
Tim, forgot one?
You know what looks like a good candidate CPU for this?
loongson 3c. 64bit mips, 2GHz. 16 cores. Seems to fit in the Watts per core envelope at least.
If SeaMicro has been "awash in business" as company founder, Andrew Feldman, tells El Reg it has been in the wake of last June's launch of the 512-core, 10U Atom-based SM10000 server, then the company had better batten down the hatches and prepare for the deluge. Because today SeaMicro is shipping the second generation of its …
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/02/25/ict_godson_3b_chip/
A complex metric, compute density. It's a balance of dollars, MIPS, Watts, cubic inches. Must not neglect storage and connectivity. Each customer has different needs. Manageability is key. There's a huge opportunity to become irrelevant here.
The X86 instruction set hasn't that much pull, but it has some. The folk who want this stuff own the source code for their apps. They would recompile them to work on an array of Xoom tablets if that was the best solution to their problems. But X86 has a huge legacy that does create some reluctance to shift.
Intel Atom needs to gain Imagination Technologies' SGX554MP16 to be a slam dunk in HPC and continue the line to stay there. Shoot, Intel should just buy Imagination Technologies and be done with it if they can get away with the antitrust issues. Can they be that bold?
Quad-core Atoms with 16-core IT graphics chipsets at 16nm could be the server win in 2013. TSV for 32GB of RAM in the SOC package, 16 CPUs with PCIe interconnect on the board and multiple Thunderbolt channels to the chassis.
In 2013 we'll need that for VDI, as the client side is going mobile.
And as long as I'm dreaming, somebody to sell the thing who has a freaking clue what the hell he's doing.
Yes I appreciate that - I was just puzzled by the comment "but he is very enthusiastic about the Atom family, particularly now that it runs 64-bit code," which makes it sounds as though this is a recent thing.
I built the file server when I needed it - I'd much rather have an even lower powered one.