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ophirgottlieb · 7 years ago

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Even Now, The Bullish Thesis for Nvidia's Future is Breathtaking

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Even Now, The Bullish Thesis for Nvidia's Future is Breathtaking

Date Published: 1-28-2018 Written by: Ophir Gottlieb This is a snippet from a CML Pro dossier. LEDE It's time for an update, yet again, on the tech gem that has its sights set on powering all of technology, and in this review we discuss several segments, with total addressable markets topping $1 trillion. It is this forward looking view of the world that justifies Nvidia's market cap -- and a potential for serious growth. CES Nvidia was added to Top Picks on 2-Jan-16 for $32.25. As of this writing it is trading at $236.66, up 591.6%. While the key note at CES was a full 90 minutes, just the first 2 minutes and 30 seconds does the trick for a primer. Here is that video, below:

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BREAKOUT SESSION Even yet more revealing was CEO Jensen Huang's breakout session which can be seen through this article posted by Venture Beat. STORY But, apart from all the videos and all the forecasts, there is more news -- real news, that powers the bullish thesis for Nvidia forward. Let's talk about some details. CARS We can star with self-driving featured cars which is a nascent industry in terms of revenue, it is booming with respect to research and planned infrastructure. Here is a forecast for the self-driving featured market:

That's 134% compounded annual growth for the six years from 2015-2020 and deep learning is the secret weapon for self-driving car algorithms. And, while dozens of manufacturers of personal cars and trucks and commercial trucks are readying themselves for a fierce battle, Nvidia has a different approach. The company's strategy in this segment is to become a part of the internal workings on which all manufacturers depend. And while that sounded a little bold when we first covered Nvidia back in 2015, today it isn't bold, it's simply a matter of fact. First, the established players in this manufacturing world are already relying on Nvidia -- companies like Audi, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Tesla in automotive, and companies like PACCAR, a leading global truck manufacturer with over $17 billion in sales and 23,000 employees. Here is a wonderful video that hits the high points of the commercial trucking world, and even has some cool musical scoring:

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Further yet, Nvidia has a partnership with Bosch, the world's largest automotive supplier with total global sales of $73.1 billion in 2016. We also now know that 145 automotive startups around the world have chosen NVIDIA DRIVE. In total, 225 companies are currently developing with DRIVE PX. But all of this is still, unbelievably, just the tip of the iceberg. When people think of AI in the car, they tend to imagine level 4 and level 5 driving capabilities. At these levels -- 5 being the highest -- the vehicle would be capable of most driving scenarios it encounters. Level 5 would be a fully autonomous drive. But the AI advances inside the car shouldn't go unnoticed. Here is a snippet from TheStreet.com:

Mercedes-Benz unveiled its new (Mercedes Benz User Experience) MBUX infotainment system. The AI-powered system will be available in the A-Class starting next month. Nvidia has already announced a new partnership with Volkswagen (VLKAY) for its Drive IX, Nvidia's intelligence experience toolkit. In a nutshell, Nvidia's hardware gives its customers the tools necessary to build their own AI-based applications.

The point here is that it's not just hardware, but also software. Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia recently said at CES:

Software is going to define so much of the user experience, the driving experience and it will continue to evolve and get better and better. New applications and new features [will be] added to your car even after it's in your driveway.

The expansiveness of AI as it pertains to the automobile, beyond self-driving, is breathtaking. Another final word for Shapiro:

AI is really at the heart of everything that's happening in the transportation space.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We could go on and on with links to product announcement on Nvidia's site that are just breathtaking, but it is in fact a 40,000 foot view that we are after. While all of this sounds like a massive opportunity, and it is, the realization of this boom has barely hit Nvidia's business. Here is the revenue from the automotive sector for Nvidia:

That's just $487 million, for a company with over $9 billion in sales. But, the total addressable market (TAM), at least in Nvidia's eyes, is quite substantial:

That is $8 billion by 2025 heading to $100 billion in the future. So, you see, while the self-driving featured car world and the various other aspects of a smart car are making headlines, they are yet to hit Nvidia's bottom line. So while we can marvel at the revenue and earnings growth, which has been staggering, just this one area is in such early stages, that it is, practically speaking, rounding error as of today. STEPPING EVEN FURTHER BACK We focused on the automotive segment to make a point -- not just about Nvidia's proliferation in one segment and the potential TAM, but also the very idea of what the company is centered on. It's not about being the face of a product, it's about being the guts of every product. Wall Street was slow to pick up on Nvidia's potential early on, but that is no longer the case. Recently Bank of America Merrill Lynch raised its price target to $275. But it's the recognition that Nvidia has several business lines, that in and of themselves are substantial companies, that is starting to resonate. We covered automotive, but the data center business is also explosive. A misguide article written August 11th, 2017, by MarketWatch read Nvidia stock could pause as server growth slows down. Here is a quick snippet from that article:

While [the graphics chips designed for data centers] segment soared 175% from the same quarter a year ago, it grew only 2% on a sequential basis to $416 million.

Of course, in the earnings report that followed, Wall Street was in fact surprised, and the data center business is large enough, right now, to see substantial impact on revenue. Here is what CNBC reported:

The company reported $501 million in datacenter revenue, which includes sales of GPUs to cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, beating analyst estimates of $461 million and marking a 20 percent increase from last quarter.

And, for a chart, we turned to some cool graphics from TechCrunch, with our added emphasis on top of it:

Taking a step back, autonomous anything (cars, trucks, drones, robots) and many other trends are still small, but here is what we can expect for the pubic cloud computing platform world:

The worldwide public cloud market is forecast to rise from $154 billion this year (2017) to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2026. That market has three dominant providers:

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google purchase from Nvidia, at scale, and this business line is a winner, right now. Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Facebook and Oracle also rely on Nvidia chips for their clouds. In fact, on 9-27-2017 we penned Nvidia Sign Massive Deal with China's Kingpins, relating to the cloud, specifically. So, what changed? It turns out that Nvidia's newest chip, 'Volta,' has done what it claimed it will do. This is from Nvidia:

NVIDIA Volta™ is the new driving force behind artificial intelligence. Volta will fuel breakthroughs in every industry. Humanity's moonshots like eradicating cancer, intelligent customer experiences, and self-driving vehicles are within reach of this next era of AI.

And then a comment from Goldman Sachs right after the earnings call:

The ramp of Volta seems to be tracking well, and more importantly, has significant runway ahead, in our view, as a broader set of customers adopt the new architecture in the coming quarters.

But still, if you read with a careful eye, data center revenue came in at $501 million, which more than doubled from a year ago on the strong adoption of the Volta platform, but that is still 'just' $1.62 billion over the trailing twelve-months. Nvidia projects that the TAM for the data center segment to hit $30 billion by 2020 on its way to $75 billion.

Again, this is a company with just $9 billion in sales as of the last year. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, BROADLY While all of this sounds bullish, it really, at least in Nvidia's eyes, is still barely scratching the surface. Here is a quick take from the company on its fundamental underlying technology, the GPU, and then yet more market opportunity in the broadly defined 'Artificial Intelligence' segment.

GPU computing powers the computation required for deep neural networks to learn to recognize patterns from massive amounts of data. GPU programmability gives developers flexibility in this rapidly evolving, nascent industry. We've built an end-to-end platform to advance AI, from purpose-built processors to software to fully integrated systems. We advance fundamental AI research and fuel the AI ecosystem by working closely with developers, researchers, and startups. We aim to democratize AI, so that every company in every industry can benefit from its power.

With only 10% of manufacturing tasks automated, AI will power a new wave of automation. * NVIDIA is the #1 AV platform — revolutionizing the $10T global transportation industry. * AI Cities: 1B smart cameras worldwide by 2020 will make cities safer, smarter. * AI Healthcare: AI is transforming the spectrum of care, from detection to diagnosis to treatment. GAMING All of these segments, this world that will progress, still hasn't even touched on Nvidia's largest segment which is gaming. And even that core business, is seeing truly remarkable growth. In the latest earnings report we learned that gaming revenue in the quarter was $1.56 billion, up 25% year-on-year and up 32% sequentially and the company claimed that it saw robust demand across all regions and form factors. We also learned that more than 1,200 companies are already using Nvidia's inference platform, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, Hi Vision and Tencent. DRONES As if all of this wasn't enough, Nvidia appears to have, a stand-alone business for drones. Accounting and auditing giant, PWC, noted that the world drone market will near $127 billion by 2020, according to Bloomberg. The drone market in general has so many charts that look like fantasy growth forecasts that it does feel a little "too good to be true," but the PWC note adds credence to those forecasts. Here are a few charts, just for some perspective, before we get the role the Nvidia hopes to play. Let's start with a chart of projections for consumer drone shipments from our friends at Statista.

There are two incredible phenomena surrounding consumer drone shipments. The first is this chart, which shows shipments growing 570% from 2016 to 2021, ultimately hitting nearly 68 million in that year alone totaling over $5 billion in sales. The second incredible phenomenon is that consumer drones are the smallest segment when compared to commercial and military. Let's turn to the commercial market -- there is where companies like Amazon would fit in.

Much like the consumer segment, this market is set to lift-off (no pun intended) right now. We're looking at a $587 million market growing to over $12 billion, or a 20-fold increase. Yes, while consumer is set to grow nearly 6x to $5 billion, this commercial market is set to grow by 20x and to $12 billion. As enormous as those growth figures are, and easily make room for several competitors to do quite well, friends, that's literally rounding error when compared to the military. Check out the size of military compared to everything else, labeled as 'civil' in the chart below:

Even further we get these projections from "Commercial and Military Drone Market Assessment and Forecasts 2016 - 2025" (note: UAV is short for "unmanned aerial vehicle"). * By 2018, UAVs will be used by nearly for every major manufacturing company to control logistics. * By 2021, UAVs will be used nearly every automobile manufacturer in metropolitan areas and along major highways to provide ubiquitous wireless coverage based on a combination of LTE, 5G, and satellite communications. Suffice it to say, the drone market is set to become a gigantic part of technology across all customer types and the demand is expected to keep growing significantly through 2027. Nvidia writes that "there's a new generation of smarter, more advanced drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that uses the power of deep learning algorithms to understand and react to the world around them. NVIDIA® Jetson™ is the platform that makes it possible." Here is a video from an Nvidia partner:

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On September of 25th of 2017, news broke that Chinese e-commerce giant JD had selected Nvidia for drone deliveries, rescue and agricultural use. JD.com is the second-largest online retailer behind Alibaba. RISK Nvidia's market cap, as of this writing, is over $140 billion, and the company has 'just' $9 billion in sales. It is quite profitable, pays a dividend, and is growing by leaps and bounds, but still, with that valuation it better at least be 'sort of right,' about several of the markets it is pursuing for the stock to rise. CONCLUSION It's head spinning -- all of it. Each segment seems too good to be true, and who knows, maybe it is, or at least, maybe some of them will not pan out. But, the idea that Nvidia is hitting a wall, or that growth is finally tapering, is likely false -- if you believe the company, at least. There is so much room for growth that all we can do is listen to earnings calls, and watch the world as we know it evolve. If Nvidia is right, or even if it is 'partially' right, this entity may well become the most important and powerful technology company in the world. SEEING THE FUTURE It's understanding technology that gets us an edge on finding the gems like Nvidia, when they are small and under appreciated, that can turn into the 'next Apple,' or 'next Amazon,' where we must get ahead of the curve. This is what CML Pro does. Each company in our 'Top Picks' has been selected as a future crown jewel of technology. Market correction or not, recession or not, the growth in these areas is a near certainty. We are Capital Market Laboratories. Our research sits next to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Barclays, Morgan Stanley and every other multi billion dollar institution as a member of the famed Thomson Reuters First Call. But while those people pay upwards of $2,000 a month on their live terminals, we are the anti-institution and are breaking the information asymmetry. The precious few thematic top picks for 2018, research dossiers, and alerts are available for a limited time at an 80% discount for $19/mo. Join Us: Discover the undiscovered companies that will power technology's future. As always, control risk, size appropriately and use your own judgment, aside from anyone else's subjective views, including my own. Thanks for reading, friends. The author is long shares Nvidia at the time of this writing. Legal The information contained on this site is provided for general informational purposes, as a convenience to the readers. The materials are not a substitute for obtaining professional advice from a qualified person, firm or corporation. Consult the appropriate professional advisor for more complete and current information. Capital Market Laboratories (“The Company”) does not engage in rendering any legal or professional services by placing these general informational materials on this website. The Company specifically disclaims any liability, whether based in contract, tort, strict liability or otherwise, for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising out of or in any way connected with access to or use of the site, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages, including liability in connection with mistakes or omissions in, or delays in transmission of, information to or from the user, interruptions in telecommunications connections to the site or viruses. The Company make no representations or warranties about the accuracy or completeness of the information contained on this website. Any links provided to other server sites are offered as a matter of convenience and in no way are meant to imply that The Company endorses, sponsors, promotes or is affiliated with the owners of or participants in those sites, or endorse any information contained on those sites, unless expressly stated.

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years ago

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CES 2018: Robots, AI, massive data and prodigious plans

http://bit.ly/2n1oEly

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This year’s CES was a great show for robots. “From the latest in self-driving vehicles, smart cities, AI, sports tech, robotics, health and fitness tech and more, the innovation at CES 2018 will further global business and spur new jobs and new markets around the world,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CTA.

But with that breath of coverage and an estimated 200,000 visitors, 7,000 media, 3,000 exhibitors, 900 startups, 2.75 million sq ft of floorspace at two convention centers, hospitality suites in almost every major hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, over 20,000 product announcements and 900 speakers in 200 conference sessions, comes massive traffic (humans, cars, taxis and buses), power outages, product launch snafus and humor:

AI, big data, Amazon, Google, Alibaba and Baidu

“It’s the year of A.I. and conversational interfaces,” said J. P. Gownder, an analyst for Forrester Research, “particularly advancing those interfaces from basic conversations to relationships.” Voice control of almost everything from robots to refrigerators was de rigueur. The growing amount of artificial intelligence software and the race between Amazon, Google and their Chinese counterparts Alibaba and Baidu to be the go-to service for integration was on full display. Signs advertised that products worked with Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa or both, or with Duer-OS (Baidu’s conversational operating system) but, by the sheer number of products that worked with the Alexa voice assistant, Amazon appeared to dominate.

“It’s the year when data is no long static and post processed” said Brian Krzanich, Intel’s CEO. He also said: “The rise of autonomous cars will be the most ambitious data project of our lifetime.” In his keynote presentation he demonstrated the massive volume of data involved in the real-time processing needs of autonomous cars, sports events, smart robotics, mapping data collection and a myriad other sources of data-driven technology on the horizon.

Many companies were promoting their graphics, gaming, and other types of processors. IBM had a large invite-only room to show their Quantum Computer. Their 50-qubit chip is housed in that silver canister at the bottom of the thing/computer. Not shown is the housing which keeps the device super cool. IBM is making the computer available via the cloud to 60,000 users working on 1.7 million experiments as well as commercial partners in finance, materials, automotive and chemistry. (Intel showed their 49-qubit chip code-named Tangle Lake in a segment in Krzanich’s keynote.)

Robots, robotics and startups

Robots were everywhere ranging from ag bots, tennis bots, drones, robot arms, robot prosthetics and robot wheelchairs, to smart home companions, security robots and air, land and sea drones. In this short promotional video produced by CES, one can see the range of products on display. Note the quantity of Japanese, Chinese and Korean manufacturers.

One of the remarkable features of CES is what they call Eureka Park. It’s a whole floor of over 900 startup booths with entrepreneurs eager to explain their wares and plans. The area was supported by the NSF, Techstars and a host of others. It’s a bit overwhelming but absolutely fascinating.

Because it’s such a spread-out show, locations tend to blur. But I visited all the robotics and related vendors I could find in my 28,000-step two-day exploration and the following are ones that stuck out from the pack:

LiDAR and camera vision systems providers for self-driving vehicles, robots, and automation such as Velodyne, Quanergy and Luminar were everywhere showing near and far detection ranges, wide, narrow and 360° fields of view, and solid state or other conventional as well as software to consolidate all that data and make it meaningful.

Innoviz Technologies, an Israeli startup that has already raised $82 million, showed their solid state device (Pro) available now and their low-cost automotive grade product (One) available in 2019.

Bosch-supported Chinese startup Roadstar.ai is developing Level 4 multi-sensor fusion solutions (cameras, LiDARs, radars, GPS and others).

Beijing Visum Technology, another Chinese vision system startup, but this one uses what they called ‘Natural Learning’ to continually improve what is seen by their ViEye, stereoscopic, real-time vision detection system for logistics and industrial automation.

Korean startup EyeDea displayed both a robot vision system and a smart vision module (camera and chip) for deep learning and obstacle avoidance for the auto industry.

Occipital, a Colorado startup developing depth sensing tech using twin infrared shutter cameras for indoor and outdoor for scanning and tracking.

Aeolus Robotics, a Chinese/American startup working on a $10,000 home robot with functional arms and hands and comms and interactivity that are similar to what IBM’s Watson offers, appeared to be focused toward selling their system components: object recognition, facial/pedestrian recognition, deep learning perception systems and auto safety cameras which interpret human expressions and actions such as fatigue.

SuitX, a Bay Area exoskeleton spin-off from Ekso Bionics, focused on providing modular therapeutic help for people with limited mobility rather than industrial uses of assistive devices. Ekso, which wasn’t at CES, is providing assistive systems that people strap into to make walking, lifting and stretching easier for employees and the military.

There were a few marine robots for photography, research and hull inspection:

Sublue Underwater AI, a Chinese startup, had a tank with an intelligent ROV capable of diving down to 240′ while sending back full HD camera and sensor data. They also make water tows.

RoboSea, also a Chinese startup, was showing land and sea drones for entertainment, research and rescue and photography.

QYSea, a Chinese startup making a 4k HD underwater camera robot which can go to a depth of 325′.

CCROV, a brand of the Vxfly incubater of China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University, demonstrated a 10-pound tethered camera box with thrusters that can dive more than 300′. The compact device is designed for narrow underwater areas and dangerous environments for people.

All were well-designed and packaged as consumer products.

UBTech, a Chinese startup that is doing quite well making small humanoid toy robots including their $300 StarWars StormTrooper showed that their line of robots are growing from toys to service robots. They were demonstrating the first video-enabled humanoid robot with an Amazon Alexa communication system touting its surveillance capabilities and Avatar modes for this little (17″ tall) walking robot. It not only works with Alexa but can also get apps and skills and accept controls from iOS and Android. Still, like many of the other home robots, they can’t grasp objects, consequently they can’t perform services beyond remote presence and Alexa-like skills.

My Special Aflac Duck won the CES Best Unexpected Product Award for a social robot designed to look like the white Aflac duck but also designed to help children coping with cancer. This is the second healthcare-related robotic device for kids from Sproutel, the maker of the duck. Their first product was Jerry the Bear for diabetic kids.

YYD Robo, another Chinese startup, was demonstrating a line of family companion, medical care robots (although the robot’s hands could not grasp), which also served as child care and teaching robots. This Shenzhen-based robot company says they are fully-staffed and have a million sq ft of manufacturing space, yet the robots weren’t working and their website doesn’t come up.

Hease Robotics, a French mobile kiosk startup, showed their Heasy robotic kiosk as a guide for retail stores, office facilities and public areas. At CES, there were many vending machine companies showing how they are transitioning to smart machines – and in some cases, smart and robotic as the Heasy robotic kiosk.

Haapie SAS, also a French startup, was showing their tiny interactive, social and cognitive robots – consumer entertainment and Alexa-like capabilities. Haapie also integrates their voice recognition, speech synthesis and content management into smartphone clients.

LG, the Korean consumer products conglomerate, showed an ambitious line of robot products they called CLOi. One is an industrial floor cleaner for public spaces which can also serve as a kiosk/guide; another has a build-in tray for food and drink delivery in hotels; and a third can carry luggage and will follow customers around stores, airports and hotels. During a press conference, one of the robots tipped over and another wouldn’t hear instructions. Nevertheless all three were well-designed and purposed and the floor cleaner and porter robots are going to help out at the airport for next month’s Winter Olympics.

Two Chinese companies showed follow-me luggage: 90FUN and their Puppy suitcase and ForwardX and their smart suitcases. 90FUN is using Ninebot/Segway follow-me technology for their Puppy.

Twinswheel, a French startup, was showing a prototype of their parcel delivery land drone for factories, offices and last-mile deliveries.

Dobot is a Chinese inventor/developer of a transformable robot and 3D printer for educational purposes and a multi-functional industrial robot arm. They also make a variety of vision and stabilizing systems which are incorporated into their printers and robots. It’s very clever science. They even have a laser add-on for laser cutting and/or engraving. Dobot had a very successful Kickstarter campaign in 2017.

Evolver Robots is a Chinese developer of mobile domestic service robots specifically designed for children between the ages of 4-12 offering child education, video chat, games, mobile projection and remote control via smartphone.

Although drones had their own separate area at the show, there were many locations where I found them. From the agricultural spraying drones by Yamaha, DJI and Taiwanese Geosat Aerospace to the little deck-of-cards-sized ElanSelfie or the fold-into-a-5″ X 1/2″ high AEE Aviation selfie drone from Shenzhen, nothing stood out amongst the other 40+ drone vendors to compete with the might of DJI (which had two good-sized booths in different locations).

Segway (remember Dean Kamen?) is now fully owned by Ninebot, a Beijing provider of all types of robotic-assisted self-balancing scooters and devices. They are now focused on lifestyle and recreational riders in the consumer market including the Loomo which you ride like a hoverboard and then load it up with cargo and have it follow you home or to another place in the facility. At their booth they were pushing the Loomo for logistics operations however it can’t carry much and has balance problems. They would do better having it tow a cart.

Yujin Robot, a large Korean maker of robotic vacuums, educational robots, industrial robots, mobility platforms for research and a variety of consumer products, was showing their new logistics transport system GoCart with three different configurations of autonomous point-to-point robots.

The Buddy robot from Blue Frog Robotics won CES’s Robotics and Drones Innovation Award along with Soft Robotics and their grippers and control system that can pick items of varying size, shape and weight with a single device. Jibo, the Dobot (mentioned above) and 14 others also received the Robotics and Drones Innovation Award.

[The old adage in robotics that for every service robot there is a highly-skilled engineer by its side is still true… most of the social and home robots frequently didn’t work at the show and were either idle or being repaired.]

Silly things

A local strip club promoted their robotic pole dancers (free limo).

At a hospitality suite across from the convention center, the head of Harmony, the sex robot by San Diego area Abyss Creations (RealDoll), was available for demos and interviews. It will begin shipping this quarter at $8-$10,000.

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Crowd-drawing events were everywhere but this one drew the largest audiences: Omron’s ping-pong playing robot.

FoldiMate, a laundry folding robot, requires a human to feed the robot one article at a time for it to work (for just $980 in late 2019). Who’s the robot?

And Intel’s drones flew over the Bellagio hotel fountains in sync with the water and light musical show. Very cool.

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ABC’s Shark Tank, the hit business-themed funding TV show, was searching for entrepreneurs with interesting products at an open call audition area.

Bottom Line

Each time I return from a CES (I’ve been to at least six) I swear I’ll never go again. It’s exhausting as well as overwhelming. It’s impossible to get to all the places one needs to go — and it’s cold. Plus, once I get there, the products are often so new and untested, that they fail or are over-presented with too much hype. (LG’s new CLOi products failed repeatedly at their press conference; Sony’s Aibo ignored commands at the Sony press event.)

I end up asking myself “Is this technology really ready for prime time? Will it be ready by their promised delivery dates? Or was it all just a hope-fest? A search for funding?” I still have no answer… perhaps all are true; perhaps that’s why I keep going. It’s as if my mind sifted through all the hype and chaff and ended up with what’s important. There’s no doubt this show was great for robotics and that Asian (particularly Chinese) vendors are the new power players. Maybe that’s why I copied down the dates for CES 2018.

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mthrynn · 8 years ago

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AMD is charging back into the enterprise data center and select HPC workflows with its new EPYC 7000 processor line, code-named Naples, announced today at a “global” launch event in Austin TX. In many ways it was a full frontal assault on Intel’s dominance in the x86 data center landscape. Claiming performance and cost advantages and supported by statements from key OEMs, ODMs, and hyperscalers – HPE, Dell, and Microsoft Azure for example – AMD is hoping to convince HPC and data center customers it is back for the long haul.

Aware there may be market reluctance after its absence from the data center, Scott Aylor, AMD corporate VP and GM of enterprise solutions business, said “It’s not enough to come back with one product, you’ve got to come back with a product cadence that moves as the market moves. So not only are we coming back with EPYC, we’re also [discussing follow-on products] so when customers move with us today on EPYC they know they have a safe home and a migration path with Rome.” AMD has committed to socket compatibility between EPYC 7000 line and Rome, code name of the next scheduled generation AMD processor aimed at the data center.

AMD showcased some gaudy performance and price-performance benchmarks comparing EPYC to Broadwell line. In a pre-launch briefing with HPCwire, Aylor said, “These numbers are very big, so they show very measurable separation from what is available with Broadwell. Part of that is quite frankly because we didn’t design EPYC to compete with Broadwell. We designed it to compete with what’s coming. When [Intel’s] Skylake comes later this summer, we think these comparisons will still be very strong against the platinum, gold silver and bronze of Skylake.”

Based on the Zen core, EPYC is a line of system on a chip (SoC) devices designed with enhanced memory bandwidth and fast interconnect in mind. AMD also introduced a one-socket device, optimized for many workloads, which AMD says will invigorate a viable one-socket server market. With EPYC, “we can build a no compromise one-socket offering that will allow us to cover up to 50 percent of the two-socket market that is today held by the [Intel Broadwell] E5-2650 and below,” said Aylor.

AMD clearly has big ambitions. Earlier this spring it introduced Ryzen7 processor line, also based on the Zen core, and targeting high performance gaming. EPYC is aimed squarely at the data center. Aylor briefed HPCwire on EPYC before the launch and some of the technical details were still not available. It is an SoC product stack with a range of offerings roughly mimicking the Broadwell product stack. EPYC has up to 32 cores and 8 DDR4 channels per CPU allowing it to address 2TB of memory. The I/O is 128 PCIe lanes.

“The SoC approach we have taken allows all of the IO that has historically lived on an external bridge or IO hub to be fully integrated that into the device,” said Aylor. One result is low latency high performance connections. The PCIe lanes are configurable, “so you can use them to connect to SATA links, directly connect to NVMe links. It also facilitates a strong connection to high performance GPUs.” AMD plans to show an EPYC plus Radeon Instinct GPU machine learning platform at its conference this week.”

AMD presented both SPECint (integer) and SPECfp (floating point) performance comparisons with the Broadwell as well as price point comparisons (how much performance the same number of dollars will be of each processor) some of which are shown below.

“We’re tiering products in 32, 24, and 16-core ranges,” said AYLOR. The idea, of course, is satisfy widely varying needs. The top end aimed at scale out and HPC workloads, he said. The bottom tier allows users to closely manage per core licensing costs. “We have tried to cover the vast majority of the market that exists today in the Broadwell family,” says Aylor. Every product will have a dedicated security processor.

“Sometime people will say benchmarks are interesting but how do you do in the real world. Well we will showcase a fluid dynamics HPC workload, Apache/Spark, and software defined storage reference architecture [at the launch]. We will also have an open stack cloud based implementation,” said Aylor. AMD was expecting n the order 600 attendees for the EPYC launch.

Moving back into the data center is a huge bet by AMD that’s required a very substantial investment in the Zen core and EPYC. Seeking to buttress the gamble, AMD has seemingly got buy-in from several market makers and many ecosystem partners. Here are four endorsements included in the official release; while the statements are on the over enthusiastic side they nonetheless suggest AMD has done product groundwork with partners:

HPE. “The EPYC processor represents a paradigm shift in computing and will usher in a new era for the IT ecosystem,” said Antonio Neri, EVP and general manager Enterprise Group, HPE. “Starting with the Cloudline CL3150 and expanding into other product lines later this year, the arrival of EPYC in HPE systems will be welcomed by customers who are eager to deploy the performance and innovation EPYC delivers.”

Dell EMC. “As an industry leader, we are committed to driving IT Transformation for our customers,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, server solutions division at Dell EMC, “Our next generation of PowerEdge servers are the bedrock of the modern data center that are designed to maximize business scalability and intelligent automation with integrated security. The combination of PowerEdge and the AMD EPYC performance and security capabilities will create unique compute solutions for our customers to accelerate workloads and protect their business.”

Baidu. “As the world’s largest Chinese language search engine and leading AI-Tech company, Baidu prides itself on simplifying a complex world through technology,” said By Dr. Zhang Ya Qin, president of Baidu. “The AMD EPYC processor powered one-socket server can significantly increase our datacenter computing efficiency, reduce TCO and lower energy consumption. We will start deploying with the launch of AMD EPYC and I look forward to our cooperation leading to scaled EPYC adoption this year, and ongoing innovations.”

Microsoft. “We’ve worked to make Microsoft Azure a powerful enterprise grade cloud platform, that helps guide the success of our customers, no matter their size or geography,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president, Azure Compute, Microsoft Corp. “To power Azure, we require the most cutting-edge infrastructure and the latest advances in silicon which is why we intend to be the first global cloud provider to deliver AMD EPYC, and its combination of high performance and value, to customers

The single socket gambit is another interesting aspect to AMD’s initiative. Currently two socket servers rule the roost.

Here’s the AMD pitch: “In our one socket offering we have come up with a clever way to maintain all of the I/O capabilities that you would get in a two socket as well as the full complement of eight memory channels. Today people buy two socket, sometimes because they need to but more often because than not because they have to. There are many examples in which I/O rich [workload] like storage, like GPU compute, and some vertical workloads where people don’t necessarily need two sockets from a CPU performance perspective,” said Aylor.

AMD’s single socket offering cuts costs substantially, according to Aylor. “We’ve selectively optimized a couple of skews for one socket only. So these are skews that are one socket capable only,” said Aylor. As an example of how the one socket and two socket offerings are distinguished, he cited on package interconnect, “The infinity fabric that would normally connect the two sockets in a two socket system, we repurpose that interconnect into more I/O lanes and that’s how you have in a two socket solution 128 lanes of PCIe and in a one socket solution you still keep the same level of connectivity.”

AMD has singled out a number of vertical as good fits for one socket EPYC servers. Perhaps not surprisingly, storage is one. “Not only base line storage but software defined storage with EPYC’s ability to attach a massive number of SATA drives to a one socket. We also see a strong opportunity in certain areas of high performance computing, especially those that tend to focus on memory bound application. And we have an oil and gas reservoir simulation demo,” said Aylor.

Link to AMD press release: http://ift.tt/2sxJ3AX

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