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It would have been better to see a comparison with SGI (ex-Rackable) CloudRack systems, which have a bit of an inbetween approach, using Xeons, but at least nom

It would have been better to see a comparison with SGI (ex-Rackable) CloudRack systems, which have a bit of an inbetween approach, using Xeons, but at least nominally seem to pack in more cores in the same enclosure size. One of their power tricks, in addition to pulling back DC converters further from the computers, is to allow things to run hot, resulting in savings on cooling costs.

Scott_MacGregor 16y ago
Too bad the electrical signal on the board cannot be altered in some way to allow less heat production for a given amount of processing. That would be a win-win situation all around. The heat seems like wasted energy, perhaps inefficiency that could be done away with by thinking outside the box.
Tamerlin 16y ago
The SGI machines are geared pretty heavily toward supercomputing applications. As such they're tailored for applications that need to share data between processes efficiently, and that also need to do a lot of computing. The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors. What would make more sense is a comparison a datacenter for a company like Disney or Google or Amazon. I suspect that even though SeaMicro's rig would look pretty bad for heavy number-crunching apps, it would most likely do very well in web and database. Those apps don't need to share a lot of data between threads/processes, and they're generally I/O bound rather than compute bound. With proper caching setups, they're mostly network bound, rather than disk bound also.
- mattmcknight 16y ago
  I was thinking of the Rackable stuff, not the supercomputing stuff. They actually acquired SGI, but took the SGI name. http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/april/rackable.html http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...
  - Tamerlin 16y ago
    I'd forgotten that Rackable did they acquiring in that one. Oops :)

Scott_MacGregor 16y ago

Too bad the electrical signal on the board cannot be altered in some way to allow less heat production for a given amount of processing. That would be a win-win situation all around. The heat seems like wasted energy, perhaps inefficiency that could be done away with by thinking outside the box.

Tamerlin 16y ago

The SGI machines are geared pretty heavily toward supercomputing applications. As such they're tailored for applications that need to share data between processes efficiently, and that also need to do a lot of computing. The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors. What would make more sense is a comparison a datacenter for a company like Disney or Google or Amazon. I suspect that even though SeaMicro's rig would look pretty bad for heavy number-crunching apps, it would most likely do very well in web and database. Those apps don't need to share a lot of data between threads/processes, and they're generally I/O bound rather than compute bound. With proper caching setups, they're mostly network bound, rather than disk bound also.

mattmcknight 16y ago
I was thinking of the Rackable stuff, not the supercomputing stuff. They actually acquired SGI, but took the SGI name. http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/april/rackable.html http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  I'd forgotten that Rackable did they acquiring in that one. Oops :)