intel vs amd ?
How about Intel vs Intel? or AMD vs AMD? They change sockets pretty regularly. I haven't paid too close attention to CPU sockets since the Socket 7 days when things really were cross compatible. I suppose these CPU engineers aren't thinking forward enough to put enough pins or whatever to take into account future connection points. It would be nice if we could have a common socket to be sure.
But even if we do get it, how many will actually use it ? I think surveys have shown that at least enterprise customers almost never upgrade the CPUs on their servers. I remember a spat I had with HP many years ago on the DL380G5, I had purchased it with dual socket dual core for Oracle Enterprise Edition - which was licensed per-core. The dual core procs had the highest clock speeds. The DL380G5 was advertised as a quad core capable system (we had other 380G5s that were quad core but just not running Oracle). Then we went to Oracle Standard Edition which is licensed per socket. So I wanted to move to Quad core.
I expected to just be able to drop a quad core CPU into the system but it didn't work. I even had HP support do it themselves I didn't want to fry the system. They couldn't get it working, after about an hour of escalations they finally figured out the specific motherboard I had was not quad core compatible (even though the socket was the same). Had to switch out the MB - so we did (the savings of Oracle easily made up for these costs). Slight drop in performance (2xdual core to 1xquad core that was clocked at a lower frequency), but massive cut in license fees.
I checked a couple years later and HP had updated their spec sheets saying some models are not quad core capable.
"NOTE: Future upgradeable to Xeon® Series 5400/5300 Quad-Core processors (Please contact your
regional sales support to determine quad core upgradeability. Some of the earlier shipping models may
not support this upgrade)"
what a pain! but in the end it was worth it.
Myself I don't see these facebook things taking off in anything other than service provider types - perhaps rackspace and the like. Rest of the world will be 19" for some time to come, having an extra 3.5" disk just isn't adequate justification for breaking compatibility - especially when storage companies have come out with innovative designs that put disks deep within the chassis and still maintain hot swap ability(3PAR has been doing it for about a decade other more recent designs are much more dense though), it's good enough.