ARM is going to make an effort but Microsoft & Facebook have both said their going with Intel multi-core Atom clusters. Bobcat APUs are even better than Atom. So ARM isn't going to have much to offer vs Intel & AMD.
Also, I think the whole idea of super-dense servers have just started to take off, and imho AMD is better positioned to take advantage of this than ARM is -- though ARM certainly looks like it is going to make a serious effort.
ARM is going to make an effort but Microsoft & Facebook have both said their going with Intel multi-core Atom clusters. Bobcat APUs are even better than Atom. So ARM isn't going to have much to offer vs Intel & AMD.
According to JFAMD's blog, he said that Bulldozer will be better perf/watt than Bobcat would be in a server environment. I agree that ARM isn't going to have much to offer, but if Microsoft and Facebook are really considering Atom clusters, I'd say they are potential BD customers. Or at least should be.
1. Virtualization is not "licensed off cores", do you have some proof of this?
2. Administration happens at the platform level and HP to HP or Dell to Dell is the major consideration. You *generally* cannot do live migration between Intel and AMD because the processor architectures are different, however:
A. Most customers don't migrate VMs. They treat VMs like servers, they want to touch them when they start them up for the first time and then when they take them out of service.
B. When they do actually migrate VMs they tend to schedule that work for off hours when nobody is there. You can suspend a VM and move it from one server to another and turn it on relatively quickly. When you do a live migration it can take minutes or hours depending on network traffic. To do a live migration you need shared, pooled storage as well.
C. Most people have "virtualization clusters", one for accounting, one for email, one for engineering, etc. If they are going to migrate VMs they can do it amongst the clusters, but you typically don't see the engineering guys or the accounting guys wanting to share. In this world, having a pool of Intel of engineering and a pool of AMD for accounting is perfectly reasonable.
According to JFAMD's blog, he said that Bulldozer will be better perf/watt than Bobcat would be in a server environment. I agree that ARM isn't going to have much to offer, but if Microsoft and Facebook are really considering Atom clusters, I'd say they are potential BD customers. Or at least should be.
They shouldn't be treating them like servers.....
Why would you not use resource pools instead of independent clusters???
All I'm saying is that if AMD wants to enter the market and take a chunk, they need to first allow seamless integration of AMD processors into exisiting VM enviornments without special configurations. Dismming and downplaying virtualization benefits to make a product fit a segment probably isn't going to yield marketshare. On top of that, AMD need to work hard with Dell, HP, Cisco to have AMD reps working with account managers and reselling partners to push the product. I can't recall the last AMD area rep I ran into.
I can't recall the last AMD area rep I ran into.
3. Since we don't own the hypervisor, it's not that easy. We've already done demos of VMs moving from intel to AMD and in the future it will be a lot easier. That is all I can say.
BD strong points: looks awesome, sweet black socket.
BD weak points: not on the market yet.
For 10+ years I've bought only AMD CPUs (mid-range, not a gamer), and never had any issues whatsoever, no high temperatures, blah.
Very satisfied. I also tend to use only ASUS, avoid ECS and el cheapos. Just trying to do my part to foster competition.
Without AMD's competitive pressue, what would an Intel CPU cost?
Want more monopolies?
In all likelihood, it will have better perf/Watt on desktops, too. It's the total wattage and cost that makes Atoms and Bobcat's attractive, not the performance per watt under load. If you underclock the desktop CPUs sufficiently, they don't cost AMD or Intel any less, and so won't cost you any less, either (ULV and EE CPUs, FI).According to JFAMD's blog, he said that Bulldozer will be better perf/watt than Bobcat would be in a server environment. I agree that ARM isn't going to have much to offer, but if Microsoft and Facebook are really considering Atom clusters, I'd say they are potential BD customers. Or at least should be.
I wonder how they will be implemented, and received, in terms of RAS, as well. RAS to the level of current Xeons is overkill for most (Intel likely plans to begin phasing out Itanium, or mixing x86 and IA64 in high-reliability environments, IMO), but error checking and logging, if not correction, on caches, RAM, and buses, would be a must, if I were specifying servers, especially now that Google's study found most errors to occur during transmit. I could see this not being thoroughly implemented turning enthusiasm into a big fat, "no," for Atom, Bobcat, and/or ARM servers.(ed: the above podspi quote was quoted by Dark Shroud, here)
I haven't followed that Blog. The big push for the use of Atom cores is the decreased cooling requirements. So it comes down to how much heat Bulldozer chips will produce vs the cooling they'll need. Either way AMD has all their bases covered in the server market.
While it would be great if they played nice, it is very common for migration between physical servers to be used only as an availability/restoration mechanism only. When not hosting VMs for others, load balancing is easy to ignore: building a server with greater specs than you need right now can be cheaper than upgrading it in the future, and is almost always cheaper than adding a server, later. As software licenses come to take so much of the cost, hundreds, or even a couple thousand, dollars on more RAM, faster storage, beefier CPUs, etc., allow consolidated servers to be assigned all they will need for their lifetime, and only share any meaningful IO when dealing with nonvolatile storage, with minimal or no overallocation of CPU and RAM resources. If you need more than one Windows Server license, this can be true down to <$2000 servers. In addition, the virtuals tend to get software upgrades about the same time as the server they rest in gets replaced with new hardware, so it's more like having 10 dedicated servers in a single 1-4U box (or two boxes, if a SAN is used for primary storage), than it is having an arbitrary set of computing and storage resources.They shouldn't be treating them like servers.....VMware will do auto load balancing and use live migration for it. Live migration is great for maintainence of a physical server during work hours. The inability to live migrate between Intel and AMD is a knock against AMD. Intel has the market. AMD is trying to get more of it. You need to work with the various hypervisors to make a mixed enviorment play nice.