• The Chip Wars and The Data Center

    June 5th, 2007 : Rich Miller

    CIO magazine looks at the “chip wars” between AMD and Intel through the prism of the data center, interviewing five industry executives about their take on the competing chips and how they are used in their facilities. Contributors include IDC’s Shane Rau, Todd Abrams of dedicated hosting specialist Layered Technologies, Peter Jarvis of online gaming company NCSoft (Lineage, City of Heroes), Bruce Taylor of the Uptime Institute and Donald Becker of Penguin Computing (the co-inventor of the Beowulf Linux cluster). The consensus: we’ll see plenty of both chips in data centers for some time to come.

Ekorn

Posted June 6th, 2007

It is interesting that the chips are getting so much play. Sure lower power, higher performance chips are important, but according to a podcast I just heard, the chip only represents less that 5 percent of the power consumer in a datacenter. WHere the real power savings are going to come from is in advances in the software layer (e.g. virtualuzation and automated power management tools) and in things like datacenter design, modular cooling, etc.

I found this podcast particularly interesting because it gives the right factoids.

http://i.dell.com/images/global/vlog/quicktime/ent_innovat_pt_kettler.mp3

Ekorn

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