[GTALUG] ARM and friends in datacenters

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 09:59:28AM -0500, David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
> There are two different cases to consider when doing data centers:
> 
>  * uniprocessors for individual tasks or trivially parallelizable ones
>  * multiprocessors for things that aren't parallelizable
> 
> Anybody can provide the first. The second is harder.
> 
> Mips had three MMUs, one of which was for each of the above cases and one
> was a trivial one for embedded, so 32-CPU Mips machines were available.
> 
> IBM and Sun spent lots of money designing backplanes that could support >=
> 32 sockets: Sun when so far as to license a Cray design when their in-house
> scheme failed to scale.
> 
> Until and unless chip vendors spend significant time and money on MMUs and
> backplanes, they won't have an offering in the second case, and will have
> chosen to limit themselves to a large but limited role in the datacentre.

Well at least for ARM, you have qualcomm and cavium offering 48 core
CPUs with two socket, so 96 cores in one machine.  That's not a bad start.

Now as to wether you can actually buy any of those stupid boxes unless
you are a clour provider or google or something, who knows.

Well it seems maybe you actually can:

https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-48-core-cavium-thunderx-arm-server-r270-t64.html
https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-48-core-cavium-thunderx-arm-server-r150-t62.html

-- 
Len Sorensen