While we are all well-behaved boys and girls, patiently waiting for an onslaught of Via Nano-based netbooks and low-cost laptops so we can give the, well, you know, to Intel and AMD, those sneaky people over at Dell have unveiled an entirely different type of computer using the Nano platform: a server.
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Member since:
2006-01-19
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2009-04-15
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2006-10-11
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2007-07-10
Would love to see some specifications, and price.
What's the price for 5 of these (ie, 60 "servers") compared to say, HP's or IBM's bladecenters (they're often 9-11U and contains some 14 quad-core servers). Then, what's the price of running these at full go for a year? How many mflops/cent over a years time?
Where is this product interesting? Just for web servers and the like, or for heavy compute farms too?
Member since:2005-09-03
This move is targeted at organizations that need many isolated environments like web hosting sites (see the inquirer article). Because of this the metric you suggested, mflops/cent/yr is probably not appropriate.
Perhaps transactions/watt/cent would be better?
Another interesting idea would be encryption. These VIA Nano processors are the only x86 CPUs (besides the earlier VIA C7) with built in encryption instructions.
If you needed to encrypt a lot of data on the fly this would rock. When it comes to encryption a Nano at 1.8 GHz is 93% faster than a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Quad QX9770 processor, so image what 12 of these blades could push.
With good scaling (which happens in this kind of task, they could do about 8.9 GBytes/s 
. (http://hothardware.com/cs/forums/t/40368.aspx )
Member since:2006-12-22
I would like to add that performance is not all.
There are some resources that are IO bound and the server may be in itself not CPU limited factor. Like keeping a router or to migrate a bigger old server let's say a 5 year old system like 2U Pentium 4 1.6GHz, to a low power consumption server. Also, reducing the power envelope in today's time is a good factor!
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2009-05-19
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2008-05-26
Using netbook processors inside servers is one of those ideas that will disappear very quickly.
Do you remember when XML files were going to replace databases on websites? Some web developers tried to implement websites around an XML file rather than a database management system, discovered that it doesn't scale past a handful of concurrent users and is a bitch to maintain, and promptly ditched the idea.
I use an Atom-powered home server and I certainly wouldn't dream of using it as an enterprise server. Sure, the computer's uptime is the same as its age, but I pity the poor sod who tries to put any sort of load through it.
Yes, you can pack a number of them into one rack, but each machine will have the overhead of the operating system plus whatever sort of load balancing is being done. It simply won't be efficiently scalable. As a person who owns two Atom-based computers, I know it won't be scalable (and the Via Nano isn't *that* much better than an Atom).
Of course, it will be much less scalable if you try to run a website with an XML-file backend on a rack full of mini-ITX Via Nano machines...
Member since:2007-05-05
Member since:
2008-01-07
