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Trends
There are several trends going on which influence the position of 4-way and 8-way servers. On one side there’s consolidation and virtualization. The first term involves running multiple applications on a single system, to save space, power and cost. Virtualization is a powerful tool for this, since it allows administrators to partition a physical machine into multiple virtual machines. This reduces the difficulties and risks usually associated with the coexistence of several types of software on a system. If companies were to bring fat machines to bear for the replacement of large numbers of smaller ones, the heavy-duty segment could grow further. IDC’s most recent figures show that the growth of cheap servers stagnated in the last quarter of 2006, but of course a single quarter does not make for a trend.
Meanwhile, the competition on the other side is not resting: blade servers offer high density and reliability thanks to cheap redundancy. Moreover, they can be clustered in case heavy duty calls. Many companies are interested in the so-called 'Google model', where hardware is merely a building block that can be added or removed as desired. In this model, heavy and expensive machines with four or eight cores are uncalled for. Oddly enough, virtualization can be handy for this sort of application, since a virtual machine doesn't care about the physical hardware, even if it changes from one moment to the next.
Another factor that can make the heavier systems less attractive is the growth of the number of cores per socket. Two years ago both the Opteron and the Xeon were single-core, but no-one would be surprised if there would be chips with eight cores by 2010. There are two ways of looking at this: one is to see it as simply the next method to increase CPU performance, on a par with bigger caches and higher clock speed. The other perspective is that the whole multicore business is going to get seriously crippled by software limitations, weakening demand for more sockets. We can ignore whether this happens at 16, 32, 64 or 128 cores, but if there is a practical limit not far from two sockets, demand for heavier systems would decrease.
Which of the factors mentioned is the strongest, is not important for the short term: the server market is a slow colossus worth about 50 billion dollars. Whichever way it moves, everyone in the business has plenty of time to respond. It is certain that this type of machine will be in reasonable demand for the next five years, so let's take a look at what such a beast can achieve.
Meanwhile, the competition on the other side is not resting: blade servers offer high density and reliability thanks to cheap redundancy. Moreover, they can be clustered in case heavy duty calls. Many companies are interested in the so-called 'Google model', where hardware is merely a building block that can be added or removed as desired. In this model, heavy and expensive machines with four or eight cores are uncalled for. Oddly enough, virtualization can be handy for this sort of application, since a virtual machine doesn't care about the physical hardware, even if it changes from one moment to the next.
Another factor that can make the heavier systems less attractive is the growth of the number of cores per socket. Two years ago both the Opteron and the Xeon were single-core, but no-one would be surprised if there would be chips with eight cores by 2010. There are two ways of looking at this: one is to see it as simply the next method to increase CPU performance, on a par with bigger caches and higher clock speed. The other perspective is that the whole multicore business is going to get seriously crippled by software limitations, weakening demand for more sockets. We can ignore whether this happens at 16, 32, 64 or 128 cores, but if there is a practical limit not far from two sockets, demand for heavier systems would decrease.
Which of the factors mentioned is the strongest, is not important for the short term: the server market is a slow colossus worth about 50 billion dollars. Whichever way it moves, everyone in the business has plenty of time to respond. It is certain that this type of machine will be in reasonable demand for the next five years, so let's take a look at what such a beast can achieve.
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