We’ve been living in the Information Age for some time now, but businesses want to start to put more of that information to work so they can leverage it to react to market forces and individual desires more quickly and efficiently. That requires not just the collection and storage of data, but also much better processing power to give organizations and their systems the ability to pore through that data and garner business insights.
That said, it’s no surprise that IBM (News - Alert) and Intel are among the companies working to make that happen. Both of these industry veterans continue to innovate to help address big data and the move to uncover more business insights on a shorter timeline.
For example, IBM just announced it has designed and tested integrated, wavelength-multiplexed silicon photonics chips that will enable the manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers.
“Making silicon photonics technology ready for widespread commercial use will help the semiconductor industry keep pace with ever-growing demands in computing power driven by Big Data and cloud services,” Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, explains. “Just as fiber optics revolutionized the telecommunications industry by speeding up the flow of data -- bringing enormous benefits to consumers -- we’re excited about the potential of replacing electric signals with pulses of light. This technology is designed to make future computing systems faster and more energy efficient, while enabling customers to capture insights from Big Data in real time.”
And Big Blue has enhanced the Power E880 server it introduced last year. The enhancements enable the E880 to scale to 192 cores.
Meanwhile, Intel (News - Alert) Corp. a week ago unveiled its family of Xeon E7-8800/4800 v3 processors. Based on Intel’s 22nm manufacturing process, this group of products (also known as Haswell-EX) addresses mission-critical computing and real-time analytics, and scales up to 18 cores and 36 threads. Around 17 system manufacturers have committed to use the chips to date, according to an article on Bidness Etc.
Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the data center group at Intel, notes: "The Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family is the engine for accelerating business intelligence through real-time analytics, enabling businesses to improve customer satisfaction through more personalized products and services, generate new revenue streams and enhance operational efficiency."