Mike, there is not anything specifically magic about 8-way servers vs. 4-way. It's just that the 8-way will be that much more powerful, and can, in one footprint, or image, run heavy duty jobs such as transaction processing, faster than a 4-way can (some numbers that I saw today, maybe 70% faster?). From some of the benchmarks, it does look like 8-ways are getting powerful enough to be challenging Unix mid-range machines, and the Intel based should be much cheaper, so we should eat into that business some. The other big deal is that now, there is 8-way supporting chipset hardware that is all Intel (Profusion). There have been some prior 8-way implementations on non-Intel chipset, or glue hardware, but server manufacturers appear to have not wanted to go with those. Compaq's announced 8-way "node" is in a nice tight package, what is called 7U high. U is an international dimension standard, = 1.75 inches. 7U is 12.25 inches, and the rest of the dimensions are width to fit in a 21" rack, and depth about the same as the width, I'm guessing. So, you get 8 Xeons with memory, drives (redundant too), PCIs, power suppy, fans, etc. a full blown 8-way computer in a 12x21x21 inch rack. That is a big deal.
Have to run, someone else want to add, pick up the Merced part?
Tony |
