News Precis#3 - 7 February 2020

Here are news, articles, podcasts and tweets from this week that I’ve found interesting and worthy of a second look. Note: Not all of these articles were published this week – it’s just when I get around to reading them.

Vendors

Micron starts sampling DDR5 DRAM. DDR5 is expected to have up to 1.85x the performance capability of DDR4. This seems like just another step up in memory performance, however as this paper highlights, the performance improvements in bandwidth allow memory to scale with multi-core processors. At a micro-level, you can read the paper and learn about new protocol changes like independent channels. At the macro-level, DDR5 continues the relentless performance improvement we come to expect in IT. We’re getting close to a single server being a mini-mainframe.
AMD on a tear with earnings beating expectations. AMD seems to have found the company mojo again. It may have been easy to assume that the processor wars were over but I think they’re just getting started. Intel may dominate x86, but AMD is giving them a run and ARM will be successful at the edge and for power-conscious applications in the data centre.
NGD Systems raises another $20m in Series C funding. Computational Storage is going to be an interesting area of future storage development (we got the low-down on the technology in this recent podcast).
Quantum buys ActiveScale from WD. There’s been a lot of industry changes over the past 12 months, with changes in ownership of storage assets. I wonder if we’re in a period of rationalisation for the object storage segment of this industry.

Enterprise

Kubernetes skills anyone? Looks like Kubernetes is the next big wave for technologists. I guess that’s no surprise as a day hardly goes by without at least a dozen K8S news pieces.
VMware changes vSphere per-CPU licensing. I guess it had to happen that VMware would want to capitalise on the evolution of 32+ core CPUs. I expect that system architectures would make 64 cores pretty difficult to architect with the right amount of memory and storage. Isn’t it more likely that these types of CPUs will be used for containerised workloads? If so, where does that leave licensing with Project Pacific?

Consumer

Ring app leaking data like a sieve. it appears that the Android version of the Ring app is also sharing data inappropriately. This is a real worry for all home automation systems. It’s bad enough that the data is being “officially” shared, but surely the sensitivity of this data should require a lot more oversight that is being given. I can see a significant amount of fallout coming from the home market as vendors get sued for their poor practices.
How much can you trust online? With the advents of sites like “thispersondoesnotexist.com”, will we go back to trusting only those people we’ve actually met….?

Podcasts

Neil Young thinks Mac audio is on a par with Fisher Price toys…. The thing is, he claims Steve Jobs told him so. Interesting listen.