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Will "Group Hug" Commoditize the Hardware Market?
Will the Open Compute Project’s Common Slot specification and Facebook’s Group Hug board commoditize the data center hardware market even further? Analyst opinions vary widely, indicating that time and additional development work may be necessary before any sort of consensus is reached. At the Open Compute Summit last week, Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook, announced both the Open Slot specification and Facebook’s prototype Open Slot board, known as “Group Hug.”
Group Hug’s premise is simple: disaggregate the CPU in a way that allows virtually any processor to be linked to the motherboard. This has never been done before with a CPU, which has traditionally required its own socket, its own chipset, and thus its own motherboard. Group Hug is designed to accommodate CPUs from AMD, Intel, and even ARM vendors such as Applied Micro and Calxeda.
All I see are links to other slashdot articles. Are we going for a new record here? First the ridiculous post about Microsoft welling their entertainment division, now this. And the same style of headline too, which of course is answered with, "No."
Mr Editor, can you at least post a link to some information, like maybe the site where this specification is detailed? Maybe the project web site itself?
One architecture that supported "variable CPUs" was S100 where it is was typical to have a CPU card, one or more memory cards, and multiple I/O cards all plugged into a backplane. There were CPU cards for the Apple ][, but these were complete computers on a card that simply allowed use of the Apple ][ I/O.
Given today's multi-gigahertz processors with gigahertz memory access, I would think it would be difficult, if not impossible to effectively separate the CPU and the memory by very much. Similarly, it gets pretty complicated with high speed DMA I/O when you move it away from the memory it is accessing. I'm sure it could be done, but the performance is going to suffer just from the physical distances. Add in connector resistance and noise and you have ample justification for putting the CPU, chipset and RAM in a very small module that then plugs into the rest of the computer for I/O.
I do no think it means what you think it means. Something that is a commodity product is fungible, meaning any indiviual product from any of various vendors is effectively interchangable with any product of the same kind from any other vendor. Computer hardware has been commoditized for a long time. While processors are not wholely interchangable (AMD vs Intel), the motherboard/CPU combo generally is. Everything else in a computer can more or less be swapped out with a different brand with the same or similar features. All pricing is based on cost and perceived value. The only way it could be more of a commodity is if someone came up with a way to plug any processor into any motherboard socket. Oh, and bonus points to anyone who can guess why the retail companies are moving away from separate box systems to all-in-ones. HINT: Look at the upgrade path for laptops.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
In the early 90s one of our mainframes blew a CPU, so the IBM CE replaced it while the system continued running. Zero reboot time because it wasn't rebooted. Much like you can swap hard drives in a NAS array while it runs.
There's really nothing new in IT. Couple years back a VMware image of mine got moved to another machine mostly seemlessly. Oh it was "frozen/down" for a minute or so but promptly unfroze on the new hardware. Not nearly as advanced as the mainframe was 20 years ago, but someday modern IT might be that advanced again... or maybe not, hard to say.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you want it to be, server hardware is already commoditized. All the priciest components are interchangeable (you *can* buy DIMMs from wherever and cram them in your server from a technology standpoint). Apart from Intel and AMD playing this game where the IOH is generally affine to some particular CPU generation, things are already there (and the IOH is a pretty inexpensive part however you slice it, and could already be subbed out for a PCI-e constructed device if they saw fit). Now the catch is that for *most* traditional IT shops, there continues to be value in well-integrated systems. This will not change that picture.
I see this as another step toward two goals:
-Getting ARM into the datacenter in some reputable fashion (which may or may not make sense, depending on whether a compelling performance per watt case can be made that offsets the energy/manufacturing gap that might be incurred from requiring more packages to get to performance desired).
-Rebranding 'whitebox'. White box vendors are viewed as the low cost alternative to HP/Dell/IBM, but image wise they are viewed anywhere between 'unacceptably bad' to, at best, 'just as good' from a select portion of the market. Putting cost aside, no one thinks of white box as 'better' than the expensive names. A lot of open compute at the system level is the same thing that has been the reality for the last decade with a shiny new name. The same standards that everyone already followed are getting highlighted more explicitly. This is the opportunity, through marketing, to change minds to say 'better' in some cases or at least make the 'unacceptable' segment of the market take another look.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
do the cards have room for 4-8 / 6-12 ram slots each? and yes that's full size ram.
Looking at the photos of the backplane, it looks like S100 era technology. Where is the trendy stuff? I want to see hermetically sealed illuminated glass-like blocks, changing color and sliding out automatically on detection of failure, a high-bandwidth optical interface on each edge, power inductively coupled to avoid metal connectors, an eerie surround sound voice saying "Dave ... Stop" ..