4 ms·
Now, I'm not even close to being able to weigh in on the physics side here... but my observation, as someone who has spent several hundred grand on servers in t
by lsc 11y ago
Now, I'm not even close to being able to weigh in on the physics side here... but my observation, as someone who has spent several hundred grand on servers in the last decade is that Intel is run by profit-maximizing professionals.
Look at how much better/faster/cheaper the intel stuff got after AMD's release of the hyper transport opteron.
and look at how much Intel tried to collect rent from their position of market dominance (say, by making us buy rambus and then FBDIMMs) before that.
AMD needs to step up their game.
There's another market force at work, too, and that is demand. On the consumer side of things, at least, there isn't any need for faster x86 computers, because Microsoft isn't doing it's job. It used to be that every three years, Microsoft would release another office suite that everyone needed, that ran like a dog if your computer was more than a year or two old.
I just upgraded my games box, a decade-old core2duo, to windows 10. Works fine (modulo spyware bullshit) - Microsoft has been focusing on the "mobile" market and has been putting a lot of effort into slimming down.
That, and (and I'm so shocked to say this) but it turns out that the people crowing about 'mobile is the future' were mostly right. When I was in high school, even my poor friends had desktops. Now, I know a lot of people, even technical people who only have laptops... and a lot of the people I went to high school with got rid of their desktops and now only have cellphones and tablets; nothing with a full keyboard and intel CPU at all.
If that trend continues, I would predict that we'll eventually switch our servers to whatever architecture the mobile devices use. AMD and Cavium and a handful of other companies have been talking about doing that with ARM, but so far there's nothing I can buy except at engineering sample prices.
- achamayou 11y agoYou can buy HP Moonshots with ARM cartridges for relatively realistic prices. PayPal is supposedly running some of their stuff on them.
- lsc 11y agoI do not have the energy to go through sales... what is 'realistic' here? And can they compete in cpu power per watt with the Intel Xeon D boards I can get from my local supermicro distributor? they look pretty sweet; the only real problem is the four dimm limit; I'm seriously considering those and 32gib modules right now, just because they have such a nice watts per flop. Long-term, for it to be a realistic solution, I'll need to be able to buy compatible parts from different companies.
- achamayou 11y agoSorry, I can't say exactly. You can find R120-P30 1U boxes at GBP1500 (8core 8DIMMs) http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigabyte-r120-p30-single-socket-1u-rackmount-armv8-24ghz-pcie-30-8x-ddr3-slots-ecc-unbuffered-2x-10g http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigabyte-r120-p30-single-sock... Higher density systems like Moonshot or H270-T70 are cheaper per core of course, whether they're competitive depends on your specific application. They're not at the point where they're commoditized and where you can buy parts easily though.
- lsc 11y agohm. $2200 in the money I use, or so. hm. the xeon D is around half that just for the board and cpu (with four dimms, but also with 8 cores... presumably 8 more powerful cores) - and after that it's just a matter of sheet-metal and a psu, so if you can deal with half the dimms, the xeon d is lower capital cost. (I mean, you can spend a grand on a psu and a case, but you have to try pretty hard.) - but the real world power usage could make the difference. Hm. Things are often cheaper priced in USD, too. So... yes. more research is required. But thanks! I wasn't aware that gigabyte was actually shipping it's arm stuff to mortals. Hm. I still don't see it in any of my usual (USian) channels; nothing on provantage. Still, pretty cool stuff.
- makomk 11y agoThe performance and performance-per-watt of the X-Gene1 processor that thing uses don't look terribly competitive, unfortunately: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-performance-per-watt-server-soc-champion/9 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo... Apparently it's made on a 40nm process, and it's probably not a terribly well-optimised design either, both of which go some way to explaining why it's not much good. (Though I guess it was good enough to convince Intel to release the Xeon D for a reasonable price. As you say, Intel's run by profit-maximising professionals - they can resoundingly beat any ARM server chips anyone puts out and drive them out of business, they just don't release their best chips at the best price unless they have to.)
- ckaygusu 11y ago> Intel is run by profit-maximizing professionals. To have a healthy and functioning market, there must be competition. Absent such rival, a company may behave in a way that is not in the best interest of the consumer. This idea is not new, Adam Smith figured it out centuries ago. A company that has been established to make money is obviously going to do it as good as possible. Being an asshole while making money is obviously a decision -be it an explicit or implicit one- but to my knowledge Intel hasn't been pulling off shenanigans that is outright evil.