<How much is such a system going to cost, and how many processors will it have? Compaq's new 8-way Xeon Profusion server is going for $85K.>
Probably a lot more than that. But the question might
be posed today.. how has Sun's UE10000 sales been affected
by 4-way Xeons, how will their sales be affected by 8-way
Xeons? Similarly, how does Celeron affect Xeon sales?
Different segments.
So where is WildFire's segment? Why Mr. Barrett pointed
that out in the growth of the Internet. Wildfire, Sun
UE10000s, HP V2500, SGI Origin are machines for this
growth. Compaq isn't forthcoming with all the technical
details about Wildfire but The Register got their hands
on a presentation and you can find slides there by searching
on Wildfire.
But to come down into that segment you describe (sub
100K) will no doubt require the 21364. Read of a 4-CPU
21364 server in the planning stages. Very cost effective
because of the point-to-point nature of the CPUs obviating
the need to expensive chipsets and providing astounding
bandwidth...
<And Merced is also "glueless SMP," although the memory controller is on the chipset, not on the processor die like the Alpha 21364.>
What about CPU to CPU?, the 21364 folks call this a
"network" connection CPU to CPU and also on die allowing
for 12 GByte/sec CPU<->CPU.
As for 21364 "giving Merced a real challenge", shoot... the
21264 will more than do that. Why just the other day
an Alpha OEM posted the following:
"Keep in mind that 1.5 GHz copper-SOI EV68 21264 to be shipped in systems in Q3 2000 will reach around 90
SPECint95 and 150 SPECfp95 when combined with 8 MB 1 GHz DDR-SRAM L3 cache"
Shaping up to be a horse race? Sure.. Alpha versus
other slower Alphas (1.2 GHz copper, etc.)
Realize that if Samsung and IBM deliver on time (IBM
is already sampling copper Alphas for Compaq), the slowest
Alpha will be faster than Merced.
Rob |
