How much..
..for the Alienware edition?
SeaMicro, the upstart maker of Atom-based microservers, has a new salesperson: server rival Dell. The companies have not made a formal announcement, but Armando Acosta, product manager for Dell's PowerEdge C cloudy infrastructure server line, confirms that the companies signed a reseller agreement back in May and Dell is …
I hope Dell doesn't buy them! Although it may be good for Seamicro and put their product in the hands of more customers. I think that in the long run, that it would hurt competition. I find it unlikely we'd ever see a version with ARM or AMD CPUs in it if Dell was the owner. As well as probably be forced to buy windows with the system. *gasp*
Whilst Snoreacle are screaming about how great the new T4-4 is and that it can run "256 threads", Dell just got the real throughput solution, with 256 dual-cores (that's 512 real single-threaded performers) in only 10U. TBH, Dell should grow a pair and slap their name on it if only as a badging exercise, the system looks a very good option for virtualisation customers (i.e., just about anyone looking at cloud).
Matty. What, if any point are you trying to make? First, the most obvious is that Dell , nor your beloved HP make this system. And if you want to compare threads... The T4-4 is 5 RU. If you double it, they'll have the same # of threads in 10RU. However, most people will evaluate the different systems to see which will perform best for their application, not be drawn to the number of CPUs, threads, memory, or pretty charts.
P.S. You'll be happy to know that one of the founders of SeaMicro used to work at Sun, as well as a few other ex-Sun employees. I saw no mention of an ex-HP employee. Shocker. I fail to see how you're mocking Sun.
"......What, if any point are you trying to make?....." T4 is simply irrellevant. Intel can provide solutions that beat it in every scenario. Want low-power? Then go Atom, and still enjoy real single-threaded performance, and the larger pool of Windows and Linux apps. Want a general purpose CPU with real grunt? Go Xeon. Want enterprise SMP? Go Itanium. CMT can't compete, and with multi-CPU Atom servers they can't even hide in the webserving niche anymore.
"....Dell , nor your beloved HP make this system...." Unlike you Sunshiners, I'm not adverse to applauding the efforts of more than one vendor. If you bothered to look back through some of the forums on Atom articles you'd see I've been quite keen to see some Atom-based servers from the major vendors. Hopefully the Dell half-effort will stimulate hp and IBM to get a move on and make some. If not, Dell is on our approved vendor list.
"......You'll be happy to know that one of the founders of SeaMicro used to work at Sun...." So that would be one of the ones that saw the Sunset and realised where Sun (and now Snoreacle) had gone wrong. Meanwhile, why would there be any ex-hp employees, they're doing fine!