Three short years ago, this would have taken 32 Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest) servers, accounting for 64U of rack space... this pic is from the upcoming Xeon MP (Beckton) platform with Nehalem-EX processors that many of you have seen at IDF 2009.  This server only takes 3U of rack space... less than 5% of the space of what it could replace.

Sometimes you see a screenshot and it just makes your jaw drop...

Just to give a comparison of CPU density... here's a diagram showing the comparison of 3 year old technology compared to the upcoming Nehalem-EX.  If each of those 32 old servers burns 400W of power - that's 12.8 kilowatts - compared to one server, burning less than 1kW.

What's even more amazing, is that some design wins are based on a 1U server with the same cpu footprint - that's AWESOME!

What are your thoughts on these upcoming multi-core technology improvements?

I had the privilege to get invited to the Microsoft Virtualization Launch event in Bellevue, Washington on September 8, 2008 on occasion of the release of Microsoft Windows Server* 2008. I attended the keynote presentations and a number of technical sessions. I was especially interested in calibrating my experience from the few months before working with Hyper-V as an architect and integrator in putting together a demo that was delivered for the Intel Developer Forum, which took place in San Francisco on August 19-21. Please refer to "[p-11499]" for a detailed account.

The solidity of the product during the months I worked with it was impressive. I've seen behaviors in previous products are technically correct. However, oftentimes with new products (and also with presumably mature products) the system just checks out for a time, or the results of certain operations are ambiguous, yielding a subjective feeling of "mushiness" that does not inspire confidence. None of this happens with the Hyper-V manager user interface. The response was always crisp and the system was good at informing the user about what is happening. At the outset, if the BIOS settings are not correct for running virtualization, it will remind you in very certain terms to turn on hardware support for virtualization and the execute disable bit, even to the point of asking you to power cycle the system before resuming. The claims by Microsoft engineers during the conference about OS and VMM stability are consistent with my own experience.

Hyper-V comes with an extensive set of tools designed to facilitate large-scale deployments, yet they are useful to small enterprises. Examples mentioned: Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) and integration with System Center. The available tools support the complete deployment life cycle.

Microsoft invited Thomas Bittman, a VP and distinguished analyst from Gartner. His vision for virtualization is similar to the one painted extensively a book I co-authored. The alignment of his ideas with those in the book caught my attention. See "[p-11383]". His thesis is that the impact of virtualization comes not from the technology itself, the capability to consolidate workloads and save energy, but from the changes in business models it brings.

"It is now less about the technology and more about process change and cultural change within organizations," said Mr. Bittman. "Virtualization enables alternative delivery models for services. Each virtualized layer can be managed relatively independently or even owned by someone else, for example, streamed applications or employee-owned PCs. This can require major cultural changes for organizations."

Have you ever asked yourself that question when you are bombarded with marketing messages from multiple different companies on why choose their products vs. a competitors product?. As a non-Engineer in an engineer centric company, I certainly have thought about this several times and asked myself a very simple question - Why should I choose one architecture type over another offering?

I suppose the best place is to start at the beginning and try and decipher the acronym soup of RISC, x86 etc. I decided to use my ‘old friend’ Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ to help with this process. What I found was another alphabet soup that I could have researched for hours, but try and simplify it below. I attach my detailed definition findings at end of this blog.

Simply put, RISC (pronounced risk) is a CPU design to use simplified instructions to execute very fast thus providing higher performance. x86 is a generic term that refers to the instruction set of another CPU architecture. So basically both RISC and x86 are types of instruction sets linked to CPU architecture.

So which one should I choose?.

Call me old fashioned, but as a business guy, it always comes down to 3 basic tenets in terms of making a decision

1) I like choice and the ability to pick and choose between multiple suppliers to get the best deal to meet my needs.(and the ability to change supplier without major obstacles)

2) Performance is really important. The higher performance means that I get my work done quicker which reduces the overall cost / improves time to revenue and ultimately improves the productivity of my business

3) System cost and total cost of ownership are key decision points in today’s era which is vastly different from the ‘dot.com’ boom. It is all about managing the bottom line through good decisions around CAPEX and OPEX spending

I applied my decision criteria and quickly found out that there is not a lot of choice from a hardware and operating system perspective with RISC architecture. In fact it looks quite the opposite of choice which always concerns me, call me pro-choice if you like, but I like the ability to move around suppliers!. On the other hand I found x86 to have lots of choice with many hardware vendors to list and a range of operating systems from windows to Linux and Solaris.

Having choice out of the way, I then moved onto performance for my business and looked at published results from many hardware vendors on different websites like http://www.spec.org. what I found was that Intel based systems had a lot of leading results against architectures like SPARC from SUN or Fujitsu and POWER from IBM.

I then looked at price (and being an ex-Accountant in my past career) nearly jumped for joy when I saw that system prices were low for x86 systems compared to the comparable RISC systems.

This analysis helped me understand it better and helped simplify my decision making.

Here is a short video with a little bit more detail. I would be interested in your thoughts and have you had any similar experiences that you would like to share.