report, which was published from 1987 in print. It then went through a tortuous number of parent companies before ending up in the Linley Group in 2010, although by then the Linley Group was already covering some of the same technology.

On the first day of the conference, Cadence is also holding their Embedded Neural Network Symposium. I will be covering both events but since obviously I can't be in two places at once, I already blogged about the ENNS.

Datacenters

There are two especially interesting trends in datacenters right now:

• Will FPGA acceleration become necessary (or at least desirable) for certain tasks such as image and speech recognition?
• Will ARM and its partners make inroads into datacenters or will they continue to be an Intel stronghold and the biggest contributor to their earnings?

Intel has acquired Altera, whose current company name seems to be "Altera now part of Intel". Although nobody outside of Intel is privy to exactly why they acquired Altera, everyone assumes it is because they think that FPGA acceleration of specialized algorithms in the datacenter will become important. Altera's new range of FPGAs were already planned to be on Intel processes, so if eventually Intel want to put an FPGA fabric on the same die as the processor itself then that should be comparatively straightforward.

The second trend is whether ARM's value proposition for datacenters will be enough to get true traction. So far, the answer has been negative but it is a long game requiring not just hardware to be created by software environments, communication stacks, and more. Simon Segars, the CEO of ARM, told me that he ordered his CIO to get arm.com running on ARM servers to find out what it took. It is always a good idea to be a bit suspicious of your own company's marketing message.

If both of the two trends happen, FPGAs in datacenters, and ARM-based datacenters, then it could be very good for Xilinx whose high-end Virtex Ultrascale devices contain multi-core ARM processors and more. Just a few days ago they announced their first customer shipment of the generation built on the TSMC 16FF+ process, although they are not speaking at the event.

Conference Agenda

So what will you find out at the Linley Data Center Conference?

On Tuesday, there is a presentation by Alex Grbic of Altera now part of Intel on "FPGA Acceleration in Data-Center Applications." I have no inside information on whether they will be announcing anything new or whether this will be a general overview, but it will be interesting to get an insight into Intel's thinking.

On Wednesday, the keynote to open the day is by Jon Masters, Chief ARM Architect at Red Hat on "How ARM Servers Can Take Over the World." It will be interesting to see his view. Although, given his title, Jon is probably not agnostic on the issue, his company Red Hat is. They supply operating systems to Intel-based systems, and this must make up the bulk of their business today.

Two more general overviews of datacenters and cloud computing (I'm not sure there is really a difference) are the opening keynote and the closing panel session: On Tuesday morning, Bob Wheeler and Jag Bolaria of the Linley Group will present "The Silicon Foundation of Cloud Computing."

At the end of the second day, there is a panel session on "Future Directions and Trends in Cloud Computing." It will be moderated by Jag Bolaria with panel members from LinkedIn, Qualcomm, Oracle, Red Hat, and Orange Silicon Valley. In a weird alignment of the planets, the representative from Oracle used to be CEO of Virtutech, where I was his VP of marketing (we did virtual platforms).

There are plenty of other sessions too, For the audience of this blog, the most interesting might be the session on "Custom Silicon for the Cloud," with presentations by Socionext (fka Fujitsu ASIC) and GlobalFoundries. There are also sessions on software-defined networks, high-speed ethernet, network fabrics, and cloud processors (with IBM, presumably on Power Architecture, and Cavium on ARM).

There is a reception and exhibition on Tuesday from 3:50pm to 5:30pm. Usually all the companies that are speaking over the two days will have more detailed demonstrations of their products.

Get full details on the Linley Data Center Conference, including the full agenda and a link for registration (free for qualified attendees).

Future Conferences

The Linley IoT Conference is April 27-28. The Linley Mobile Conference is July 26-27. The Linley Processor Conference is September 26-27. Details on the Linley Events page.