Reply to post: Re: I fear that too much shiny is taking a toll on some people's attention span.

Re: I fear that too much shiny is taking a toll on some people's attention span.

"When all you have is a hammer"

There is always more than one way to solve a task. In your example, one way is what you do: throw a "bigger" computer at the problem. Another approach is throw "more computers" at the problem.

The latter is what "supercomputers" do, for the very practical reason you just can't build a "very big" computer that can compete. It is also what "cloud computing" does - it runs on a lot of "smaller" computers.

Until now, the tools they have were power hungry Intel CPUs and let's not give them too much slack, not many years ago an entry level Intel "server" could not have more than 32GB RAM (while a cheaper AMD server you could fit with say 512GB). We also had ARM server chips, trying to emulate what the Intel chips were doing and trying to compete on cost (less profit).

Now Apple has demonstrated that high performance, high-integration SoC can be done.

SoCs are not now. Pretty much all microcontrollers around are of this kind. There are microcontrollers with wildly warying amounts of RAM/FLASH, I/O and CPU cores etc. Every one highly optimized for it's task. We take this for granted in the embedded world.

So what Apple have demonstrated is you can have the same choice in the "desktop" and likely soon in the "server" world.

Remember, once upon a time, the cache SRAM was a separate part you could replace in a DIMM slot. Today nobody argues that cache SRAM should be user replaceable, because having it integrated in the processor provides so much benefits and resolves so many issues.

Now back to your SAP example. I am sure whoever writes SAP code might one day experiment on an "server" that instead of two-socket 28-core Xeons and 512 GB of RAM uses say a 8-socket 16-core 64GB RAM each (same 512GB RAM) M1-like SoCs, with fast interconnects (we haven't see this yet as there is no use for it in a notebook). With a total power consumption (SoCs with integrated RAM) of say 100W.

Do you think you will prefer such server to your current one?