Re: Re: Re: Re: Migration to Xserve is a reality, not a rumor.
Originally posted by thogs_cave
Look, don't get me wrong - it's a fine chip, and I love my Dual 2.0. (Well, in a platonic way.) But, just like Sun's UltraSPARC-IIIi .vs. the UltraSPARC-III, there is a target market intended. Features like sleep and bus slewing are good for desktops, but not necessary (or desired) in a hard-working server. I'm probably getting old and crusty, but to me a RISC server needs whopping amounts of cache fer starters...
Of course, I wouldn't turn down (and will probably soon be ordering) a G5 XServe. But to me it's a different beast then a large IBM or Sun system.
I guess one of the more interesting trends is that the concept of a "server" has changed quite a bit in the last 5-8 years. Until about 1997-1998, a "server" was typically a $20K+ computer that came in a 1/4 rack or larger enclosure. These "servers" had significantly different I/O systems than the average desktop workstation (wider, faster SCSI interfaces for disks, support for larger memory configurations, ECC, etc.), so even when they used processors similar to the desktop workstations (e.g. Sun Servers), the company that built the system could justify the increased price.
The computing model was based on SMP. Except for a very few high end machines from Cray & SGI that used scalable interconnects, the scale of the system was determined by how many processors you could put on a bus, bandwidth and electrical issues being the major constraints.
Also, most computer companies that built servers made sure they segmented the market and did not let their lower priced (lower margin) desktop workstation products eat into the sales of their higher priced (much higher margin) server products.
What happened starting from 1998 caused major changes to this situation:
1. Linux became a credible server operating system and managed to push basic x86 architectures into low-end and mid-range UNIX server applications at the expense of Sun, HP, etc.
2. Intel processors (PIII and P4) made tremendous performance gains and exceeded the previously top of the line solutions from Sun/HP/Compaq/IBM for small server performance.
3. During the Internet/Web craze, the need to build very large server farms very fast at a low cost lead to a number of companies that manufactured cheap 1U/2U servers that can be very efficiently stacked in racks and deliver exceptional price/performance for applications that can be mapped to a distributed compute environment.
As a result of these changes, there is a big shift in the industry to replace older, large, expensive SMP architectures with racks of inexpensive 1U/2U servers for many applications.
This forces even traditional server vendors like IBM to deal with the problem of delivering low cost, efficient, low priced servers to deal with the competition. Looks like Sun is pretty much going to go ahead with Opteron and IBM has developed the PPC970 for this application.
