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Honestly is sounds exactly like the strategy Sun pursued with UltraSPARC systems; however in my experience, time and time again commodity hardware with higher p

by lreeves 15y ago

Honestly is sounds exactly like the strategy Sun pursued with UltraSPARC systems; however in my experience, time and time again commodity hardware with higher per-core clock speeds beat the pants off of Sun hardware except for very narrow HPC tasks (supposedly, I couldn't even get decent speeds for the distributed computing projects available on the platform). It also seems to rely on software to be written specifically to take advantage of multiple local threads. This may or may not happen in a timely fashion for most projects (and again, chances are fewer cores with a higher clock speed will still outperform). Time will tell though I guess!

rkalla 15y ago
Agreed -- it really seems to be a long term bet. They see the growth of hosted apps and cloud environments and I am sure that is making up a large margin of their sales (and have been for years). I think they are banking on dominating the multi-tenant server market with these designs and if consumer PCs follow suite with some convoluted virtualization mechanism in the years to come, that might leave them sitting pretty with a lot of disparate, fast cores ready to execute the work thrown at them. If not, and quad-core is all we ever really utilize, then Intel is going to dominate that arena as they have for the last decade.