Napatech launches 400Gbps SmartNIC based on Intel Agilex FPGA

Napatech announced general availability of its first 400Gbps programmable SmartNIC based on the Intel Agilex 7 FPGAs.

The new NT400 SmartNIC platform includes two QSFP56 network ports, supporting up to 2x200G traffic. At the core of the NT400 platform is the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA F-Tile chiplet, which incorporates a configurable, hardened Ethernet protocol stack.

The SmartNIC hardware is complemented by Napatech's portfolio of production-grade software packages. The platform's PCIe Gen 4 16-lane host interface enables full-duplex 2x100Gbps traffic between network ports and host applications.

Napatech said it chose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for its scalability options, which allow support for five different configurations that meet various price, performance, power and feature goals.

“The NT400 platform represents the latest generation within our portfolio of SmartNIC solutions,” said Jarrod Siket, Chief Marketing Officer at Napatech. “We will deliver multiple SKUs based on this platform, providing products with memory configurations as well features like time synchronization and management ports that are precisely tuned to the requirements of our customers’ applications, all packaged with the applicable production-grade software.”

“We are delighted to see Napatech choose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for their leading-edge SmartNIC solutions,” said Mike Fitton, Vice President Programmable Solutions Group and General Manager, Network Business Division at Intel. “The combination of our FPGAs, which deliver high performance, and power efficiency plus a rich feature set for the most demanding applications, together with Napatech’s production-grade hardware and software, helps ensure that customers can deliver leading solutions for a wide range of enterprise and telecom applications.”

https://www.napatech.com/media/press-releases/

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Forbes: Intel’s Chiplet Strategy Accelerates FPGA Development

An article in Forbes discusses how Intel's use of chiplets is accelerating the development of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). 

Specifically chiplets are being used for input/output (I/O) functions, allowing the central portion of the FPGA to remain unchanged and eliminating the need to redesign the main FPGA die. 

The article also notes that Intel's use of chiplets is part of a broader trend in the semiconductor industry toward integrating multiple chiplets in a package to deliver product innovation across market segments.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2023/08/21/intels-chiplet-strategy-accelerates-fpga-development/?linkId=100000214920972&sh=551f16285561

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Brightspeed names Tom Maguire as next CEO

Brightspeed, the fifth largest incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) in the U.S., selected Tom Maguire, current chief operating officer, to succeed Bob Mudge as chief executive officer. Mudge will step into the role of executive chair of the Board of Directors, responsible for the strategic direction of the company. Brightspeed will also welcome Manuel (Manny) Sampedro as chief operating officer. The changes are effective November 1, 2023.

“When we began our exploration of a new internet company in 2020, Bob Mudge, Chris Creager and Tom Maguire were the advisors we trusted to help evaluate and shape the opportunity. We asked each of them to stay on to take the company through the launch and initial stabilization, and we’ve been so pleased with all that this team has accomplished so far. As planned, Chris transitioned to an advisor role earlier this year, and this next transition is a natural next step in the team’s evolution,” said Aaron Sobel, partner, private equity at Apollo and Brightspeed Board member. “Bob has helped to shape Brightspeed into the growing, thriving company it is today, and I’m pleased he has agreed to step into the role of executive chair for our Board, where he will remain actively involved in the company.”

With more than four decades of experience in telecommunications, Tom Maguire brings a breadth of expertise to his new role. Beginning as a field technician and rising through various management and leadership roles at Verizon, Tom ultimately served as SVP, national operations support, responsible for the processes and systems supporting an operations team of 35,000 field technicians, engineering and network operations employees. In his role as COO at Brightspeed, Tom leads a team of nearly 3,000 employees and is responsible for service and repair, as well as the company’s multi-year fiber network deployment.

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UScellular gains early C-Band spectrum access

UScellular has received full access to the 5G C-Band spectrum it was awarded from Auction 107 in March 2021, allowing the company to expand its 5G network faster than anticipated. 

Earlier this year, UScellular upgraded more than 440 cell sites in preparation for this spectrum access, and the company will turn on this enhanced 5G service in the coming weeks – three months ahead of schedule. C-Band spectrum technology brings faster data speeds and more capacity and enhances the network performance for customers.

"This early access to our C-Band spectrum allows us to accelerate our plans and bring a superior network experience to more mobile and Home Internet customers earlier than expected," said Mike Irizarry, executive vice president and chief technology officer at UScellular. "Additional spectrum access is important as we advance our mission to connect people to what matters most."

newsroom.uscellular.com

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Ericsson teams with AWS and Hitachi America R&D on Private 5G

Ericsson, AWS and Hitachi America R&D enabled the private 5G infrastructure trial at Hitachi Astemo Americas’ electric motor vehicle manufacturing plant in Berea, Kentucky.

The solution leverages Ericsson Private 5G side by side with the AWS Snow Family to provide the private cellular networks that were foundational in establishing machine learning (ML) models within the Hitachi manufacturing complex.

Using Hitachi video analytics, real-time video of the component assembly operation was fed across the Ericsson private 5G network to help detect defects earlier, reducing wasted material and lost production.

“We explored and validated new use cases enabled by private 5G to show how smart factories can already function,” Sudhanshu Gaur, Vice President of R&D for Hitachi America and Chief Architect at Hitachi Astemo Americas, says. “The combination of private 5G, cloud and artificial intelligence/machine learning automated technologies has the potential to revolutionize the way we manufacture products, and we are excited to be at the forefront of this innovation.”

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Globe Telecom deploys Nokia’s Interleaved Passive Active Antennas

Nokia is deploying itsmodular Interleaved Passive Active Antenna (IPAA+) for Globe Telecom, Inc, across the southern islands of the Philippines. 

Nokia’s advanced IPAA+, has a light, modular design and supports all 5G frequency bands in a single compact antenna including the 2.6 GHz spectrum band. Nokia said its IPAA+ also has the capability to support other bands, which means investments are protected. The new IPAA+ is the size and weight of a standard multiband antenna and makes it easier and faster for service providers to deploy their 5G networks through just a simple antenna swap. C

Nokia and Globe’s engineering team also successfully trialed a Globe Telecom-specific variant of the IPAA+ in the field. The field test was carried out in Tantangan, South Cotabato in the island of Mindanao, making Globe Telecom the first operator in the world to successfully test the 2.6 GHz IPAA+ variant.

Jeciel Nuyda, President at Nokia Shanghai Bell Philippines, said: “We are delighted to partner with Globe Telecom on this deal that will see our state-of-the-art IPAA+ products being deployed in the Philippines. These products are lighter, more modular and cover all sub-6GHz 5G frequency bands. We look forward to collaborating closely with Globe on this important deployment.”

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Nokia field tests mobile network for the moon

 Nokia conducted a major field test of the 4G LTE lunar network it will provide to NASA.  The tests were conducted at the Southern Colorado Autonomous Test Facility in partnership with Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost.

• In October 2020, NASA selected Nokia to deploy the first LTE/4G communications system on the lunar surface. Nokia’s lunar network consists of an LTE Base Station with integrated Evolved Packet Core (EPC) functionalities, LTE User Equipment, RF antennas and high-reliability operations and maintenance (O&M) control software. The solution has been specially designed to withstand the harsh conditions of the launch and lunar landing, and to operate in the extreme conditions of space. The fully integrated cellular network meets very stringent size, weight and power constraints of space payloads in an extremely compact form factor. Nokia is partnering with Intuitive Machines for this mission to integrate this groundbreaking network into their lunar lander and deliver it to the lunar surface. The network will self-configure upon deployment and establish the first LTE communications system on the Moon.

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VIAVI’s CFO steps down

Henk Derksen has resigned as VIAVI's Chief Financial Officer, effective August 25, 2023. Mr. Derksen is resigning from his position and plans to return to Europe to pursue a new opportunity. 

VIAVI said Derksen’s resignation is not the result of any dispute or disagreement with then company on any matter relating to VIAVI's operations, policies or practices.

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NVIDIA previews AI accelerator

 In a talk at this week’s Hot Chips event at Stanford University, Bill Dally, NVIDIA’s chief scientist and senior vice president of research previewed a deep neural network (DNN) accelerator chip designed for efficient execution of natural language processing tasks.

The 5nm prototype achieves 95.6 TOPS/W in benchmarking and 1711 inferences/s/W with only 0.7% accuracy loss on BERT, demonstrating a practical accelerator design for energy-efficient inference with transformers.

He explored a half dozen other techniques for tailoring hardware to specific AI tasks, often by defining new data types or operations.

Dally described ways to simplify neural networks, pruning synapses and neurons in an approach called structural sparsity, first adopted in NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

“We’re not done with sparsity,” he said. “We need to do something with activations and can have greater sparsity in weights as well.”

In a separate talk, Kevin Deierling, NVIDIA’s vice president of networking, described the unique flexibility of NVIDIA BlueField DPUs and NVIDIA Spectrum networking switches for allocating resources based on changing network traffic or user rules.

“Today with generative AI workloads and cybersecurity, everything is dynamic, things are changing constantly,” Deierling said. “So we’re moving to runtime programmability and resources we can change on the fly.”

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/08/29/hot-chips-dally-research/

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Google unveils its 5th gen TPU

Google unveiled its 5th generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU v5e), promising up to 2x higher training performance per dollar and up to 2.5x inference performance per dollar for LLMs and gen AI models compared to Cloud TPU v4.

TPU v5e pods can be interconnected with up to 256 chips, providing aggregate bandwidth of more than 400 Tb/s and 100 petaOps of INT8 performance.

TPU v5e also supports eight different VM configurations, ranging from one chip to more than 250 chips within a single slice. This allows customers to choose the right configurations to serve a wide range of LLM and gen AI model sizes.

Google Cloud also introduced Multislice technology, which allows users to scale AI models beyond the boundaries of physical TPU pods. This means that users can now scale their training jobs up to tens of thousands of Cloud TPU v5e or TPU v4 chips. Previously, training jobs using TPUs were limited to a single slice of TPU chips, capping the size of the largest jobs at a maximum slice size of 3,072 chips for TPU v4.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/announcing-cloud-tpu-v5e-and-a3-gpus-in-ga

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Intel previews 5th Gen Xeons

At this week’s Hot Chips event at Stanford University, Intel presented two sessions revealing technical specifications and features of the Xeon platform architecture and offerings coming in 2024, along with additional information on its forthcoming 5th Gen Intel Xeon® processors launching later this year. A separate session outlined new capabilities related to its Intel Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series FPGAs.
 

The new Intel Xeon platform utilizes modular system-on-chips (SoCs) for increased scalability and flexibility to deliver a range of products that meet the growing scale, processing and power efficiency needs for AI, cloud and enterprise installations.

• P-core and E-core are delivered with shared intellectual property (IP), firmware and OS software stack.
• Fastest DDR and new high-bandwidth multiplexed combined rank (MCR) DIMMs.
• New Intel Flat Memory enables hardware-managed data movement between DDR5 and CXL memory, making total capacity visible to software.
• CXL 2.0 support for all device types with backward compatibility to CXL 1.1.
• Advanced I/O with up to 136 lanes PCIe 5.0/CXL 2.0 and up to six UPI links.

Intel Xeon processors with E-cores (Sierra Forest) are enhanced to deliver density-optimized compute in the most power-efficient manner. Xeon processors with E-cores provide best-in-class power-performance density, offering distinct advantages for cloud-native and hyperscale workloads.  

• 2.5x better rack density and 2.4x higher performance per watt1.
• Support for 1S and 2S servers, with up to 144c per CPU and TDP as low as 200W.
• Modern instruction set with robust security, virtualization and AVX with AI extensions.
• Foundational memory RAS features such as machine check, data cache ECC standard in all Xeon CPUs.

Intel Xeon processors with P-cores (Granite Rapids) are optimized to deliver the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for high-core performance-sensitive workloads and general-purpose compute workloads. Today, Xeon enables better AI performance than any other CPU2, and Granite Rapids will further enhance AI performance. Built-in accelerators give an additional boost to targeted workloads for even greater performance and efficiency.

• 2-3x better performance for mixed AI workloads3.
• Enhanced Intel AMX with support for new FP16 instructions.
• Higher memory bandwidth, core count, cache for compute intensive workloads.
• Socket scalability from one socket to eight sockets.

Intel Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series FPGAs with Integrated 64 Gsps (giga-samples per second) Data Converters and a new wideband agility reference design include both wideband and narrowband receivers within the same multichip package. The wideband receiver provides an unprecedented 32 GHz of RF bandwidth to the FPGA.

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Google Cloud and Nvidia Expand Alliance for AI

Google Cloud and NVIDIA are extending their collaboration focuses on AI infrastructure and software.  

Highlights:

• Google Cloud announced general availability next month of A3 VMs powered by NVIDIA’s H100 GPU for the most demanding gen AI and large language model (LLM) workloads. Google Cloud said theA3 VMs powered by the new H100s will achieve three times better training performance over the prior-generation A2. 

• NVIDIA H100 GPUs to power Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform — H100 GPUs are expected to be generally available on VertexAI in the coming weeks, enabling customers to quickly develop generative AI LLMs.
• Google Cloud to gain access to NVIDIA DGX™ GH200 — Google Cloud will be one of the first companies in the world to have access to the NVIDIA DGX GH200 AI supercomputer — powered by the NVIDIA Grace Hopper™ Superchip — to explore its capabilities for generative AI workloads.
• NVIDIA DGX Cloud Coming to Google Cloud — NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing and software will be available to customers directly from their web browser to provide speed and scale for advanced training workloads.
• NVIDIA AI Enterprise on Google Cloud Marketplace — Users can access NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a secure, cloud native software platform that simplifies developing and deploying enterprise-ready applications including generative AI, speech AI, computer vision, and more.
• Google Cloud first to offer NVIDIA L4 GPUs — Earlier this year, Google Cloud became the first cloud provider to offer NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs with the launch of the G2 VM. NVIDIA customers switching to L4 GPUs from CPUs for AI video workloads can realize up to 120x higher performance with 99% better efficiency. L4 GPUs are used widely for image and text generation, as well as VDI and AI-accelerated audio/video transcoding.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/google-cloud-and-nvidia-expand-partnership-to-advance-ai-computing-software-and-services

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GlobalFoundries unveils its most advanced RF solution

GlobalFoundries (GF) announced its new 9SW RFSOI technology, its most advanced RF solution for use in front-end modules (FEMs) for today's 5G operating frequencies, as well as future 5G mobile and wireless communication applications. The advanced 9SW technology will be manufactured on GF’s 300mm production line at its fabrication site in Singapore.

The 9SW technology improves on the company’s previous 8SW technology with superior switching, low-noise amplifiers (LNA), and logic processing capabilities. The 9SW technology features significant reduction in standby currents for longer battery life, creating products over 10% smaller than previous generations with more than 20% enhancement in efficiency. It is more energy-efficient, lowering power consumption in both inactive and active states.

“Developing high-speed, more reliable connectivity is critical for the key 5G mobile and next-generation applications that we all depend on to live, work and play,” said David Archbold, vice president of product marketing, Wireless Semiconductor Division, Broadcom. “With this new generation of technology, Broadcom will enable our customers to deliver the best possible 5G mobile experience to their end users.”

“Wireless Connectivity comes in many shapes and sizes. GF has long standing leadership, in highly efficient wireless whether it’s short, medium, or long range. The ever-increasing reliance on 5G and smart mobile devices combined with the explosion of data necessitates more connectivity and improved efficiency.  GF’s newest generation of industry-leading RF SOI technologies will allow us to meet the global demand for solutions that deliver more reliable seamless connectivity, while using significantly less power,” said GF President and CEO Dr. Thomas Caulfield.

https://gf.com/gf-press-release/globalfoundries-announces-9sw-rfsoi-technology-for-next-generation-mobile-and-5g-applications/

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IONOS interconnects data centers with Infinera’s GX G30

IONOS, the largest web hosting company in Europe, deployed Infinera’s GX Series Compact Modular Platform to expand its network and interconnect data centers across Europe.

IONOS offers small- and medium-sized businesses web hosting and cloud services, managing more than 6 million customers and hosting over 22 million domains in its own regional data centers in Europe and in the U.S. With the 

Infinera GX G30 compact modular solution enables IONOS to scale capacity and deliver 100 GbE and 400 GbE services to meet increased demand for data center connectivity to keep up with its growing cloud business.

“We continue to advance the capabilities of our network infrastructure and invest in best-in-class technologies to meet ever-increasing data center traffic volumes driven by today’s bandwidth-intensive end-user applications,” said Sebastian Hohwieler, IONOS Head of Network Infrastructure. 

“We are constantly improving the energy efficiency of our networks,” said Daniel Heinze, SVP Network at IONOS. “Our target is to lower energy consumption despite traffic growth. Although green electricity is the main source of supply for our data centers in all countries, the best is if energy is not consumed at all.”

https://www.infinera.com

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Altafiber raises $600M for fiber rollouts

Cincinnati Bell , which is now doing business as “altafiber” in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, announced $600 million in new funding to support the continued construction of fiber networks throughout incumbent and expansion markets. The equity raise was solely supported by existing investors, funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management, Ares Management, and supporting co-investors.

In addition to continuing to upgrade its current footprint, these new funds will enable altafiber to expand its opportunistic edge-out and community partnership strategy, delivering on its mission to provide individuals and businesses with the fastest, most reliable, future-proof fiber network while maintaining its commitment to the communities it serves.

Since the close of the “take-private” transaction in September 2021, the company has passed ~300,000 addresses with fiber now totaling over 1.1 million homes passed with fiber. The Company expects to complete the construction of fiber to every single-family unit within Greater Cincinnati by the end of 2023. The completion of the construction of Hawaii’s statewide fiber network is expected by the end of 2027.

In combination with previously announced expansion markets, altafiber now has plans to expand its multi-gigabit fiber network to ~400,000 homes outside of its incumbent territories. These new markets include Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana communities including, but not limited to, Butler, Warren, and Greene Counties in Ohio; Boone, Kenton, and Campbell Counties in Kentucky; and regional cities such as Greater Dayton, Dublin, Middletown, Waynesville, Xenia, Lawrenceburg, and Greendale.

“Gigabit connectivity is essential to access educational, employment, and healthcare opportunities. Robust fiber networks are also powerful economic development tools for business attraction and retention in growing municipalities,” said Leigh Fox, President and CEO of altafiber. “The combination of our operational expertise and this new funding will allow us to continue to invest in fiber, expand our geographic reach, and help to create digital equity in many rural and suburban communities.”

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Dell'Oro: Open RAN revenues declined in 2Q2023

Both Open RAN and Virtualized RAN (vRAN) revenues declined in 2Q23, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group. This marks the first quarter of year-over-year (YoY) contractions since Dell’Oro began tracking these next generation architectures back in 2019. 

“After a couple of years where Open RAN revenues exceeded expectations and advanced at an accelerated pace, the current slowdown doesn't come as a surprise,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President with the Dell’Oro Group. “Projections for 2023 were more tempered, considering that it would take time for the early majority operators to balance out the more challenging comparisons with the early adopters who fueled the initial Open RAN wave. This is the trend we are witnessing now – growth decelerated in the first quarter and declined in the second quarter,” continued Pongratz.

Additional Open RAN and vRAN highlights from the 2Q 2023 RAN report:

• In Europe, Open RAN revenues are on the uptick, but this was insufficient to offset the declines in Asia Pacific and North America.

• The vendor landscape remains mixed, as many Open RAN-focused suppliers are not thriving as they had hoped. NEC experienced a material improvement in its Open RAN market share between 2022 and 1H23, whereas Mavenir's Open RAN revenue share declined over the same period.

• The top 4 Open RAN suppliers by revenue for the 1H23 period were Samsung, NEC, Fujitsu, and Rakuten Symphony. 

• Open RAN revenues are still expected to account for 5 to 10 percent of the 2023 RAN market. 

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Arm unveils Neoverse Compute Subsystems for Custom Silicon

Arm has announced a new product offering called Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) that enables Arm partners to build specialized silicon at a lower cost, with less risk and a faster time-to-market.

Neoverse CSS is based on the Arm Neoverse architecture, which is designed for datacenter, edge computing, and high-performance computing use.

The first product in the Neoverse CSS family is Arm Neoverse CSS N2, which is a 5nm-based compute subsystem that can support up to 64 cores and with core frequencies of 2.1GHz up to 3.6Ghz. The design is optimized for cloud computing, AI/ML, and high-performance computing.

Significantly, Arm Neoverse CSS N2 supports high-speed chip-to-chip links, using UCIe or a partner-specific PHY, can link up to 128-cores in a single socket. And two sockets can be coherently connected using CXL PHYs and SMP protocol.

https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/infrastructure-solutions-blog/posts/neoverse-compute-subsystems-css-the-fastest-path-to-production-silicon

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Intel and Ayar Labs demo 4 Tbps optically-connected FPGA

Intel and Ayar Labs are showcasing a 4 Tbps optical FPGA with Ayar Labs’ in-package optical I/O at this week’s HOT CHIPS 2023 event at Stanford Univertsity.

The demo shows a 4 Tbps bidirectional communication between two optically enabled Intel FPGAs using Ayar Labs TeraPHY optical I/O chiplets. Data generated from each FPGA is optically transmitted from one board and received and verified on the other board.

https://ayarlabs.com/hot-chips/

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Cisco and Nutanix Partner to Accelerate Hybrid Multicloud

Cisco and Nutanix announced a global strategic partnership to accelerate hybrid multicloud deployments.

The new offering integrates Cisco's SaaS-managed compute and networking infrastructure with the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The solution will be sold by Cisco using its extensive go-to-market reach. The solution will offer flexible deployment options with support for Cisco UCS rack and blade servers.

The new offering will integrate advanced Cisco servers, networking and security, and management with the Nutanix Cloud Platform software.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a consistent cloud operating model with a single platform for running applications and data across data centers, edges and public clouds.

Solution availability is expected in the next 90 days.

The companies said ustomers will benefit from a fully integrated and validated solution that is sold, built, managed and supported holistically for a seamless end-to-end experience.

https://www.cisco.com

https://www.nutanix.com

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Dell'Oro: E-Band Microwave shipments up 77% in 2Q 2023

Shipments of E-band Microwave Transmission equipment grew 77 percent year-over-year in 2Q 2023, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. The top two vendors, Huawei and Ericsson, held the vast majority of this market’s share.

 “Demand for E-band microwave equipment really picked up in the past three quarters,” stated Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “A lot of these systems are being installed in India as the operators in that country quickly ramp up on 5G. Network rollouts and upgrades to 5G are happening at a really fast pace there. On top of this, the use of E-band is steadily moving beyond shorter spans that are under a kilometer to longer spans that are over a couple kilometers. Longer reach is a benefit of the newer radios designed with higher transmit power and active antenna for site-to-site alignment,” added Yu. 

Highlights from the 2Q 2023 Microwave Transmission & Mobile Backhaul Quarterly Report:

• The Microwave Transmission market grew 5 percent year-over-year in 2Q 2023, driven by both Mobile Backhaul and the Vertical markets. The overall market forecast for 2023 is unchanged at an expected growth rate of 5 percent.
• The E/V Band market segment reached a new record revenue amount in the quarter. For the trailing four quarter period, the revenue was approximately $600 million.
• Huawei and Ericsson captured the majority of the E/V Band market in the quarter with a combined market share of more than 70 percent. Other major E/V Band vendors include Nokia, Siklu, and ZTE.

https://www.delloro.com/news/e-band-microwave-transmission-shipments-grew-77-percent-in-2q-2023/ 

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