IBM, HPE tout new A.I.-oriented servers

IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week introduced new servers optimized for artificial intelligence, and the two had one thing in common: Nvidia technology. HPE this week announced Gen10 of its HPE Apollo 6500 platform, running Intel Skylake processors and up to eight Pascal or Volta Nvidia GPUs connected by NVLink, Nvidia's high-speed interconnect. A fully loaded V100s server will get you 66 peak double-precision teraflops of performance, which HPE says is three times the performance of the previous generation. The Apollo 6500 Gen10 platform is aimed at deep-learning workloads and traditional HPC use cases. The NVLink technology is up to 10 times faster than PCI Express Gen 3 interconnects. For its part, IBM held its OpenPOWER Summit in Las Vegas this past week and announced that more than 325 member companies are working on products and services for A.I.-themed workloads in the enterprise.