Microsoft has announced more details about their use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to accelerate servers in their massive datacenters. CEO Satya Nadella made the announcements at their Ignite Conference in Atlanta, sharing details about their five-year journey called “Project Catapult”. The surprise was not that they are using FPGAs; Microsoft had disclosed their adoption of FPGAs to accelerate BING search ranking over three years ago. What surprised many industry observers was the extent to which they are already deploying this typically esoteric style of chip and their plans for pervasive use of the technology in the future. Mr. Nadella said that the entire fleet of servers for the Azure cloud now has at least one FPGA installed in each server, delivering over one “exa op” (one billion billion operations per second) of total throughput across datacenters in 15 countries. An “ExaScale” computer in traditional HPC sense (meaning double precision math) is not expected to appear until early in the next decade.

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3D Robotics had raised nearly $100 million and wanted to build the perfect consumer drone. That effort nearly destroyed the company.

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Rumor has it that Walt Disney wants to acquire Netflix. But Disney should punt because such a deal fails the four tests of a successful acquisition.

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Facebook recently introduced a new “Marketplace” feature to help formalize local buying and selling on its platform. This was already happening via the “Facebook Groups” section previously, but the new feature puts Facebook in direct competition with established players such as eBay and Craigslist. eBay has plenty to think about now, considering its hasn’t been able to turn around its marketplace sales in the last couple of years and comparable sales of its auctions marketplace have fallen consistently in double-digits since the start of this year.

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Cameras equipped with heat mapping software are promising to bring analytics to brick-and-mortar store operators similar to what can be accomplised with online tracking.

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Everyone’s favourite wizard returns to a really massive screen near you.

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