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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

#81

Post by ssp »

pjscott wrote: post #63

Performance per watt depends on the computer and the workload. It's not apparent from the SPECint benchmarks they show in the article, but chips like Atom are better than beefy server chips for some server workloads, and worse for others, when measuring performance per watt. Here's a paper from Berkeley's RAD lab which tries two Atom processors and a Xeon on several different server workloads, and compares their perf…

See also this:

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT090909050...

for a comparison of various types of chips.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#82

Post by pjscott »

ssp wrote: post #81
pjscott wrote: post #63

Performance per watt depends on the computer and the workload. It's not apparent from the SPECint benchmarks they show in the article, but chips like Atom are better than beefy server chips for some server workloads, and worse for others, when measuring performance per watt. Here's a paper from Berkeley's RAD lab which tries two Atom processors and a Xeon on several different server workloads, and compares their perf…

See also this: http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT090909050... for a comparison of various types of chips.

That chart compares theoretical peak GFLOPS per watt, which is an absolutely terrible metric for server workloads. As the paper I linked to showed, Atom is sometimes much better and sometimes much worse than large, fast server processors in performance per watt on real server workloads. Those charts don't take into account things like cache, or branch prediction, or multicore memory coherence.

The only way to get meaningful performance per watt data is to actually run real workloads on various processors.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#83

Post by Super74 »

ElliotH wrote: post #25
Super74 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Even Ubuntu needs an upgraded graphics card and RAM to utilize all of the bells and whistles." Bells and whistles are what makes computing fun for the average user. Why do you think the iPhone is such a hit? It's basic functionality? or the fact that you can have a lot of fun on it? It even sucks as a phone and people don't seem to mind. In my IT business, the first thing I do for most customers is upgrade their RAM…

Why do you think the iPhone is such a hit? It's basic functionality? or the fact that you can have a lot of fun on it? The iPhone was initially a hit because it was the first smart phone that was really designed for the consumer (before that, the way I see it there were mostly business smartphones). It is a hit today because it is seen as the cool phone to have and it is very well marketed. The eyecandy provides only…

The iPhone was initially a hit because it was the first smart phone that was really designed for the consumer. Yes, you are correct, because consumers want the bells and whistles I mentioned earlier. Apple's marketing was a success in highlighting the eye candy that the Mac OS X has been known for. Even MS eventually added most of the visual effects associated with Apple's OS.

The consumer is mostly uninformed when it comes to their hardware needs and that is where the manufacturer should step in. As another HN article discussed, the confusion in PC model labeling is another example of this carelessness. Steve Jobs has always said the consumer does not know what they want, you have to tell them.

I should have said most consumers use Mac OS X or W7 and those machines need more than 512M of RAM.

In helping large data centers improve their power consumption, creating consumer products that inspire and ignite a passion or pushing larger competitors to continually have to innovate, smaller companies always make a difference.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#84

Post by Andys »

GFischer wrote: post #3

Interesting... I've never been in a really big datacenter, so I'd like to see some (hopefully non-biased) reviews from somebody that does work in those places. Would this really work well for the intended market? There are lots of startups over here that plan on massively serving webpages - would something like this (only cheaper :) ) make you reconsider using whatever cloud services you're currently using? Articles…

Its a custom-designed niche product. It will be priced accordingly.

You can tell from their "dollar savings" chart that they plan to claw back the money you save in price of the machine!

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#85

Post by blhack »

runT1ME wrote: post #80
DEinspanjer wrote: post #58

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…

I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine, or is it a 'cluster' in the sense that each node has a single processor? (You used both threads and inter-process, but also implied multiple nodes...)

>I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine

I would love to watch that thing boot, haha. SO many penguins!

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#86

Post by ericd »

pjscott wrote: post #63

Performance per watt depends on the computer and the workload. It's not apparent from the SPECint benchmarks they show in the article, but chips like Atom are better than beefy server chips for some server workloads, and worse for others, when measuring performance per watt. Here's a paper from Berkeley's RAD lab which tries two Atom processors and a Xeon on several different server workloads, and compares their perf…

Yeah, there are still some single-threaded tasks that I want my servers to be able to tear through. For serving up HTTP requests, though, this sounds great.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#87

Post by pjscott »

hackermom wrote: post #19

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.

Most of their technology is not related to the processors themselves, but to the rest of the computer. They've got a fancy high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect between the chips. They multiplex access to I/O hardware, which I'm sure takes advantage of that nice interconnect. They have hardware-accelerated network load balancing which tries to keep the CPUs at maximally-efficient levels of utilization, letting the spare CPUs sleep, and avoiding malfunctioning CPUs. I would love to see this with ARM Cortex-A9 processors, and I think that's actually very likely if this company succeeds.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#88

Post by pjscott »

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.

The load-balancer monitors the health of the processors and can route around broken ones. Some amount of degradation is okay.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#89

Post by blhack »

blhack wrote: post #85
runT1ME wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine, or is it a 'cluster' in the sense that each node has a single processor? (You used both threads and inter-process, but also implied multiple nodes...)

>I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine I would love to watch that thing boot, haha. SO many penguins!

I apologize for the self-reply, but am I wrong here? I use mostly OpenBSD and linux only lives on servers that I don't physically see booting. I remember when I first starting using Linux, there would be one penguin for each processor core. Booting it up for the first time on a dual xeon machine and seeing 8 of them, was kindof funny in a nerdy way.

Would this be different? If there are 512 cores...would it show a penguin for each core?

Sorry, like I said, I haven't actually watched the boot process on a linux machine for quite some time, and now I'm a bit curious...

Sorry if this question is juvenile or stupid or something.

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