Schneider Electric releases its initial integrated rack with immersed, liquid-cooled IT for data centers

Schneider Electric, vendor of digital transformation of energy management and automation, with Avnet and Iceotope, announces creation of commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. Optimized for compute-intensive applications, the solution combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope’s liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. 

Avnet integrates the liquid-cooled server with Schneider Electric’s NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system for simple deployment into data centers or edge computing environments. The system is EcoStruxure Ready since the solution is available with next generation data center management software, EcoStruxure IT Expert and our digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor. 

This liquid-cooled solution is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, where high compute demands more energy use. In a recent report published by Gartner, liquid cooling was identified as a technology to watch. 

Analyst Henrique Cecci advised data center operators “maximize cooling energy efficiencies by employing modern liquid cooling solutions.” Liquid cooling offers greater efficiency, lower operating costs, smaller footprint, increased reliability, and nearly silent operation despite the high-power density of the GPUs. 

Avnet, Iceotope and Schneider Electric plan to expand the offering as demand grows by welcoming other server OEMs into the partnership. 

“Schneider Electric is committed to making data centers more sustainable and liquid cooling is a very compelling approach,” said Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation, Secure Power, Schneider Electric, who is presenting on liquid cooling at the Gartner conference. “This latest development marks a significant step toward industrializing chassis-based immersion solutions which offer the efficiency and effectiveness of tanks based solutions while providing the compatibility and serviceability of more traditional, ‘direct-to-chip’ liquid-cooling designs. Given the growth of compute-intensive applications, we believe this approach is very promising.”

“As a leading global technology solutions provider, Avnet has always excelled at adapting to changing markets, trends, and technologies,” said Scott MacDonald, global president, Avnet Integrated. “We do well at this by partnering with the world’s best technology designers and hardware manufacturers. In this case, we’re partnering with liquid cooling-specialist, Iceotope, and global infrastructure giant, Schneider Electric, to make the best possible liquid cooling solutions for our customers. We’re excited to integrate, fulfill, and support this solution that smartly addresses customer cooling challenges around rising chip densities, harsh IT environments, rising energy costs, water use restrictions, and space constraints.”

“Iceotope is thrilled to be making its innovative chassis-level, immersive liquid cooling technology available to the general market,” said David Craig, CEO of Iceotope. “We offer the only liquid cooling tech that scales easily from edge computing devices to large server farms in the cloud. And compared to direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems, our approach is more efficient, more reliable, saves more space, eliminates fans, and when deployed across the data center, it lowers cost.”

Intel opposes Qualcomm’s appeal in US District Court; files brief supporting FTC

Intel files a brief supporting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and opposing Qualcomm’s appeal of the judgment rendered in May against Qualcomm by the United States District Court, Northern District of California. 

The District Court found that “Qualcomm’s licensing practices have strangled competition in the CDMA and premium LTE modem chip markets for years, and harmed rivals, OEMs and end consumers.” The District Court also found that Qualcomm’s conduct “unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.”

Intel agrees with the District Court’s findings. Intel suffered the brunt of Qualcomm’s anticompetitive behavior, was denied opportunities in the modem market, was prevented from making sales to customers and was forced to sell at prices artificially skewed by Qualcomm. 

Qualcomm would have you believe that its position in the market today — as the last surviving U.S. supplier of premium modem chips — is due to its “ingenuity and business acumen,” and that its rivals in the market failed simply because “they did not offer good enough chips at low enough prices.” This is simply not true.

Instead, as detailed in the District Court’s opinion and in our brief, Qualcomm maintained its monopoly through a brazen scheme carefully crafted and implemented over many years. This scheme consists of a web of anticompetitive conduct designed to allow Qualcomm to coerce customers, tilt the competitive playing field and exclude competitors, all the while shielding itself from legal scrutiny and capturing billions in unlawful gains.

The victims were Qualcomm’s own customers (original equipment manufacturers or OEMs), the long list of competitors it forced out of the modem chip market, including Intel, and ultimately consumers. 

Intel fought for nearly a decade to build a profitable modem chip business, and invested billions, hired thousands, acquired two companies and built innovative products that eventually made their way into Apple’s iPhones, including the most recently released iPhone 11. 

But when all was said and done, Intel could not overcome the artificial and insurmountable barriers to fair competition created by Qualcomm’s scheme and was forced to exit the market this year.

“As I have pointed out before, the District Court’s decision finding Qualcomm violated the antitrust laws comes on the heels of governmental entities around the globe reaching the same conclusion,” wrote Steven R. Rodgers is executive vice president and general counsel at Intel, in a post. “As a result of its anticompetitive practices, Qualcomm has been fined nearly $1 billion in China, $850 million in Korea, $1.2 billion by the European Commission and $773 million in Taiwan (later reduced in settlement). The FTC, however, did not seek monetary relief. Instead, it sought injunctive relief to prevent Qualcomm from continuing to engage in its unlawful conduct.”

Among other things, the District Court prohibited Qualcomm from continuing to implement the central component of its scheme, its coercive “no license, no chips” (NLNC) policy. Under the policy, Qualcomm cuts off handset OEMs’ purchases of modem chips unless they enter into a patent license agreement on Qualcomm’s terms. These onerous, one-sided terms enable Qualcomm to artificially lower the price of its modems while simultaneously inflating customers’ costs of using modem chips manufactured by competitors, like Intel, by charging royalties as large as the price of the modems themselves. 

The District Court concluded that the NLNC policy, together with other anticompetitive behavior on Qualcomm’s part, unlawfully distorted and, in fact, destroyed the competitive playing field.

The world benefits from fair competition in the wireless technology market. Given the importance of wireless technology to the future of connected computing, including the revolutionary promise of 5G, we strongly support the efforts of the FTC and other law enforcement agencies to require Qualcomm to obey the laws and compete on a level playing field.

“We hope our amicus brief will help in clarifying the full extent of the harm that Qualcomm’s unlawful behavior has caused and will continue to cause if left unchecked,” Stevans added.

Samsung secures global recognition for environmental sustainability of its semiconductor offerings

Samsung Electronics announced that its 512-gigabyte (GB) embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 3.0 will be awarded Carbon Footprint and Water Footprint Certifications from UK-based Carbon Trust. 

Samsung’s 512GB eUFS 3.0 is initial mobile memory in the industry to be recognized by an international certifying organization, which was made possible through the company’s extensive efforts to reduce carbon and water footprints.

The Carbon Trust is a globally accredited non-profit certification body established by the British government to accelerate the move to a sustainable, low-carbon economy. Each certification by the Carbon Trust was made after a thorough assessment of the environmental impact of carbon emissions and water usage before and throughout the production cycle, based on international standards.

Based on the company’s fifth-generation (90+ layers) V-NAND, Samsung’s 512GB eUFS 3.0 provides optimal speed, power efficiency and productivity to deliver twice the capacity and 2.1 times the sequential speed of its fourth generation (64 layers) V-NAND-based 256GB eUFS 2.1, while requiring 30 percent less operating voltage. 

Samsung’s 512GB eUFS 3.0 stacks eight of the company’s fifth-generation 512-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND die and integrates a high-performance controller. At 2,100 megabytes-per-second (MB/s), the new eUFS doubles the sequential read rate of Samsung’s latest eUFS memory (eUFS 2.1) which was announced in January this year. 

The offering’s blazing read speed is four times faster than that of a SATA solid state drive (SSDs) and 20 times faster than a typical microSD card, allowing premium smartphones to transfer a full HD movie to a PC in about three seconds. In addition, the sequential write speed also has been improved by 50 percent to 410MB/s, which is equivalent to that of a SATA SSD.

Additionally, Samsung’s fifth-generation V-NAND utilizes a unique etching technology that pierces more than 90 cell layers in a single precise step. This allows the chip to have nearly 1.5 times more stacked layers than the previous generation and accommodate a 25-percent reduction in chip size. Such innovations help to minimize the overall increase in carbon and water footprints for each V-NAND cell layer.

Samsung is also being awarded Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) labels for its ‘1-terabyte (TB) eUFS 2.1’ and its ‘fifth-generation 512-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND’ by the Korean Ministry of Environment.

Samsung plans to actively expand the adoption of its highly sustainable, high-capacity premium memory solutions into many more flagship smartphones and further strengthen global partnerships for its next-generation memory technologies.

“We are extremely pleased that our cutting-edge memory technologies not only demonstrate our capability to overcome more challenging process complexities, but also are recognized for their environmental sustainability,” said Chanhoon Park, executive vice president and head of Giheung Hwaseong Pyeongtaek Complex at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will continue to create memory solutions that provide the highest levels of speed, capacity and power efficiency at extremely small geometries for end-users worldwide.”

Ambient Scientific debuts DigAn (Digital Analog) AI technology to boost performance and efficiency

Ambient Scientific released its initial Digital Analog (DigAn) AI technology with demonstration of its first DigAn AI processor chip at the Edge AI Summit. 

DigAn AI is an advanced version of Analog AI technology that provides ultra-high performance and efficiency of Analog AI with implementation and commercial advantages of Digital chips. The company also announced low-power on-device AI solution for ‘Wake on Word’ applications.

Ambient Scientific’s DigAn AI Processor is built with multiple fundamental grass root level innovations. These include Analog Matrix Compute Engine using DigAn technology, that performs blazingly fast arithmetic computations with improved power efficiency, ultra-low power embedded SRAM for critical storage, and ultra-low power on-chip interconnect technology that enables massive parallel processing.

Ambient’s DigAn AI Processor computes an entire layer of neurons in a single clock cycle using custom Analog techniques, a task that takes several hundreds or even thousands of clock cycles in traditional implementations. However, DigAn technology uses standard digital transistors to implement its analog functions.

Experts agree that Analog is a great fit for AI computing. However, prior implementations had severe limitations in accuracy and computing range – two important parameters for optimal AI solution. Ambient has eliminated these limitations. 

While prior implementations have struggled to achieve 8-bit accuracy, Ambient’s DigAn (Digital Analog) technology can achieve 32-bit accuracy. This is 16 million times more accurate in computer language.