7 ms·

Leaving sarcastic comments aside, I think the valid point is made - the rise of commodity, garbage-quality hardware overmanufactured in China and subsequent ris

by gesman 11y ago

Leaving sarcastic comments aside, I think the valid point is made - the rise of commodity, garbage-quality hardware overmanufactured in China and subsequent rise of "commodity-proud" software empowered by penny-wise / dollar-stupid business processes are overdue for correction. Instead of putting 20 rusty bicycles together and claim to be a revolutionary fuel- and cost efficient rocket ship, why don't we build a rocket ship from the beginning that actually flies quite well? Hardware and chips optimized for DB engines, queries and huge amount of streaming data will be welcomed.

txdv 11y ago
GPUs are already getting slower, CPUs have been stagnant for a while (no 2x every few years), except if they just double the core count. I think in time specialized domain hardware will make financially sense because it will be the only way to grow.
- onion2k 11y ago
  GPUs are already getting slower Do you mean the rate of change is slowing down, or that they're actually getting slower?
  - tmostak 11y ago
    Based on Nvidia's Pascal launch I think you could argue that not only are GPUs getting faster but that the range of change just dramatically accelerated (due to a process node shrink and introduction of super-fast HBM2 memory).
    - vetinari 11y ago
      Pascal already launched? I'm not getting excited until Nvidia really ships something that keeps up with their promises. For the past few years, their products were underwhelming compared to marketing materials before launch.
      - jandrese 11y ago
        Only in expensive compute boards. No GPUs yet.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- mtgx 11y ago
  Are cores really doubling every 2 years per unit of cost? Intel's chips seems to be getting more expensive with each new generation. Or they do stuff like calling Atom "Pentium", Avoton "Xeon-D", and make dual-core "Core i7", to trick you into buying lower-performance chips for the same price as the last, more powerful, generation (for the same price).
- tracker1 11y ago
  The per-core speed of a given CPU has been pretty stagnant for about 6 years... However, the number of cores (specifically in server hardware) continues to grow (slowly) and the CPUs themselves are using much less power per core than before. There's more ways to improve than just faster cores.
- dagw 11y ago
  CPUs have been stagnant for a while Performance pr. core has been pretty stagnant, but performance pr watt has been improving. With the current consumer focus being so heavily on various battery powered 'computers', this seems like a reasonable trade off.
sabalaba 11y ago
One reason the "rusty bicycle" approach has worked so well is because of economies of scale. If you look at mean time to failure on "commodity consumer" vs "enterprise grade" GPUs they're very close and price wise the consumer hardware is significantly less expensive on a flop/W/$ basis.
sgt101 11y ago
When/if the business cycle settles out (say Moore's law stops now and international affairs settle due to the emergence of a super being who imposes world peace) I would expect this kind of approach (rocket ship wins) to be prevalent about 10 years hence. It makes great sense to me as a techie, my users will be happy. My staff will be happy. I will sleep at night. There will be no surprises, everything will just work. We will not have to explain that "the cluster just doesn't do that well when it's 90% full" or "it's been unstable since we lost that node a month ago, we think that the new capacity will let it get to a better state when we put that in" or "there's a network problem, we don't know why, somethings interacting with something else and long queries are getting killed". However, my CFO will never give me the money to build a rocket ship. NEVER. I have looked into the eyes of his successor and all his acolytes and they will never give me the money either. To make this happen the current corporate hegemons of HR & Finance must be thwarted and destroyed. We must take their significant others, ride their quadrupedal beasts and burn their smartphones. Only when the laments of their personal digital assistants swirl in my ears like a Bach requiem will I take a case to the Operating Committee to do things right. Until then it would be suicide.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
matt4077 11y ago
What are you even talking about? Hardware reliability has gone through the roof in recent years. So has performance in some areas, such as SSDs, GPUs, displays. The ability to run a medium-sized startup or a complex scientific simulation on commodity hardware is a fantastic force of democratization access. DBs are CPU-limited and, yes, single-core performance has been stagnating. But that's unlikely to be a vast conspiracy.
- alex_anglin 11y ago
  Depends on the workload: Analytical DBs are often I/O limited.
  - imaginenore 11y ago
    Modern consumer SSDs are what, 2GB/sec, DDR4 is 60GB/sec. What kind of CPU can process data at these speeds?
    - zardo 11y ago
      Isn't the cache going to be in the 100GB/s range? Why would we even have a cache if memory speed wasn't a bottleneck.
      - imaginenore 11y ago
        That's not the point. Even trivial meaningful data manipulations are not possible at such speeds. Maybe on some 18-core Xeons, and even then I doubt it.
- tremon 11y ago
  DBs are CPU-limited and, yes, single-core performance has been stagnating. What are you basing this on? Database engines are only CPU-limited only if you have unlimited I/O bandwidth. Also, database engines hardly ever have only one query to process. Even if queries were not parallellizable (which they certainly are), single-core performance has little impact on overall performance.
imtringued 11y ago
>Hardware and chips optimized for DB engines, queries and huge amount of streaming data will be welcomed. Oracle has been doing this for years. The only problem is the price. >SQL in Silicon: Adds co-processors to all 32 cores of the SPARC M7 that offload and accelerate important data functions, dramatically improving efficiency and performance of database applications. Critical functions accelerated by these new co-processors include memory de-compression, memory scan, range scan, filtering, and join assist. Offloading these functions to co-processors greatly increases the efficiency of each CPU core, lowers memory utilization, and enables up to 10x better database query performance. Oracle Database 12c In-Memory option fully supports this new capability in the current release. In addition, this new functionality is slated to be available to advanced developers to build the next generation of big data analytics platforms. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/sparc-m7-102615.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/sparc-m7-10261...
lmm 11y ago
Because time and again that approach has demonstrated itself to be more expensive and less effective. Computers are not bicycles. The differences are important: the rate of change of the whole ecosystem is much higher, the ways economies of scale play out are different, load-balancing approaches have no analogue in the physical world, refactoring is zillions of times cheaper than it is with physical objects. Intuitions from physical engineering are often simply wrong when applied to computing.
hobs 11y ago
So, what about Google? A fleet of commodity hardware delivering rocket ships to everywhere. Maybe you are not wrong for some smaller scale N, but after you need to make globally available datastores the speed of light is your enemy, not interconnect between two processors or some special NUMA configuration.
sitkack 11y ago
One can explain by analogy, but arguing by it is not productive.

by gesman 11y ago

txdv 11y ago

GPUs are already getting slower, CPUs have been stagnant for a while (no 2x every few years), except if they just double the core count. I think in time specialized domain hardware will make financially sense because it will be the only way to grow.

onion2k 11y ago
GPUs are already getting slower Do you mean the rate of change is slowing down, or that they're actually getting slower?
- tmostak 11y ago
  Based on Nvidia's Pascal launch I think you could argue that not only are GPUs getting faster but that the range of change just dramatically accelerated (due to a process node shrink and introduction of super-fast HBM2 memory).
  - vetinari 11y ago
    Pascal already launched? I'm not getting excited until Nvidia really ships something that keeps up with their promises. For the past few years, their products were underwhelming compared to marketing materials before launch.
    - jandrese 11y ago
      Only in expensive compute boards. No GPUs yet.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
mtgx 11y ago
Are cores really doubling every 2 years per unit of cost? Intel's chips seems to be getting more expensive with each new generation. Or they do stuff like calling Atom "Pentium", Avoton "Xeon-D", and make dual-core "Core i7", to trick you into buying lower-performance chips for the same price as the last, more powerful, generation (for the same price).
tracker1 11y ago
The per-core speed of a given CPU has been pretty stagnant for about 6 years... However, the number of cores (specifically in server hardware) continues to grow (slowly) and the CPUs themselves are using much less power per core than before. There's more ways to improve than just faster cores.
dagw 11y ago
CPUs have been stagnant for a while Performance pr. core has been pretty stagnant, but performance pr watt has been improving. With the current consumer focus being so heavily on various battery powered 'computers', this seems like a reasonable trade off.

sabalaba 11y ago

One reason the "rusty bicycle" approach has worked so well is because of economies of scale. If you look at mean time to failure on "commodity consumer" vs "enterprise grade" GPUs they're very close and price wise the consumer hardware is significantly less expensive on a flop/W/$ basis.

sgt101 11y ago

When/if the business cycle settles out (say Moore's law stops now and international affairs settle due to the emergence of a super being who imposes world peace) I would expect this kind of approach (rocket ship wins) to be prevalent about 10 years hence. It makes great sense to me as a techie, my users will be happy. My staff will be happy. I will sleep at night. There will be no surprises, everything will just work. We will not have to explain that "the cluster just doesn't do that well when it's 90% full" or "it's been unstable since we lost that node a month ago, we think that the new capacity will let it get to a better state when we put that in" or "there's a network problem, we don't know why, somethings interacting with something else and long queries are getting killed". However, my CFO will never give me the money to build a rocket ship. NEVER. I have looked into the eyes of his successor and all his acolytes and they will never give me the money either. To make this happen the current corporate hegemons of HR & Finance must be thwarted and destroyed. We must take their significant others, ride their quadrupedal beasts and burn their smartphones. Only when the laments of their personal digital assistants swirl in my ears like a Bach requiem will I take a case to the Operating Committee to do things right. Until then it would be suicide.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

matt4077 11y ago

What are you even talking about? Hardware reliability has gone through the roof in recent years. So has performance in some areas, such as SSDs, GPUs, displays. The ability to run a medium-sized startup or a complex scientific simulation on commodity hardware is a fantastic force of democratization access. DBs are CPU-limited and, yes, single-core performance has been stagnating. But that's unlikely to be a vast conspiracy.

alex_anglin 11y ago
Depends on the workload: Analytical DBs are often I/O limited.
- imaginenore 11y ago
  Modern consumer SSDs are what, 2GB/sec, DDR4 is 60GB/sec. What kind of CPU can process data at these speeds?
  - zardo 11y ago
    Isn't the cache going to be in the 100GB/s range? Why would we even have a cache if memory speed wasn't a bottleneck.
    - imaginenore 11y ago
      That's not the point. Even trivial meaningful data manipulations are not possible at such speeds. Maybe on some 18-core Xeons, and even then I doubt it.
tremon 11y ago
DBs are CPU-limited and, yes, single-core performance has been stagnating. What are you basing this on? Database engines are only CPU-limited only if you have unlimited I/O bandwidth. Also, database engines hardly ever have only one query to process. Even if queries were not parallellizable (which they certainly are), single-core performance has little impact on overall performance.

imtringued 11y ago

>Hardware and chips optimized for DB engines, queries and huge amount of streaming data will be welcomed. Oracle has been doing this for years. The only problem is the price. >SQL in Silicon: Adds co-processors to all 32 cores of the SPARC M7 that offload and accelerate important data functions, dramatically improving efficiency and performance of database applications. Critical functions accelerated by these new co-processors include memory de-compression, memory scan, range scan, filtering, and join assist. Offloading these functions to co-processors greatly increases the efficiency of each CPU core, lowers memory utilization, and enables up to 10x better database query performance. Oracle Database 12c In-Memory option fully supports this new capability in the current release. In addition, this new functionality is slated to be available to advanced developers to build the next generation of big data analytics platforms. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/sparc-m7-102615.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/sparc-m7-10261...

lmm 11y ago

Because time and again that approach has demonstrated itself to be more expensive and less effective. Computers are not bicycles. The differences are important: the rate of change of the whole ecosystem is much higher, the ways economies of scale play out are different, load-balancing approaches have no analogue in the physical world, refactoring is zillions of times cheaper than it is with physical objects. Intuitions from physical engineering are often simply wrong when applied to computing.

hobs 11y ago

So, what about Google? A fleet of commodity hardware delivering rocket ships to everywhere. Maybe you are not wrong for some smaller scale N, but after you need to make globally available datastores the speed of light is your enemy, not interconnect between two processors or some special NUMA configuration.

sitkack 11y ago

One can explain by analogy, but arguing by it is not productive.