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Thursday, June 22nd, 2017
| Time | Event | |||||||||||||||||||||
| 7:45a | Imagination Technologies Formally Puts Itself Up For Sale
The fate of Imagination Technologies has become something of a saga in recent months. The prolific IP vendor, Apple’s right-hand supplier for GPU designs and IP over the last decade, found itself on the rocks in April, when Apple announced they would be transitioning away from using Imagination’s IP and designs. Then in May, the company announced that they would be doubling-down on the GPU business – their strongest business – by selling off their remaining Ensigma communications and MIPS CPU businesses. Now this morning, the company has announced that they have decided to instead focus on going another route, and will be putting the entire company up for sale. While the company as a whole was not formally up for sale until today, as you’d expect for a company in difficult circumstances like Imagination, that option has unofficially been on the table since the start. To that end, Imagination has reported that a number of parties have expressed an interest in buying the entire company. As noted in Imagination’s press release:
At this time Imagination is not naming any suitors – and indeed is warning that a sale may not go through at all – though at this stage it’s difficult to imagine someone not taking advantage of the situation. Imagination’s PowerVR GPU IP alone is valuable to virtually all of the major SoC vendors, not to mention IP powerhouses and former customers such as Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, and of course, Apple. Meanwhile the MIPS and Ensigma business have yet to be sold, and a buyer could opt to pick those businesses up too. Otherwise, for the time being, Imagination is continuing their efforts to sell of those businesses, and they have already received proposals for both. As for a potential price for the company, assuming Imagination were purchased wholesale, after today’s announcement the company’s market cap has jumped to £400M (~$500M USD). At about half of the company’s 52-week high, this would be significantly cheaper than had anyone attempted to purchase the company before the Apple split. The final price tag then would be somewhat higher, as a sale would almost certainly come with a premium over the company’s current stock price. Finally, while the company looks for potential buyers, they are also continuing their dispute with Apple. At last report, the companies were still going through their contractual dispute resolution process. It’s not clear whether this process would be completed before Imagination finds a buyer. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| 8:00a | Lexar Professional Workflow HR2 4-Bay Thunderbolt 2 / USB 3.0 Reader Hub Review ​Content creators in the field often have to deal with large amounts of data spread over multiple flash media. Importing them into a computer for further processing has always been a challenge. Casual users can connect the cameras directly to a PC, while some might prefer taking the card out and using a card reader for this purpose. There are a multiple options available in the card reader market. However, professionals who value cutting down the media import time need to opt for readers with a USB 3.0 and/or Thunderbolt interface. Lexar has a range of card readers and a 4-bay hub (the Lexar Professional Workflow HR2) to go with them. In addition to reviewing the hub, we also take the opportunity to develop a framework for reviewing flash-based storage media for non-PC applications in this piece. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| 12:00p | TYAN Announces AMD EPYC TN70A-B8026 Server: 1P, 16 DIMMs, 26 SSDs, OCuLink
TYAN introduced its first server and its first motherboard for AMD’s new EPYC processors. The company decided to take a cautious approach to AMD’s EPYC, and the initial machine will be a single-socket server for high-performance all-flash storage applications. Meanwhile, the new platforms from TYAN will be among the first applications to support OCuLink connections. The first TYAN platform based on the AMD EPYC 7000-series processor capitalizes on the CPU’s primary advantage besides its core count (up to 32): the number of integrated PCIe 3.0 lanes (up to 128) that can be used to connect NVMe SSDs without any external switches or controllers. The TYAN TN70A-B8026 server is based on the S8026 motherboard that has 16 DDR4 DIMMs slots (two modules are supported per channel, 1 TB of DDR4 in total), two M.2-22110 slots for SSDs (PCIe 3.0 x4) as well as eight SFF-8611 PCIe/OCuLink x8 connectors for 24 hot-swap SSDs in U.2 form-factor. In total, the server supports 26 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs as well as two SATA devices.
The platform also supports five PCIe 3.0 x8 slots via 2U risers (these slots function when storage drives are not using their PCIe connections) as well as one PCIe 3.0 x16 OCP 2.0-capable slot for an EDR InfiniBand or a 100 GbE card. To support even the most power hungry components, TYAN equips its TN70A-B8026 with a redundant 770 W power supplies. As for management and networking, the machine is equipped with the AST2500 BMC with iKVM & Redfish support, two GbE ports (Broadcom BCM5720) for connectivity and one GbE for IPMI.
TYAN does not say which SSDs it's going to use for the TN70A-B8026 and how many terabytes of storage in total the machine can support. What the company does say is that a pair of SFF-8611 OCuLink x8 connectors can be re-configured (from BIOS) to support up to 16 SATA 6 Gbps drives, which provides flexibility to server makers or value-add resellers, who plan to use the TYAN S8026 motherboard or the TN70A-B8026 server barebones. In fact, the latter fits into regular E-ATX supporting cases, so it can be used to build workstations with enhanced storage capabilities.
TYAN did not announce MSRP or ETA for its TN70A-B8026 server as well as the S8026 motherboard. Since the server can be equipped with different CPUs and SSDs, its price can vary by orders of magnitude and it does not make a lot of sense to make guesses at this point. Considering that high-endurance/high-capacity SSDs are quite expensive, a fully populated TYAN TN70A-B8026 machine can easily cross the $100K mark. Related Reading: | |||||||||||||||||||||
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