Itanium--one step forward, one back

specialised chips for servers on the way out: It always seemed to me that having specialised
high speed chips for servers was a bad play, as
the fundamental nature of silicon chips is that
technology and cost (yield essentially)
improvement tracked volume of manufacture.
Bladed servers using similar chips to desktops
are probably going to be the flavour of the month
for most applications.
In future I see a large monolithic supercomputer
will continue to have roles, but in shrinking
areas.
The technology that has brought about the demise
of the Server custom chip has been in my view the
development and finessing of SMP / Cluster
SOFTWARE. This includes ubiquity of high speed
storage solutions like striped arrays, larger and
large caches etc.
Having said that, I think the move to Linux has
grown the chances for RISCs in the marketplace.
The Power/PowerPC range is doing rather well
indeed now. (Playstation3, XBOX2, Apple ...).
The X86 architecture is pretty lousy when you try
to write stuff like doing bit work on Floating
point results. Shunt it off into memory, shunt it
back etc etc.
Also, hardware video codecs would be a very nice
thing (AMD are I think adding this to their
chipsets).; Posted by: hipparchus2000 Posted on: 01/06/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use