4 ms·
Ah, just the man I've been wanting to talk to then :) As I mentioned in another post, I really think Intel are missing an opportunity when it comes to high spe
by spangry 10y ago
Ah, just the man I've been wanting to talk to then :)
As I mentioned in another post, I really think Intel are missing an opportunity when it comes to high speed networking. Why don't they drop all the crazy server market lock-in vendor shenanigans (e.g. brand to brand SFP incompatibility, 'call us' pricing etc.) and just jump straight to the consumer market? I know this means cannibalising CPU revenue, but that's going to happen anyway.
Developers are consumers. In many cases the direction that their skills develop in is largely determined by the consumer hardware they're running at home. The same seems to be true for Ops folks, who all seems to be running vSphere homelabs atm. Based on what others have said here, it sounds like NVIDIA have chosen to cross-sell, and work their way down from HPC -> ... -> Consumer, presumably to extract maximum rents, despite not yet having strong enough network effects o lock out competition.
This seems like the perfect opportunity for Intel to cut the legs out from under that strategy, by aggressively pushing widespread consumer (or at least 'power-user'/developer) take-up of high speed, low-latency networking. And hasn't iWARP been endorsed as an IETF standard (or is on its way to be)? It seems like there's a window of opportunity here, albeit one that gets smaller and smaller as Nvidia slowly work their way down market.
- greglindahl 10y agoWell, Omni-Path has a 48 port switch ASIC. So that's it for consumer accessibility. But if you want to buy the PCI Express cards, Newegg has 'em. Intel has a great channel organization.
- spangry 10y agoIt's certainly impressive tech. But, and bear in mind this is just from a consumer perspective, here are the reasons I wouldn't buy it: - ~$8000 USD for a 24 port switch is way beyond my price range. I doubt any consumer market could support this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP53G3510 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP53G35...) - ~$550 USD for a single port adapter is also way outside of my budget, especially since I'd need to buy at least half a dozen of these for my home lab (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106290 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106...) - It's very difficult to find solid information on the product. The Ark page doesn't tell me anything (http://ark.intel.com/products/92007/Intel-Omni-Path-Host-Fabric-Interface-Adapter-100-Series-1-Port-PCIe-x16 http://ark.intel.com/products/92007/Intel-Omni-Path-Host-Fab...). The link to the whitepaper (which I'm assuming is actually a marketing brochure) 404s. - So even if I could afford this as a consumer/dev, I probably wouldn't buy it due to the uncertainty around total cost of ownership. Will it accept non-Intel branded QSFP transceivers? Same question with optical cabling. - Given the product brief mentions 'fabric performance [will] scale automatically with ongoing advances in Intel Xeon processors...', it leaves me wondering if this is somehow dependent on some specialised Xeon CPU instruction sets, making it useless for most home labs (which, at best, will be running older generation Xeons from second-hand servers, but more likely CPUs from Intel's consumer line-up). On costs: If these are just reflective of the cost of production, then fair enough, I guess I'll just have to wait (for either Intel, or another manufacturer, to devise a cheaper production process). If it's not, then I think you're missing the opportunity outlined above, and you'll lose the HPC fight given Nvidia occupy the high ground here. On compatibility: If this is just some idiot 'multi-channel cross sales' strategy that some genius with an MBA has cooked up, you're going to have a bad time. It falls apart the second someone releases a commodity adapter (which may already exist, for all I know).