Happy Days Are Here Again For Systems

June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A combination of increases in memory and CPU prices, beefier configurations often with GPU or FPGA accelerators, and outright ebullient demand for compute capacity is making the server business look like it is exploding when it is merely expanding at a more-than-healthy clip.

In the first quarter, according to the box counters at IDC, server revenues were up an astounding 38.6 percent to $18.82 billion, the kind of number we have never seen in the history of the server racket. Server shipments – and it is getting hard to count the nodes sometimes – rose by 20.7 percent to just …