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Gelsinger Shoots Down EMC On ARM
Nerval's Lobster writes "EMC president and incoming VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger most likely shot down any hope that the company's storage arrays would be built around the ARM architecture. Gelsinger, who also helped orchestrate the VMworld show in San Francisco this week, presented an Aug. 29 keynote at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, Calif. Afterward, an audience member told Gelsinger that as many as 25 percent of all servers could be shipped around the low-power ARM architecture, then asked if Gelsinger agreed with that estimate. EMC previously shifted its product lines to Intel processors. Gelsinger told the audience member that the situation is unlikely to change, even if ARM could deliver workloads at a fraction of the power of an X86 chip."
Sounds like a x86 show, allright!
EMC arrays are already pushing more than what four westmere cores can do and they don't even have some of the cool features that the new breed of all flash arrays are doing (global dedupe and inline block compression). It will be a LONG time before ARM can handle todays storage workloads, let alone all the cool stuff they should be adding.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Another day another thinly-vieled attempt at getting people to drive up page hits to the ghost towns of SlashBI/Cloud/etc. Just post the story here rather than trying redirect people to your buzzword sites.
ARM fan is pissed off that IBM zSeries won't be using ARM processors either.
ARM fanboys are convinced that ARM is in every way superior to Intel and if only all the stupid companies/users out there would realize it then the world could switch and start the glorious ARM revolution.
I've gotten pretty used to it on /. :P
Remember! Gelsinger was a Senior VP and worked at Intel for thirty years.
In other news former CTO of Intel who has huge amounts of stock options says Intel chips are awesome! Seriously though, our tiny little SAN maxes out 8 Xeon cores and 16 GB of ram while running less than 30 heavy VMs (80,000 IOs on average). I don't see ARM in this space for a while.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
If you have a rackmount case full of big disk drives front-ended by a CPU, the CPU isn't using a big fraction of the power. Nor does it constitute a large fraction of the cost. ARM is a 32-bit architecture. If you have a few terabytes in your disk array and 10Gb Ethernet going in and out. you might want more than 4GB of RAM in front of it.
This sounds like some ARM fanboy thing.
...require huge cache management (RAM) - I'm not sure if ARM is a fit for that.
ARM nowadays stands mostly for locked down tablet crap, phones and locked down consumer equipment .. the cost of cpu is marginal in a storage controller .. my guess the spin doctors at geeknet were paid to put this out.
compared to what the entire unit goes on sale for and there are extreme performance requirements,
this story just doesnt make sense
Comments here all of course look at big stuff, servers that handle huge amounts of storage, that serve dozens of VMs for remote users, run busy web sites.
Most servers are not like that. EMC may be an example of the high-end stuff but most servers in this world are low-end. They have to serve files and e-mail to maybe a dozen users, they have to store the media catalog of a four-person family, that kind of things. That's where ARM may be very useful.