SeaMicro Unveils 512 Atom-Based Server 183
1sockchuck writes "Stealthy startup SeaMicro has unveiled its new low-power server, which incorporates 512 Intel Atom CPUs, a load balancer and interconnection fabric into a 10u server. SeaMicro, which received a $9.3 million government grant from DOE to develop its technology, says its server uses less than 2 kilowatts of energy — suggesting that a single rack with four SeaMicro units and 2,048 CPUs could draw just 8 kilowatts of power. Check out the technical overview, plus additional coverage from Wired, GigaOm and VentureBeat."
Vitual center (Score:3, Funny)
Wow. Just think how many servers you could run in VMWare on that. A hundred would be a decent functional number.
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Re:Vitual center (Score:4, Informative)
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Thats funny cause I have a Intel D410 Mobo that runs a couple virtual box instances on top of FreeBSD.
Virtualization of the x86 existed before Intel added special support for it.
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You don't need hardware support for paravirtualization and paravirtualization will handle everything you listed. It won't let you run different OSes but there are plenty, potentially even a majority, of cases where that's not necessary.
Re:Vitual center (Score:4, Informative)
check your facts - the atom Z530 which they use does have VT-x. and people did virtualize before that , you know.
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check your facts - the atom Z530 which they use does have VT-x
Thank you, I was just going to say the same thing. In fact, the Z-series is the only Atoms with VT I can think of. On the other hand, it does not support 64-bit.
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Re:Vitual center (Score:5, Informative)
SMP will only bring you so far - i'll bet 8 VCPU VMs on Atoms will be beat by a 2 VCPU VM on a Core 2 Duo.
Perhaps not, depending on the other load the system is working on. Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice. If your task is CPU intensive and can be easily separated into distinct tasks not overly chatty (i.e. cross VM latency is not going to be a major issue) and the host has gobs of RAM available, you are often better off having several VMs with one cVPU each than one VM with several vCPUs. This may be much less of a problem on a many-CPU monster like the 512 core unit being discussed than it is on 2/4/8-core boxes, but I expect the balance to still be in favour of multiple single-vCPU VMs in cases where the task can be efficiently split between them.
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SMP will only bring you so far - i'll bet 8 VCPU VMs on Atoms will be beat by a 2 VCPU VM on a Core 2 Duo.
Perhaps not, depending on the other load the system is working on. Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice.
Not all virtualization systems have that limitation. In a modern VM, each VCPU gets scheduled separately on the physical CPUs, rather than using gang-scheduling, for exactly the reason you described. That way, if you have a pile of N-cpu VMs, each of which just has one or two CPUs waking up periodically rather than all doing intensive computation, they can all share relatively few hardware CPUs and run efficiently.
Re:Virtual center (Score:2)
Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice.
That is insane. I seriously doubt it applies to anything other than VMWare, however. No doubt the VMWare folks are working to remove whatever limitation possessed them to make such a ridiculous design as well.
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Not entirely true. Some of the Atoms have VT support and some have AMD64 support, but I don't think any have both.
http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?familyId=29035 [intel.com] (Doesn't show AMD64 support on the main page, but you can drill down to find 'em).
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Incorrect.
http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38 [seamicro.com]
"Processor Specification Intel Z530: 1.6GHz, Single Core, Dual Thread x86 Processor"
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=35463 [intel.com]
"Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) - Yes"
Re:Vitual center (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually it is much more interesting to handle each of them as you would handle an individual virtual machine - so you have 512 nice low-powered virtual servers with each of them having a fixed and dedicated processor.
In fact such a load-out would be very useful for hosting companies - you can have a ton of small clients with minimal management or scheduling burden.
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This server is an outstanding building block for a very eco-conscious VM system. Take one of these servers, then maybe 2-3 standard servers with very good performance, although they have a large energy footprint. Connect all of them to a SAN.
Now, have a script that runs that does the following:
7:30 AM (or before peak time), suspend the VM which is running on the Atom CPU server (with all the VM disk stuff being on the SAN.)
A standard, high performance, but yet energy-wasting server then grabs and restarts
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What's the "bang for the buck"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the "bang for the buck"? (Score:5, Informative)
The FLOPS are not all that important for this device. It isn't designed to crunch big numbers. It is designed as a web|web application server with the goal of serving far more connections per watt than a traditional server.
Re:What's the "bang for the buck"? (Score:4, Insightful)
System Specs (Score:5, Informative)
This is a good start- SM10000 System Overview [seamicro.com]
Interconnect is 1.28 Tbps or 2.5 Gbps per core.
I/O includes a minimum or 8 gige or 2 10-gige, which can be increased to 64 gige or 16 10-gige links per chassis.
This unit runs as 512 system images using stock 32 bit OS's. Each CPU may have 1 or 2 GB's of ram and up to 64 local drives may be installed and divided among the CPU's with the included management software. The unit supports PXE boot, so the system images may run off local disk or from a ram image.
Just to note, the Atom z530 is a single core, 32 bit only CPU, if that matters.
I couldn't tell you if the 16 10-gige links would seriously limit this box or not. You'd have to show me a data center with more than 160 Gbps of internet connectivity first. :) And that's assuming you only purchased one of these suckers, because you'd need that much per chassis.
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Hmmm, didn't see that. Given that it takes the place of two full racks, maybe you're supposed to put it on a pedestal in place of them.
Something like this [exhibitsusa.com] for easy access.
Or, maybe you could rotate it 90 degrees and mount it CPU-access-side up. At 10U that's only 15", so it should fit in a 19" rack. :-)
Seriously, if you don't plan to do hot swap on the CPU boards, you'd be OK in a normal rack. I'm not sure I'd trust hot swap for CPU boards anyways.
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If that's the case, Atom is a horrible choice for the CPU. Atom's strongest feature is its 128-bit vector (SSE) unit for SIMD FLOPS.
The in-order (albeit SMT-enabled), 2-issue integer/LDST/Conditional pipeline is lackluster at best from either a performance or a performance/watt standpoint.
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If that's the case, Atom is a horrible choice for the CPU. Atom's strongest feature is its 128-bit vector (SSE) unit for SIMD FLOPS.
But it's a poor choice for high-precision scientific calculations. The vector unit on the Atom is optimized for 32-bit Floats, and when you switch-up to Doubles, the performance drops off the map.
See this performance comparison (Processor Multimedia) [pcper.com]. The dual-core Atom 1.6 is actually faster than the dual-core Athlon 64 1.6 when running SSE 32-bit Floats (this is due to the
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But it's a poor choice for high-precision scientific calculations. The vector unit on the Atom is optimized for 32-bit Floats, and when you switch-up to Doubles, the performance drops off the map.
See this performance comparison (Processor Multimedia). The dual-core Atom 1.6 is actually faster than the dual-core Athlon 64 1.6 when running SSE 32-bit Floats (this is due to the dual 64-bit SSE units on the Athlon 64, and poor scheduling on AMD's part). But when you transition to Double precision, the performance on the Athlon 64 only drops by roughly 2x, whereas the Atom sees a 5-6x performance drop!
This means you have very little flexibility in workloads you can use - if you're not using 32-bit precision, you've wasted your money.
That was for x87 FP though. While it's important in that a lot of code out there might still use it, for performance on any Intel architecture, you're supposed to use SSE (scalar SSE if you're not doing SIMD). I would like to see SSE performance broken down to SP vs DP. I suspect, from what little I know of the vector pipeline, that it'd be pretty much exactly half the performance.
It's not so bad if you're running a highly-multithreaded program on the system. The Atom uses the SMT to great advantage, in most cases seeing a %30 performance increase. But yeah, for single-threaded code, the Atom is a joke.
Even for highly threaded programs, the performance/watt will not be competitive with (lightly) OoOE architectures. In-order is s
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That was for x87 FP though. While it's important in that a lot of code out there might still use it, for performance on any Intel architecture, you're supposed to use SSE (scalar SSE if you're not doing SIMD). I would like to see SSE performance broken down to SP vs DP. I suspect, from what little I know of the vector pipeline, that it'd be pretty much exactly half the performance.
No. The Multimedia benchmark in the Sandra suite is all SSE. See their FAQ here [sisoftware.net].
The following is their only Double test:
Q: Wha
Re:What's the "bang for the buck"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Then they screwed up, and they should have used ARMs, because a great deal of Atom's performance lies in its multimedia instruction set. Or in other words, if you're not pushing flops, you have a lot of hardware lying around unused. Atom delivers a lot of flops (or iops, for that matter) but doesn't shovel data any more efficiently than anyone else.
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Why exactly would you be doing real processing on a virtual machine?
If you need real processing power you don't put it on a VM, thats just dumb and wasteful.
Virtual machines are for testing and silly little one off instances of something that some department 'needed' on a 'server' that gets used by 3 people, twice a year, and thats only until next month when they've forgot about it completely.
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Why exactly would you be doing real processing on a virtual machine?
Because VMs are much, much nicer to manage than real hardware, if for no other reason than making the ideal one-service-per-server scenario less wasteful.
If you need real processing power you don't put it on a VM, thats just dumb and wasteful.
The overhead of modern virtualisation software on modern hardware is negligible (a couple of percent, if that, outside of corner-case workloads).
Virtual machines are for testing and silly little
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Re:What's the "bang for the buck"? (Score:5, Funny)
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of class-6 SD cards
plz link to class-6 SD card and reader that can meet it's bandwidth performance
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A hogshead'sfull of class-6 SD cards will be nice and zippy.
What's the conversion rate between hog'sheads and pints?
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(Things do get a little tricky because of how the packing of rectangular prisms in a cylindrical container works, so while 1 hogshead is 504 pints, 1 hogshead of SD cards is actually a fair bit more data storage than 504 pints of SD cards. Storage pedlars, of course, always insert "*1 hogshead = 504 pints" in tiny print somewhere on their packaging...)
Re:What's the "bang for the buck"? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. double precision. Use a double, and the Atom will grind to a halt.
2. division. Use rcp + mul instead.
3. sqrt. Same as division.
All of those produce unacceptable stalls, and annihilate your performance immediately. So don't use them!
Now, you'd imagine those are insurmountable, but you'd be wrong. If you use the Intel compiler, restrict yourself to float or int based SSE instuctions only, avoid the list of things that kill performance, and make extreme use of OpenMP, they really can start punching above their weight. Sure they'll never come close to an i7, but they aren't *that* bad if you tune your code carefully. Infact, the biggest problem I've found with my Atom330 system is not the CPU itself, but good old fashioned memory bandwidth. The memory bandwidth appears to be about half that of Core2 (which makes sense since it doesn't support dual channel memory), and for most people that will cripple the performance long before the CPU runs out of grunt.
The biggest problem with them right now is that they are so different architecturally from any other x86/x64 CPU that all apps need to be re-compiled with relevant compiler switches for them. Code optimised for a Core2 or i7 performs terribly on the atom.
Am I the only one who.... (Score:5, Funny)
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I want my server out of 512 actual atoms! *waaaahhhh*
P.S.: I bet a ARM-based server would beat the crap out of that (TFA) thing on the price/performance and price/energy scales
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When I first read the headline I thought "Wow--someone's just commercialized quantum computing!"
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That would sure save rack space... (Score:2)
Imagine how may of these servers you could fit in the space of even a single grain of rice, let alone a standard 1U enclosure!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
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It would seem that the 'beowulf cluster' is starting to fall out of style, doesn't it? :P We're getting to the point where such concepts are as quaint as a "Cray supercomputer" were just a couple years ago.
Re:Imagine a beowulf cluster of... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I dunno, Beowulf is my favorite mythical hero, what are we going to replace him with, Hector? Imagine a Hector Cluster of those? It just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Hercules Cluster maybe? I dunno.
An Achilles Cluster simply does not convey the impression you want to give in your computing environment, no matter how spectacular Achilles was.
Calling it a "cloud" is too ephemeral, could we call it "the horde" instead?
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More like imagine a cloud of those ;)
For their next trick (Score:5, Funny)
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What does a normal rack consume? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What does a normal rack consume? (Score:4, Informative)
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So, since this is an 8U at 8000W, it consumes rather a lot MORE power than 8 1U machines. At least twice as much if going with 500W.
So, not countin
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So, since this is an 8U at 8000W, it consumes rather a lot MORE power than 8 1U machines. At least twice as much if going with 500W.
So, not counting the potential cooling problems, to be competitive in performance-per-watts, it would have to provide more than the power of 16 1U dual-quad-core machines, or 128 Xeon cores.
Of that, I have my doubts.
Eh, fail. It's 8000W for all 42U (presuming you put 4 2000W chassis in there).
And as an aside to the first number thrown out (300 to 500w/u) that's a little high since most servers with a 500w nameplate will, at full load, only run in the 350-400w range, and that's atypical since most servers don't spend much time at 100% usage except in rare, specific applications. Building for 20KW/rack (or beyond) is on the high end right now, with most data centers still OK with 5-10KW/rack.
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72Us of fully loaded blade chassis, fully kittted out, might draw as much as the rack above, just spinning its cooling fans...
Re:What does a normal rack consume? (Score:5, Interesting)
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And, how parallel is your workload.
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I don't know if 8 kW is a lot or a little less than a normal rack would draw.
how much power would a "normal" rack consume?
Well, just as a first guess, knowing nothing about computers, you could have estimated that you can wedge several floor mounted electrical baseboard heaters into the physical space of a rack, and the servers would (probably) be running 24x7 unlike the baseboard heaters. Keeping those baseboard heaters ventilated and air conditioned is going to be moderately challenging, but doable given a reasonable budget.
So, knowing that its marketed as a "savings" so 8 kw is going to be less than average and that an ord
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8kW for a normal rack is a LOT! ;)
The ones I know consume one bra, a bag of bird seed, and one to two men a week.
Operating system not mentioned? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or it's only me who can't find it?
"No changes to software" or something like that.... And only tons of RFC* and "funny acronyms"... What software needs no change?
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I couldn't find the phrase "no changes to software" in TFA (no mention even of "software" in fact), but I'm guessing it would mean that since it is still an x86 based system that you can achieve power saving benefits while using any current x86 OSes, rather than say have to rewrite/recompile stuff to run on ARM processors.
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Well, I guess I was more thinking of Linux distributions and software that are already designed for massively multicore systems, but on top of that OS you could run many Windows x86 virtual servers..
Low power, really? (Score:3, Interesting)
In all of the benchmarks that I've seen, clock for clock a Core 2 gets about twice the score of an Atom, sometimes more. The Core 2 uses a bit more than twice as much power, but if you have two Atoms you also need twice as many north-bridge chips and this pushes the power usage up to over what the Core 2 will consume. The newer Xeons do even better.
The first benchmark results I found that compared the two were PassMark benchmarks, where a 2GHz Atom scored 386 and a Intel Xeon X5680 at 3.33GHz scored 10620. The fastest Atom, the D510 at 1.66GHz, scored 662. Even if your code scales linearly, you need more than 16 of the fastest Atom that you can buy to replace one Xeon. Or, to put it another way, this 512-Atom machine is about as powerful as a 32-CPU Xeon.
A single Atom D520 draws around 13W, so 16 of them draw 208W. The Xeon will draw 130W. Drawing under 2KW for 512 Atoms means that they probably aren't using the fastest available ones. Actually, it means that they're drawing under 4W per Atom, which means that they're probably using Z-series Atoms, getting about half the performance of the D-series ones, so you'd only need about 16 Xeons for the same performance.
For most workloads, if the server is not busy, you'll get much better power usage from the Xeon as well. Power usage drops off dramatically when the CPU is not 100% busy. Unless you are turning individual atoms off completely, you can't scale back power usage nearly as well with the Atoms, as single processes that would not be CPU-bound on the Xeon will require an Atom core to run at full speed.
In other words, it sounds a lot more like greenwashing than anything that's actually sensible.
Re:Low power, really? (Score:5, Informative)
Considering how many articles were linked I don't know if you rtfa'd or not.
The Core 2 uses a bit more than twice as much power, but if you have two Atoms you also need twice as many north-bridge chips and this pushes the power usage up to over what the Core 2 will consume.
This is from the wired article.
Just changing the CPU to a low power chip, though, isn't enough says SeaMicro. The trick lies in creating a new architecture that can pull all the chips together and manage their power requirements.
"If you just replace the chips in a traditional server with Atom processors, the power consumption actually goes up," says Feldman.
Integrating features such as storage, networking and server management into a single ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) helps manage power better, says the company. It has also virtualized the CPU input-output so those modules that would have otherwise occupied space on a board and consumed power don't anymore.
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Also from the Wired article.
The Atom-based servers target a few specific tasks performed by data centers. In the past, servers were largely used to solve a small number of complex data-based problems, says Feldman. But the internet changed this. In the internet-focused data center, the challenge is to handle millions of small tasks such as searching, mapping and viewing pages quickly, and to do this in a way that can handle unpredictable bursts of traffic.
They are going for mass IO not computing power.
Here is the link again. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/seamicro-server-intel-atom/ [wired.com]
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For performance I would wonder how this would have worked with say Cortex A9 cores instead of Atom D520s.
Also you really might have done even better with Opterons.
So I must ask why this over Operons, Xeons, or Arm?
Why not ARM? (Score:2)
So I must ask why this over Operons, Xeons, or Arm?
That was my first thought too. Considering some of the benchmarks that show ARM performance per watt that crushes the Atom. But according to the Wired article:
Though SeaMicro has used Atom processors for its chipset, the company says it has designed its architecture to be flexible and support any CPU. So any low-power chip included that from ARM, which runs on most smartphones today, can become a part of SeaMicro’s system. But Atom remains the best choice for now, says Feldman. ARM processors used in cellphones consume much lower power than an Atom chip but they also cannot deliver the same kind of computing performance, he claims.
So they say their system can handle it but they don't think ARM's have enough performance. I'd tend to doubt that and instead bet that they just haven't built their custom chip to handle the ARM yet. If they did, they could take advantage of ARM's extensive hardware power saving features. I would think it would be much cheaper too since you could have
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Because you are thinking serial while they are thinking parallel.
How many simultaneous operations can do 512 atoms VS. say total 128 Xeon cores?
What happens when single operation is extremely small, but there are extremely high volume of them?
What happens to a CPU core while it's waiting for RAM or other I/O? Yea, that's right: It waits.
What happens to memory IOPS when you have 512 channels versus 128 dual-channels? Yup, it's vastly higher, but not actually just twice, but quadruple (dual channel is for dua
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Well then again it the ops are very small they may all fit in cache on the Xeon.
Yes having more cpus may actually have a higher performance but then how would say 2048 Cortex A9s do then? Of course you will have to use Linux on the Arm CPUS but then for a server that isn't usually an issue.
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According to the wired article they use a custom chip set.
From the article
“If you just replace the chips in a traditional server with Atom processors, the power consumption actually goes up,” says Feldman.
Integrating features such as storage, networking and server management into a single ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) helps manage power better, says the company. It has also virtualized the CPU input-output so those modules that would have otherwise occupied space on a board and
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For most workloads, if the server is not busy, you'll get much better power usage from the Xeon as well.
Not really. Look at the idle power numbers on a Xeon compared to an Atom. One of the things about low power (and low-clocking) chips is that leakage is orders of magnitude less. Atom not only runs on a lower-leakage process, it also runs at a lower voltage than Xeons. So while dynamic power-per-unit-work may not be competitive in aggregate, idle power is not even close.
Other options (in 10U, 240 opteron cores can fit) (Score:3, Informative)
SeaMicro: 512 Atom processors in 10U rack
Dell PowerEdge R815: 4 Opteron processors, each one up to 12 cores, in 2U rack. In a 10U you can include 5 of these servers, which will bring 4 x 12 x 5 = 240 Opteron cores
More info here [dell.com]
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No it isn’t. Because as a poster above mentioned, and as we all should know by now, Atom is a power consumption scam and is designed as one.
When you look at an Atom mainboard, what you think is the CPU, because of the cooler, is the north bridge. And what you think is the north bridge, because of its smallness, is the Atom CPU.
They simply shifted features to the north bridge, so they could trick you into believing the whole system would be more efficient, by giving you small consumption numbers for th
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Re:Other options (in 10U, 240 opteron cores can fi (Score:4, Informative)
The Atom can be paired with other northbridge chips, notably Nvidia's ION. If part of the CPU was in the 945 chip as you claim this would be impossible.
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While "shifting features" is indeed not accurate, the point stands. Compared to ARM (or even Athlon and Nehalem/Lynnfield processors), Atom (prior to Pinetrail and Moorestown) was less integrated. So to compare power numbers, you can't just look at the CPU itself but need to include the memory controller (when compared to Athlon and Nehalem/Lynnfield) and PCI-E controller (when compared to Nehalem/Lynnfield). When compared to most ARM SoC's, you'll need to include graphics, miscellaneous I/O, GPS, video pro
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Score:5, Bullshit
The CPU is a full-fledged CPU. The Northbridge, as others have pointed out, is simply old.
Stop lying, and get a grip. It's painful to read posts like yours. The level of whining is simply staggering.
Atom vs GPGPU? (Score:2)
I think the main point here is trying to make a server that can do many non-intensive parallel computations. But then when I look at a GPGPU (such as the Tesla c2050), you can get the same type of performance using a 2kW server in 3U (which I have here). The Atom is ~3GFLOPS per processor making this cluster ~1500GFLOPS strong. A single C2050 has ~500GFLOPS and you can load 4 of them in a single server. nVidia's S2050 has that performance in a single U.
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Except that you have to rewrite you application completely to be able to use the GPGPU. And it will be impossible for most applications.
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Atom has a TDP of ~2W and I would speculate a maximum power consumption of ~4W. A C2050 has a maximum power consumption of 247W. For the same power bugdet as a C2050, you can use 60 Atoms each with its own pocket of memory and condition code handlers.
Who else expected... (Score:2)
following the recent single-atom transistor development, an actual simple CPU that is built from 512 atoms of various elements?
Hexagonal venting grills (Score:2)
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Am I the Only One... (Score:2)
The scope of atomic manipulation recently could really get this crazy.
Poor man's Niagra/CMT? (Score:2)
convergence at computing's highest & lowest en (Score:2)
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No. Only Windows Server DataCenter editions support this number of CPU's.. they don't include DirectX in DataCenter edition. In fact, only "signed hardware" will install. So getting you fancy video card, or Soundblaster 64 to work on it would be impossible.
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No. Only Windows Server DataCenter editions support this number of CPU's.. they don't include DirectX in DataCenter edition. In fact, only "signed hardware" will install. So getting you fancy video card, or Soundblaster 64 to work on it would be impossible.
I am pretty sure that that is only true if you are limiting yourself to Microsoft operating systems. There are plenty of linux BSD and unix OS's that can handle huge numbers of processors.
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Well, I figured if they were asking about Duke Nukem, their technology savvy would be limited. Of course many OS's could run on it, although process scheduling would be interesting to see..
I was attempting to give a smart ass answer, to a smart ass question.
PS, yes, I can imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. In fact, I think that's kind of the point...
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Yes, but everyone knows Duke Nukem Forever hasn't been ported to Linux, BSD or any other of the Unix OS's yet. They'll probably try to get it running on OSX first anyway.
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1999 called and wants its meme back.
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To be fair, they are very close to the same thing - 1 watt for 1 second = 1 joule. Watts are the flow rate of energy, while joules or watt hours or whathaveyou are the total measure of the energy.
Honestly I'd say 8 kW of energy is fine as long as you know what a watt actually is, though it is a semantic no-no, because it will confuse someone who doesn't know better.