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Between Power9, AMD's Zen-based Naples, and Qualcomm's ARM-based Centriq, things are looking pretty interesting for the future of servers.

by mtgx 10y ago

wyldfire 10y ago
IMO Xeon will be tough to unseat for performance. But a lot of server consumers only want to be able to scale ever-more guest OS/containers on a single platform, so these challengers do pose a real threat to Intel's server market. Open source software has been a powerful economic force: the fact that so much software exists that's designed to target many similar platforms and is frequently recompiled for those targets means that the impact to the end-consumer of switching among x86/ppc/arm is much lower than it was in the past.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I don't know if they have to beat Intel on performance per core. There are markets that require the best performance per core, but there is also a big market that wants more reasonably powerful cores for a given price point. For instance, in the VPS hosting market, you see most providers offer "vCPUs" (virtual CPUs), because then they can sell their customers "four cores" (or 20 cores) on the cheap, and so on. It's a good marketing strategy. What if they can offer real cores for the same low price? That would be pretty appealing to their customers. They can also offer "24-core dedicated servers" on the cheap, and so on. Also, in the long run, it would be best for hosting and cloud providers if they would at least adopt a strategy of 50% Intel chips, and 50% AMD + Power + ARM. That should get them much better prices in the future (from all the chip providers), if they did that. Monopolies don't serve anyone but the monopolist.
  - rwmj 10y ago
    They could look at the Cavium (ARM 64 bit) chips. 48 cores / socket, and typically two sockets per server. Each core is in-order and rather slow. eg: http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#ov http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#...
zeotroph 10y ago
And maybe Mill Computing can follow through with the claim that their belt based, general purpose DSP CPU design can beat all other offerings at least with regard to power use. I wonder how long it will be until physical chips are out. Or at least new talks, they were really good.
- the_duke 10y ago
  I watched all the talks and it taught me a lot about how CPUs work, and what an interesting new architecture the "belt machine" is. Highly recommended. http://millcomputing.com/docs/ http://millcomputing.com/docs/
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    I was enthralled watching those talks, and the concept of storing high-level bytecode for executables that gets targeted to the specific machine at runtime is a concept I've always found cool (I can install an ancient AS/400 app on our IBM i that was originally built on IBM's ancient 48-bit CPU the old systems had on our shiny POWER7 box as long as they didn't use any private API's). However, we'll see what happens if and when they produce real silicon whether the concept will be another Itanic, even AMD moved away from VLIW designs for their GPU's for performance reasons ~4 years(though, to be fair, they don't exactly have the $$$ to pay for tremendous amounts of driver developers to optimize their code generation anymore).

Between Power9, AMD's Zen-based Naples, and Qualcomm's ARM-based Centriq, things are looking pretty interesting for the future of servers.

by mtgx 10y ago

Between Power9, AMD's Zen-based Naples, and Qualcomm's ARM-based Centriq, things are looking pretty interesting for the future of servers.

wyldfire 10y ago

IMO Xeon will be tough to unseat for performance. But a lot of server consumers only want to be able to scale ever-more guest OS/containers on a single platform, so these challengers do pose a real threat to Intel's server market. Open source software has been a powerful economic force: the fact that so much software exists that's designed to target many similar platforms and is frequently recompiled for those targets means that the impact to the end-consumer of switching among x86/ppc/arm is much lower than it was in the past.

mtgx 10y ago
I don't know if they have to beat Intel on performance per core. There are markets that require the best performance per core, but there is also a big market that wants more reasonably powerful cores for a given price point. For instance, in the VPS hosting market, you see most providers offer "vCPUs" (virtual CPUs), because then they can sell their customers "four cores" (or 20 cores) on the cheap, and so on. It's a good marketing strategy. What if they can offer real cores for the same low price? That would be pretty appealing to their customers. They can also offer "24-core dedicated servers" on the cheap, and so on. Also, in the long run, it would be best for hosting and cloud providers if they would at least adopt a strategy of 50% Intel chips, and 50% AMD + Power + ARM. That should get them much better prices in the future (from all the chip providers), if they did that. Monopolies don't serve anyone but the monopolist.
- rwmj 10y ago
  They could look at the Cavium (ARM 64 bit) chips. 48 cores / socket, and typically two sockets per server. Each core is in-order and rather slow. eg: http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#ov http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#...

zeotroph 10y ago

And maybe Mill Computing can follow through with the claim that their belt based, general purpose DSP CPU design can beat all other offerings at least with regard to power use. I wonder how long it will be until physical chips are out. Or at least new talks, they were really good.

the_duke 10y ago
I watched all the talks and it taught me a lot about how CPUs work, and what an interesting new architecture the "belt machine" is. Highly recommended. http://millcomputing.com/docs/ http://millcomputing.com/docs/
- snuxoll 10y ago
  I was enthralled watching those talks, and the concept of storing high-level bytecode for executables that gets targeted to the specific machine at runtime is a concept I've always found cool (I can install an ancient AS/400 app on our IBM i that was originally built on IBM's ancient 48-bit CPU the old systems had on our shiny POWER7 box as long as they didn't use any private API's). However, we'll see what happens if and when they produce real silicon whether the concept will be another Itanic, even AMD moved away from VLIW designs for their GPU's for performance reasons ~4 years(though, to be fair, they don't exactly have the $$$ to pay for tremendous amounts of driver developers to optimize their code generation anymore).