Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#51

Post by hga »

CountHackulus wrote: post #47

I do see a potential problem here. In the pictures, they show a bunch of Atom CPUs soldered directly to the board. That means dire things for service. Now, if a single CPU has a a flaw, you need to replace an entire board of CPUs. Compare this to a standard blade setup, where you could just swap out CPUs, or even an IBM System Z where you could hotswap the CPU, and service doesn't look so great.

Or just ignore it if it doesn't take out the whole card. Atoms only come this way (solder mount), right?

You can hotswap each 8 CPU board.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#52

Post by wmf »

c00p3r wrote: post #29

There are no information about the chipset, memory specs and extension slots in particular. It could be a huge bottleneck between CPUs and RAM, because of concurrent access of so many CPUs to the memory while Atoms have a very small caches. It means that real-world applications, like a multi-threaded services (especially JVM-based, or simply MySQL) could not be used efficiently. I'm also very skeptical about hundreds…

It's a cluster, so each Atom has its own RAM.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#53

Post by wmf »

CountHackulus wrote: post #47

I do see a potential problem here. In the pictures, they show a bunch of Atom CPUs soldered directly to the board. That means dire things for service. Now, if a single CPU has a a flaw, you need to replace an entire board of CPUs. Compare this to a standard blade setup, where you could just swap out CPUs, or even an IBM System Z where you could hotswap the CPU, and service doesn't look so great.

To be fair, the unit of hotswap in System z is a book that contains ~32 cores; that's not so different from SeaMicro.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#54

Post by c00p3r »

hga wrote: post #48
c00p3r wrote: post #29

There are no information about the chipset, memory specs and extension slots in particular. It could be a huge bottleneck between CPUs and RAM, because of concurrent access of so many CPUs to the memory while Atoms have a very small caches. It means that real-world applications, like a multi-threaded services (especially JVM-based, or simply MySQL) could not be used efficiently. I'm also very skeptical about hundreds…

Here's a lot more technical detail: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3768/seamicro-announces-sm1000... Per CPU (8 per board): Atom Z530 (1.6GHz, Silverthorne) US15 chipset (Poulsbo) 2GB DDR2 Per board: 4 ASICs to virtualize IO 2x PCIe x16 connectors " Each hop takes 8 microseconds ", so good enough for (most/all?) IO but not good enough for memory. No ECC of course, it being a non-server Intel chip. Each single cored CP…

So, it's just a tight packing of a 512 netbook's boards in a one box. I thought it is a 512-core system. Oh, I'm such a moron. Nothing to see here.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#55

Post by c00p3r »

wmf wrote: post #52
c00p3r wrote: post #29

There are no information about the chipset, memory specs and extension slots in particular. It could be a huge bottleneck between CPUs and RAM, because of concurrent access of so many CPUs to the memory while Atoms have a very small caches. It means that real-world applications, like a multi-threaded services (especially JVM-based, or simply MySQL) could not be used efficiently. I'm also very skeptical about hundreds…

It's a cluster, so each Atom has its own RAM.

Yeah, I missed the point. =)

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#56

Post by ippisl »

GrandMasterBirt wrote: post #22

I am completely baffled that Intel did not do this. I guess they figured ATOM is just a crappy little side-project processor, not one of the big boys.

Some see the move to many-core ATOM servers , as a move to put financial pressure on intel(since ATOMs are cheap).

And this move helps the future of ARM based servers , since ARM is more similar to ATOM than to XEON.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#57

Post by c00p3r »

limist wrote: post #36

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay

Where are Sun, SGI, Cray, etc now?

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#58

Post by DEinspanjer »

I worked with one of these prototype boxes. I was using it for something a bit outside their common use case: clustered ETL processing of log data. I was quite happy with the performance. In the workloads I had that needed lots of threads, I was able to use the box to spin up a lot of nodes and crunch through several hundred GB of log data very quickly. The machines were easy to work with since they felt like normal Linux nodes, and the interconnect fabric made inter-process communication very snappy.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#59

Post by mbreese »

c00p3r wrote: post #57
limist wrote: post #36

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay Where are Sun, SGI, Cray, etc now?

Is Apple just an anomaly? Also, Sun was bought partially so that Oracle could offer a complete software/hardware package, so I'm not sure your point stands. The others had great runs with great hardware/software... they just didn't survive to the next generation.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#60

Post by ComputerGuru »

mbreese wrote: post #59
c00p3r wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay Where are Sun, SGI, Cray, etc now?

Is Apple just an anomaly? Also, Sun was bought partially so that Oracle could offer a complete software/hardware package, so I'm not sure your point stands. The others had great runs with great hardware/software... they just didn't survive to the next generation.

And you can add Google and Microsoft to that list, too.
Post reply on HN