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."

Comments

duh

[afidel]

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.

Re:duh

[Richard_at_work]

Agreed - I read the summary and article more along the lines of "Company makes internal product design choice, ARM fan disappointed."

Why is it news worthy what processor EMC choose? Are we missing something here? Did someone accidentally delete the paragraph which offered up something juicy, like "Gelsinger went on to shout the virtues of Intel, while his own personal Intel sales representative gave him a blow job and stuffed hundred dollar bills into his pants" ?

Whoopdi-fucking-do that 25% of all servers could be based around ARM - does that immediately mean everyone that isn't using ARM should flock to it? Or does it mean that companies should continue to go on making internal decisions about their own products?

Re:duh

[hairyfeet]

Here is what I don't get about these ARM fanbois...why is it that one product has to "win" and the other "lose". Its like what Jobs told the reporters when they kept trying to turn it into Apple VS MSFT "MSFT doesn't have to lose for Apple to win" and he was right, he was going after a different market.

With ARM you are talking extremely low power, idles in the sub-mw range. That low a power draw has a cost and that's IPC. No way in hell the newest ARMs can put out even half the IPC of a 6 year old Phenom quad much less the new Intel cores. On the flipside X86 chips can't drop to the sub-mw idle usage unless you really strip down the core design like Brazos or Atom.

Its different markets folks, its a scalpel and a chainsaw. This VS crap is just bullshit, different use cases require different levels of IPC, some x86 fits better, some ARM. That simple.