Paul,
This is AMD's target market - the idle Server Market !
They should do just fine in that segment. Nobody will know that their SMP circuits don't work.
I don't think anything I said is in any way related to AMD. Just servers in general. And the silly benchmarks to measure tham. The TPC benchmarks are the silliest of all.
I don't know the exact ratio, but IMO, when it comes to database operations, the reads outnumber writes by a huge margin. The ratio may be as high as 99:1. I believe they are using 4:1 in TPC.
Most servers are not CPU limited, but I/O limited. The way you deal with I/O is by getting a ton of RAM. If your system is highly unusual (as the TPC benchmark) and you need write performance, a good disk subsystem is a good idea.
What makes the Xeon systems nice is the memory subsystem, not necessarily the Xeon itself. Many higher end systems have 8 to 16 banks for DIMMS (or older SIMMS), so you can load a ton of RAM. 16 banks of registered RAM with 128 MB chips, 32 chips per DIM can support 8 GB of RAM. Of course this matters if your dataset, or the portion of your data that needs fast access is this large. Most installations need far less than this.
Anyway, Memory and Disk I/O is one thng that you can use to sell servers. But you have to connect this server to a network, and this network itself will end up being the ultimate bottleneck. PC Week did some tests of web servers with transaction based tests, and their winner - Microsoft solution was so fast that it was limited by the Gigabit Ethernet network. There are very few web sites and internal LANS that have this much bandwidth.
Joe |
