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.
They basically did it's called Larrabee and it is now being transformed into a server product.
SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
61–70 of 110 posts
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#63http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/hotpower_10_chun.pd...
The tl;dr version is that what you really want are hybrid datacenters, where you can assign various workloads to different types of machines, and use each machine type for what it's best suited to do.
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.
Why not just buy google ads for technical keywords and target only the desired countries?
(now, most of my advertising 'budget' was spent on, say, writing a book... but per-click ads are the opposite of what I want.)
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.
Why not just buy google ads for technical keywords and target only the desired countries?
I don't even /see/ them.
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#66I 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.
I wonder how Atom specific the ASIC is....
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#67"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?
I'm actually in Chippewa Falls at the moment. :-)
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.
You can search for local linux/debian user groups.
Hm. But yeah, I should play more with LUGs in poor parts of the world; I've tried to give away stuff to local LUGs around here (in the SF bay area) but they usually have a setup they like already, and other providers falling over themselves to give them free crap.
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#69Earlier 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.
Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
#70Interesting in terms of technology, but of no interest to me as someone who does colocation and web servers for my clients, especially since they almost all use traditional RDBMSes like MySQL and Postgres. The Atom is too underpowered and too RAM limited for individual systems - you would do better in most cases with a 2x quadcore setup and 32-64GB RAM combined with OpenVZ or Solaris Zones. Lack of ECC = automatic di…
I would rethink that if I were you. What if you started to provide virtual private servers on one of these boxes instead of offering colocation? I think this innovation makes VPS solutions even more efficient than they are today.
how much power would that eat? in my setup, we'd be talking about 3840 watts, each one of those single socket 8 core boxes eats about one amp of 120v, give or take. they say 4w per server, so that'd be 2048 watts for their solution; so yeah, it will take quite a while to make up the price difference.
Now there are some reasons why having your own physical server is better than having a virtual slice, but many of those reasons have to do with I/O, and as these boxes don't come with local storage... so at least for my workloads, they still can't beat the nice, standard opteron G34 systems I throw together in my workshop.