The Tianhe-2 supercomputer may be number two in the TOP500 rankings, but its tops in radio telescope applications. An early version of the software that will analyze data from the Square Kilometer Array (SKA)is now running on the Chinese petaflopper. When completed, the software will act as the brain of the future SKA system, which will be the largest radio telescope every built.

A new report from market research firm Tractica forecasts that the annual global revenue for artificial intelligence products and services will grow from 643.7 million in 2016 to $36.8 billion by 2025, a 57-fold increase over that time period. As such, it represents the fastest growing segment of any size in the IT sector.

High-performance computing (HPC) is driving new insights and discoveries in the fields of life sciences and oil and gas. Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF), Intels HPC approach incorporating a single, balanced architecture for scalable clusters that can run codes used for simulation, analytics, visualization, and machine learning, is powering new breakthroughs in these fields.

Addison Snell and Michael Feldman dissect the HPC news from the Hot Chips symposium.

Phytium Technology has announced a 64-core ARM server CPU, which according to the press release will deliver 512 gigaflops of performance. The new chip, known as FT-2000/64, is aimed at high throughput and high performance servers.

IBM is looking to take a bigger slice out of Intels lucrative server business with Power9, the companys latest and greatest processor for the datacenter. Scheduled for initial release in 2017, the Power9 promises more cores and a hefty performance boost compared to its Power8 predecessor. The new chip was described at the Hot Chips event, which took place in Silicon Valley this week.

The prospects for another serious rival to the x86 processor in the high performance computing space are looking much better this week after ARM Holdings presented the companys plan to offer an HPC version of its 64-bit architecture. Known as ARMv8-A SVE, the design incorporates a technology known as the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), which will provide a unique type of flexibility with regard to vector processing -- the basis of many scientific and engineering workloads.

Addison Snell and Michael Feldman review the biggest HPC news of the week and the announcements coming out of the Intel Developer Forum.

At the Hot Chips symposium taking place in Cupertino, California this week, Samsung and SK hynix touted their latest efforts for high bandwidth memory (HBM), including the third iteration of the technology, known as HBM3. This new version promises to double bandwidth and density, while taking more direct aim at the high performance computing market.

The goal of integrating lasers and semiconductors reached its commercial fruition this week as Intel announcedit is shipping 100G silicon photonics transceivers to customers. The technology, which puts lasers onto a CMOS substrate, promises to bring down the costs and power of optical communications in the datacenter.