[Info-vax] Moonshot

[Matthew H McKenzie]

This would be the direction most of the big players are going in.  The AWS 
EC2 "C4" instances are running "bespoke" haswell CPU's.

i.e they are a custom order and sold in volume to a single customer.

- One bus replaces all PSU's,  these are not so much blades but board level 
servers. You need the chassis to run them.
- Ultimately they will be maintained by robots, by pull and swap.
- External storage is drifting towards similar arrangements with large raid 
arrays of SSD's hot swapped like reactor control rods.
- Still attractive to the MaaS enterprise (nothing beats being in the same 
room as your hardware).

The scale is there, and the economies are obvious for power consumption and 
real estate.

How moonshot would work for parallel processing has yet to be seen, but I 
expect they would scale like leds on a bar graph display.
(IBM- aware readers might think of CICSPLEX regions rolling in on demand.)

ARM has smarts for specific functions too (mod, for instance ?)
They must be as good as Prestonia era servers, without the weight, heat, 
noise, and power draw..

So really, web sites would not really have to be static, just not too 
ambitious. Groupware for SME's.

Any work that can be broken into work units, well the CPU's could be changed 
to application specific dies for crypto currency say, or folding/SETI.


"Stephen Hoffman" <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote in message 
news:m0k8he$bcd$1 at dont-email.me...
> On 2014-10-02 18:43:07 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:
>
>> Hoff wrote:
>> "Moonshot is good for some tasks, such as serving static web content, 
>> maybe even mucking about with video transcoding (though I'd be looking at 
>> GPUs there, too), and such."
>>
>> Patience, young man.
>
> I'm aware of the (published) cartridge plans here, having sat in more than 
> a few HP presentations on this and related topics.
>
>
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC
>