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SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

venturebeat.com

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Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#11

Post by Super74 »

rbanffy wrote: post #8
Super74 wrote: post #7

Big surprise, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM not innovating? I can't believe it... Just look at the computers they are selling. most still offers 512M of RAM as a default. What can you run on 512? Nothing like having to upgrade the day you receive your product. Consumers by and large need the guidance of manufacturers to make the right HW choices and the manufacturers just want the cash. They will suck each segment dr…

> What the F* can you run on 512? A lot, really. I have rendered DVD quality movies, handled product composition databases and processed millions of orders on machines with less than 512 megs of memory. Not many companies (or people) have enough data or volume to stress a machine with 512 megs of RAM. I agree it seems a pittance - my netbook has more than that - but if I break up memory usage by application here, Fir…

Well, you can't effectively run Mac OS X or W7 on 512 to start, the most used operating systems in the world. Even Ubuntu needs an upgraded graphics card and RAM to utilize all of the bells and whistles.

As I said before, I was referring to the general public. There will always be hackers or high-end users that can make miracles.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#12

Post by mattmcknight »

It would have been better to see a comparison with SGI (ex-Rackable) CloudRack systems, which have a bit of an inbetween approach, using Xeons, but at least nominally seem to pack in more cores in the same enclosure size. One of their power tricks, in addition to pulling back DC converters further from the computers, is to allow things to run hot, resulting in savings on cooling costs.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#13

Post by stcredzero »

njharman wrote: post #10
stcredzero wrote: post #2

The way I read this, they are achieving savings by virtually mux-ing (or de-muxing depending on viewpoint) much of everything that's not the CPU. Is this optimized to make the support of virtual servers with relatively low throughput more efficient?

I read it to be they created a chip that runs code written to emulate/virtualize most of the other (non-cpu) logic on a motherboard. so instead of 10 "io" chips and 10 "memory" chips most of which are idle they have 15 virt chips which may act as either "io" or "memory" depending on demand. I guess (de)muxing is close to that? Multiplexing many "request" amongst fewer real(non-virutal) objects.

I read it to be they created a chip that runs code written to emulate/virtualize most of the other (non-cpu) logic on a motherboard.

That's exactly what I meant by "virtually (de)muxing everything but the CPU." I should have said, "CPU+chipset," though.

I wonder if their architecture is also (unintentionally) optimized for languages like Ruby/Python? I suspect that languages like those tend to have more CPU operations per IO operation. I wonder if anyone has researched this metric?

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#14

Post by thedjpetersen »

Super74 wrote: post #11
rbanffy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the F* can you run on 512? A lot, really. I have rendered DVD quality movies, handled product composition databases and processed millions of orders on machines with less than 512 megs of memory. Not many companies (or people) have enough data or volume to stress a machine with 512 megs of RAM. I agree it seems a pittance - my netbook has more than that - but if I break up memory usage by application here, Fir…

Well, you can't effectively run Mac OS X or W7 on 512 to start, the most used operating systems in the world. Even Ubuntu needs an upgraded graphics card and RAM to utilize all of the bells and whistles. As I said before, I was referring to the general public. There will always be hackers or high-end users that can make miracles.

I run Ubuntu off of 512M of ram, and it has always performed well for me, I don't think it is a miracle to run off that amount of memory, for most people's needs they could deal with a lot less memory. Most people just want more memory for more eye candy.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#15

Post by lftl »

Super74 wrote: post #11
rbanffy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the F* can you run on 512? A lot, really. I have rendered DVD quality movies, handled product composition databases and processed millions of orders on machines with less than 512 megs of memory. Not many companies (or people) have enough data or volume to stress a machine with 512 megs of RAM. I agree it seems a pittance - my netbook has more than that - but if I break up memory usage by application here, Fir…

Well, you can't effectively run Mac OS X or W7 on 512 to start, the most used operating systems in the world. Even Ubuntu needs an upgraded graphics card and RAM to utilize all of the bells and whistles. As I said before, I was referring to the general public. There will always be hackers or high-end users that can make miracles.

I think the general miscommunication here is that you seem to be talking about desktop computing, while this article is focused on datacenter usage.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#16

Post by ableal »

p3ll0n wrote: post #4

James Hamilton, VP at Amazon and author of the popular blog "Perspectives" has some interesting insights into and great things to say about the work SeaMicro and other new startups are doing to revolutionize the server industry. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleases...

(timf had submitted that one too, but it slipped down)

Another write-up with names and tech details here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/14/seamicro_sm10000_ser...

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#17

Post by Super74 »

lftl wrote: post #15
Super74 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can't effectively run Mac OS X or W7 on 512 to start, the most used operating systems in the world. Even Ubuntu needs an upgraded graphics card and RAM to utilize all of the bells and whistles. As I said before, I was referring to the general public. There will always be hackers or high-end users that can make miracles.

I think the general miscommunication here is that you seem to be talking about desktop computing, while this article is focused on datacenter usage.

I agreed with the article in the sense that a smaller company has seen the error of some major manufacturers' ways. My opinion was that these major manufacturers do not have the user's best interest in mind and used their PC sales as another example.

They have billions for research at their disposal and they couldn't see that their equipment was too power hungry, would not be sustainable in the long run and probably needed re-tuning? I'm guessing they did.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#19

Post by hackermom »

An ARM-powered variant would sit on top of this Atom-powered machine, with quite possibly the same or higher numbers of efficiency when looking at performance-per-watt.

The article quotes the interviewee saying that ARMs can be used, but not clear enough to determine if they actually have ARM versions of these machines, which I'd be very interested in seeing 100k specint_rate figures for.

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