Inference is the Hammer That Breaks the Datacenter

Two important changes to the datacenter are happening in the same year--one on the hardware side, another in software. And together, they create a force big enough to blow away the clouds, at least over the long haul. As we covered this year from a datacentric (and even supercomputing) point of view, 2018 is the time for Arm to shine. With a bevy of inroads to commercial markets at the high-end all the way down to the micro-device level, the architecture presents a genuine challenge to the processor establishment. And now, coupled with the biggest trend since cloud or big data (which ironically could be replaced in various ways by this contender) machine learning comes steamrolling along, changing the way we could think about the final product of training--inference.