Jesper Frimann (jesperfrimann@gmail.com) on 8/20/08 wrote:
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>Tom W (twerges@hotmail.com) on 8/19/08 wrote:
>---------------------------
>And there have been Big iron x86 boxes around for a long
>time. But they generally are more expensive than their
>risc/EPIC counterparts in TCO.

Those big iron x86 boxes were not commodity boxes insofar as they required additional expensive hardware to allow pentium4 xeons to scale up to 32 processors. In the near future, however, nehalem will allow scaling up to 64 processors on commodity hardware. It seems possible that that would allow x86 boxes to be built which can scale up far enough, but which cost much less than their equivalent risc boxes, since the design cost per unit would be so much lower.

>>The reliability features of high-end risc boxes are not features of the instruction set.
>
>They are, now get into the game.

Are they? I remember learning assembly language for sparc and power when I was a student. I don't recall those architectures having instructions relevant to RAS. In fact most of the risc ISAs were developed for workstations and not for "big iron".

>And still if you compare the p570 to the x3950 with a x7460, then is a product with availability August 2007
>compared to one with availability of December 2008 the power6 based p570 is still 25% faster per socket
>and _FOUR_ times faster pr core.
>
>So the comparison is between a a future x86 product compared
>to a current RISC product. And the furture x86 product still
>gets creamed by a current RISC product.

I don't doubt that power and itanium currently enjoy an advantage on TPC/C and other benchmarks. Probably, they will enjoy that advantage well into the future. I'm not contesting that.

However, it appears to me that the time is coming when commodity x86 will be able to scale up far enough to meet almost everyone's needs. When that happens, I don't think so many people will be willing to pay the overhead imposed by architectures and instruction sets which have limited production runs and therefore have high design costs per unit. I realize that IBM gets around this issue to a large degree by using the same processor design in consoles.

The places I've worked recently, there has always been tremendous resistance to that single big box which had a different architecture and OS from all the other servers in the place. It was not solely a matter of upfront costs. It was also a matter of lock-in, need for different admins to adminster the big box, incompatibility, uncertainty about the future of the proprietary platform, etc.

Because of those things, I'd have to assume that many places would prefer not to use itanium or power if they thought x86 were seriously an option.

It seems possible to me, that once x86 overcomes it scalability problems, it may dominate the high end in the same way it dominated PCs, workstations, and low-end servers--and for the same reasons.

>I must admit that I don't get this euphoria and well the
>skadefryd/schadenfreude (danish/German word which means to
>rejoice in others misfortune) that people express as the
>x86 marked share rises.

You might be misreading my intentions. There are differences between recognizing an inevitability and being euphoric about it.

>And many are talking about the prospect of a server marked
>based solely on x86 as being a good thing.
>IMHO that would be a terrible thing, a return to the days
>where the IBM mainframe had monopoly, just with other
>players sitting on the monopoly.

I don't think we would return to the days of IBM mainframes, since there are so many manufacturers in the world which have licenses to make x86 chips. If we return to the days of monopoly, it will be because of the economics of chipmaking, which greatly favor larger players, and not because of intellectual property or lock-in.