Extron announces the HD Pro Plenum Series-- active, hybrid optical-copper cables for high-speed HDMI digital video and audio signal transmission, with support for data rates reaching up to 18Gbps.

The cables also support video resolutions up to 4K/60 @ 4:4:4 with HDR, EDID, HDCP and CEC, as well as HDMI audio formats. The active cables are unidirectional, and draw only nominal power from the connected HDMI source device. Diameter is just 4mm, and offers a narrow bend radios for easy installation and uncompromised performance. A combination of traditional copper and fibre optics makes a cable reaching up to 91.4m in length.

According to TrendForce's DRAMeXchange the global server market sees 5% growth on shipments reaching 12.42 million units in 2018, with brands going through a "noticeable" recovery in Q2 2018 after a slight decline in Q1 2018.

Shipments peaked in Q3 2018, reaching 3.2m units. However the analyst warns shipment growth is set to slow down in 2019, reaching 2% in H1 2019 as stock-ups for migration to the latest processor platform began earlier than expected. The market may have a new demand moment in H2 2019, following the release of new platforms like Gen2 from Intel or AMD's Rome.

The 2018 Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) does not tell a new story, but it is one worth repeating-- by 2022 more IP traffic will cross global networks than all prior "internet years" combined up to the end of 2016.

For the curious, Cisco calculates more than 4.7 zettabytes of IP traffic have made their way across global networks since the internet officially came to life in 1984. And that amount will be superseded in a 5 year period! Furthermore, 60% of the global population will be on the internet by 2022, bringing about traffic from over 28 billion online devices. As for what users will actually use the internet for, it is telling that 82% of traffic will be dedicated to video.

Nvidia presents the Quadro RTX 4000 at the annual Autodesk Conference-- a first Turing-based midrange professional GPU from the company, packing the appropriate amount of CUDA, ray-tracing (RT) and Tensor cores.

The Quadro RTX 4000 is essentially a workstation version of the GeForce RTX 2070 gaming CPU reworked for professional rendering and deep learning workloads. As such, it carries 2304 CUDA cores, 36 RT cores and 288 Tensor cores, plus 8GB GDDR6 graphics memory. It demands 150W of power, and Nvidia says the fully enabled TU106 GPU pushes up to 7.1 TFLOPS of FP32 performance, 6 Giga Rays/Sec and 43T RTX-OPS.