Gotta love the Register with it's vulture logo. But I came across this headline, “Itanic sinks at Lloyds Register” and just had to laugh...

As most of you know, we have been proceeding to build out Sun Grid with a focus on Opteron based processors. What is becoming increasingly clear is that there is a cost of power - namely that power efficiencies will be a critical element of any utility offering. We really notice this when we try and power cycle quite a few racks (32 nodes x ~350W = ~11kW/rack) at the same time and recognize that instantaneous power-on spikes (booting every node at once) could cause us to blow circuits. In fact, where we used to pay “per circuit” for power, many of our co-lo partners are now moving to metered power just like we do at home. This really makes some sense because power in = heat out, which is really a recognition that though floor space is expensive, that power density is a very large contributing factor to overall cost.

This makes me double excited about our Niagra based processors which are expected to provide 8 cores at < 60W:

“Imagine the potential impact to IT operations: a single blade shelf designed to do the work of 32 of today's 4-way servers; eight rack units instead of 160; less than 3 kilowatts of power versus 38; one blade system to manage instead of 32 servers.”

and I haven't even started to talk about the relative balance in performance that Concurrent Multi-Threading (CMT) provides in beginning to address the growing gap in cpu clocking vs. memory latency in which traditional processor designs are frequently waiting for the data that they need to perform useful work to become available.

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