.png)
3 Key Trends We're Seeking from AIHW and Edge Summit Next Week
To say that the TechArena team is excited for next week's AIHW and Edge Summit is an understatement. With 2024 being completely dedicated to all things AI, this event is a fantastic opportunity to check in on disruptive innovation to fuel the next wave of AI buildouts from hyperscale to the enterprise.
And with industry conversations focused on supply chain constraints of critical technology like GPUs and HBM, it's clear to see that innovation is required to keep up with customer demand and introduce more choice of solutions into the market. We will be coming at you with a deluge of content featuring bright stars in the AI hardware development arena which we recently kicked off with our conversation with Arun Nandi from Unilever. Here's what we will be tracking at the event next week:
Will NVIDIA GPUs Finally Face Real AI Competition in 2025?
The year has been filled with stories of NVIDIA AI Factories packed with Blackwell platforms and broad deployments of GPU clusters scaling to 100,000 nodes. While the extreme shortages of GPUs of the first half of the year have eased, the cost and power requirements to fuel these performance engines are eye-opening. AMD, the event's primary sponsor, has delivered the MI300X accelerator to the market, a viable performance alternative for many AI models that is gaining traction in the market. We'll also be talking to many silicon startups that are delivering unique solutions for AI trying to capture some of the growing logic TAM in this space. The real question is if the large players will move off of NVIDIA for any of these alternatives or simply continue to advance their internal designs and if the real market for new entrants to AI processors are aimed at the next layer of cloud providers and in the enterprise data center and edge.
Will 2025 Usher in AI Fabric Innovation?
While much of the industry attention has been focused on performance drivers of compute acceleration, the AI fabric cannot be ignored. This is a two-part target for us. First, we are keen to check in to viable competition to InfiniBand for offering the latency and scale required for AI training clusters. Today, NVIDIA also has a corner on this market with their tech acquired from Mellanox. While last year saw the announcement of the Ultra Ethernet consortium and a flurry of new specification development to bring Ethernet closer to the capabilities of InfiniBand, we may see other technologies emerge at the conference delivering an alternative for high-end fabric capability. The second target is a look at fabric connectivity and the age-old question of transition to optical. Copper continues to gasp out a life within the data center, but its limitations and power costs are putting increased pressure on providers to migrate more of their connectivity to optical. We'll be checking in with optical providers for the latest innovations in this space to see if 2025 is the year that optical will finally take over.
What About All That Power?
While the allure of AI is unquestioned, we may actually tap the planet's resources at the rate we're moving before we reach the age of AGI. Fundamental change to design principles including more efficient hardware innovation within every element of the data center is required. We will be looking to the vendor community to bring news of advancements on energy efficiency, embedded carbon, and circularity of designs, talk to operators at the show on how their organizations are tackling the challenge of power delivery and management, new cooling technology options, and more, and checking in with venture capital leaders to see how the energy quotient will help shape investments moving forward.
Got more things you'd like covered from next week's show? Please connect with us to share. And if you're going to be at the Summit and would like to connect, please hit me up on LinkedIn.
To say that the TechArena team is excited for next week's AIHW and Edge Summit is an understatement. With 2024 being completely dedicated to all things AI, this event is a fantastic opportunity to check in on disruptive innovation to fuel the next wave of AI buildouts from hyperscale to the enterprise.
And with industry conversations focused on supply chain constraints of critical technology like GPUs and HBM, it's clear to see that innovation is required to keep up with customer demand and introduce more choice of solutions into the market. We will be coming at you with a deluge of content featuring bright stars in the AI hardware development arena which we recently kicked off with our conversation with Arun Nandi from Unilever. Here's what we will be tracking at the event next week:
Will NVIDIA GPUs Finally Face Real AI Competition in 2025?
The year has been filled with stories of NVIDIA AI Factories packed with Blackwell platforms and broad deployments of GPU clusters scaling to 100,000 nodes. While the extreme shortages of GPUs of the first half of the year have eased, the cost and power requirements to fuel these performance engines are eye-opening. AMD, the event's primary sponsor, has delivered the MI300X accelerator to the market, a viable performance alternative for many AI models that is gaining traction in the market. We'll also be talking to many silicon startups that are delivering unique solutions for AI trying to capture some of the growing logic TAM in this space. The real question is if the large players will move off of NVIDIA for any of these alternatives or simply continue to advance their internal designs and if the real market for new entrants to AI processors are aimed at the next layer of cloud providers and in the enterprise data center and edge.
Will 2025 Usher in AI Fabric Innovation?
While much of the industry attention has been focused on performance drivers of compute acceleration, the AI fabric cannot be ignored. This is a two-part target for us. First, we are keen to check in to viable competition to InfiniBand for offering the latency and scale required for AI training clusters. Today, NVIDIA also has a corner on this market with their tech acquired from Mellanox. While last year saw the announcement of the Ultra Ethernet consortium and a flurry of new specification development to bring Ethernet closer to the capabilities of InfiniBand, we may see other technologies emerge at the conference delivering an alternative for high-end fabric capability. The second target is a look at fabric connectivity and the age-old question of transition to optical. Copper continues to gasp out a life within the data center, but its limitations and power costs are putting increased pressure on providers to migrate more of their connectivity to optical. We'll be checking in with optical providers for the latest innovations in this space to see if 2025 is the year that optical will finally take over.
What About All That Power?
While the allure of AI is unquestioned, we may actually tap the planet's resources at the rate we're moving before we reach the age of AGI. Fundamental change to design principles including more efficient hardware innovation within every element of the data center is required. We will be looking to the vendor community to bring news of advancements on energy efficiency, embedded carbon, and circularity of designs, talk to operators at the show on how their organizations are tackling the challenge of power delivery and management, new cooling technology options, and more, and checking in with venture capital leaders to see how the energy quotient will help shape investments moving forward.
Got more things you'd like covered from next week's show? Please connect with us to share. And if you're going to be at the Summit and would like to connect, please hit me up on LinkedIn.
