This is a microserver, designed to connect up I/O bound resources to each other. Imagine a cache like Squid running on this thing. Imagine mulitiple RAID-0 SSD drives on one side, and 20Gbps going out through the network.
This is NOT a computationally difficult task. For computationally difficult tasks, you have 8-core $2000 E5 Xeons (which get more and more efficient the bigger the workload you have).
However, filling your datacenter with $2000 Xeons so that they can spend 0.01% of their CPU power copying data from SSD drives to the network is a waste of money and energy.
The A1100 looks like it will be a solution in the growing microserver space. As Facebook and Google scales, they have learned that a large subset of their datacenters are I/O bound and that they're grossly overspending on CPU power.
Big CPUs -> Big TDPs -> higher energy costs.
This machine is designed with big I/O throughput (multiple 10GbE and 8 SATA ports on-chip), with the barest minimum CPU possible to save on energy costs.
The upcoming competitors to this market are HP Moonshot (Intel Atoms), AMD Opteron A1100, and... that's about it. Calexda's Boston Viridis has died, so that is one less competitor in this niche.
This is a microserver, designed to connect up I/O bound resources to each other. Imagine a cache like Squid running on this thing. Imagine mulitiple RAID-0 SSD drives on one side, and 20Gbps going out through the network.
This is NOT a computationally difficult task. For computationally difficult tasks, you have 8-core $2000 E5 Xeons (which get more and more efficient the bigger the workload you have).
However, filling your datacenter with $2000 Xeons so that they can spend 0.01% of their CPU power copying data from SSD drives to the network is a waste of money and energy.
The A1100 looks like it will be a solution in the growing microserver space. As Facebook and Google scales, they have learned that a large subset of their datacenters are I/O bound and that they're grossly overspending on CPU power.
Big CPUs -> Big TDPs -> higher energy costs.
This machine is designed with big I/O throughput (multiple 10GbE and 8 SATA ports on-chip), with the barest minimum CPU possible to save on energy costs.
The upcoming competitors to this market are HP Moonshot (Intel Atoms), AMD Opteron A1100, and... that's about it. Calexda's Boston Viridis has died, so that is one less competitor in this niche.