[Not] the End of History
This is truly an amazing coincidence. My first blog on The Tech Arena is inspired by Allyson’s conversation with Lynn Comp.
Lynn used to be my manager at Intel some years ago. I owe Lynn a debt of gratitude. When she moved on from that role, she gave me advice (and supported me with a reference) that set me on a path to the final 7 years of my time at Intel, which were by far the most gratifying of my professional career so far.
We had many conversations on industry trends and strategy over the years. And so, hearing Lynn’s response to Allyson’s question on what’s different between the industry now and 10 years ago, I couldn’t resist the temptation to talk about “[Not] The End of History”. I hope you enjoy it, and please do let me know…
The Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989. By the end of 1991 the Soviet Union had dissolved ending, a process started 3 years earlier. The cold war was over, and the US was the sole superpower left standing, thriving.
In the summery of 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his famous article “The End of History?”, which he expanded into the book “The End of History and the Last Man” published in 1992. Paraphrasing, the thesis was that the winning political and economic system has been established and that the future of competition will be “higher in the stack”. Well…
In March 2009 Intel launched its Nehalem based Xeon processor family. After fighting for several years to win back share from AMD, Nehalem was a winning product. And that’s an understatement. Among other things its timing and feature fit was perfect to win the virtualization hockey stick growth curve and ultimately established Intel’s Xeon CPU at the foundation of the cloud revolution. Within a couple of years, Intel had >95% market share in server CPUs. It seemed like “the end of history” for data center CPU wars and was all but clear who “the last man” was.
The signs were already there (just like in geopolitics of 1989) and today we see a very different reality.
- Intel’s execution faltered and AMD came back not just with competitive technology but also with credible and consistent execution.
- ARM based CPUs have finally started making headway in the datacenter space. After acquiring Anapurna Labs in 2015, Amazon launched the ARM based Graviton CPU and instances in 2018, thus legitimizing ARM as a data center architecture. Ampere has been making real headway as an ARM based datacenter CPU vendor.
- Nvidia established GPUs as an important architectural approach to accelerate various workloads and gained tremendous momentum, to say the least, with the AI boom.
- Application specific accelerators have been deployed for anything from AI (for example Google’s TPU, but of course numerous companies are developing and selling AI training accelerators), to media transcode (YouTube’s Argos), to infrastructure (IPU/DPU galore, storage specific examples, etc…).
History seemed to end again with the advent of cloud computing. “Everything” was going to “the cloud”, server and data center architecture became “the cloud”. And again, history starts again with edge, new optimization points, data affinity, etc…
So what comes next? I’m eager to see (and discuss) how “the edge” is going to impact infrastructure, architectures, technologies and products. The Edge is about diversity as opposed to uniformity, and deals in general with priorities and constraints that are quite different from the cloud.
How will the accelerator landscape evolve? I can imagine pooling use cases that make sense in some environments (perhaps cloud) but less so in others (e.g., edge). How will it resolve in the different environments between general purpose accelerators (e.g., GPU) and function specific ones?
How will innovations like CXL impact these different market segments? How will modularity impact cloud, edge, and other evolving deployment models? How will application architecture eveolve?
And how will evolving security and new workloads (I didn’t say AI much in this edition ??) impact all of the above?
So much to think about, write about, talk about and to do! History keeps marching on after all.
This is truly an amazing coincidence. My first blog on The Tech Arena is inspired by Allyson’s conversation with Lynn Comp.
Lynn used to be my manager at Intel some years ago. I owe Lynn a debt of gratitude. When she moved on from that role, she gave me advice (and supported me with a reference) that set me on a path to the final 7 years of my time at Intel, which were by far the most gratifying of my professional career so far.
We had many conversations on industry trends and strategy over the years. And so, hearing Lynn’s response to Allyson’s question on what’s different between the industry now and 10 years ago, I couldn’t resist the temptation to talk about “[Not] The End of History”. I hope you enjoy it, and please do let me know…
The Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989. By the end of 1991 the Soviet Union had dissolved ending, a process started 3 years earlier. The cold war was over, and the US was the sole superpower left standing, thriving.
In the summery of 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his famous article “The End of History?”, which he expanded into the book “The End of History and the Last Man” published in 1992. Paraphrasing, the thesis was that the winning political and economic system has been established and that the future of competition will be “higher in the stack”. Well…
In March 2009 Intel launched its Nehalem based Xeon processor family. After fighting for several years to win back share from AMD, Nehalem was a winning product. And that’s an understatement. Among other things its timing and feature fit was perfect to win the virtualization hockey stick growth curve and ultimately established Intel’s Xeon CPU at the foundation of the cloud revolution. Within a couple of years, Intel had >95% market share in server CPUs. It seemed like “the end of history” for data center CPU wars and was all but clear who “the last man” was.
The signs were already there (just like in geopolitics of 1989) and today we see a very different reality.
- Intel’s execution faltered and AMD came back not just with competitive technology but also with credible and consistent execution.
- ARM based CPUs have finally started making headway in the datacenter space. After acquiring Anapurna Labs in 2015, Amazon launched the ARM based Graviton CPU and instances in 2018, thus legitimizing ARM as a data center architecture. Ampere has been making real headway as an ARM based datacenter CPU vendor.
- Nvidia established GPUs as an important architectural approach to accelerate various workloads and gained tremendous momentum, to say the least, with the AI boom.
- Application specific accelerators have been deployed for anything from AI (for example Google’s TPU, but of course numerous companies are developing and selling AI training accelerators), to media transcode (YouTube’s Argos), to infrastructure (IPU/DPU galore, storage specific examples, etc…).
History seemed to end again with the advent of cloud computing. “Everything” was going to “the cloud”, server and data center architecture became “the cloud”. And again, history starts again with edge, new optimization points, data affinity, etc…
So what comes next? I’m eager to see (and discuss) how “the edge” is going to impact infrastructure, architectures, technologies and products. The Edge is about diversity as opposed to uniformity, and deals in general with priorities and constraints that are quite different from the cloud.
How will the accelerator landscape evolve? I can imagine pooling use cases that make sense in some environments (perhaps cloud) but less so in others (e.g., edge). How will it resolve in the different environments between general purpose accelerators (e.g., GPU) and function specific ones?
How will innovations like CXL impact these different market segments? How will modularity impact cloud, edge, and other evolving deployment models? How will application architecture eveolve?
And how will evolving security and new workloads (I didn’t say AI much in this edition ??) impact all of the above?
So much to think about, write about, talk about and to do! History keeps marching on after all.
