Is this Core-rect?

The article to which this is linked came across my inbox just now.

Tilera, which already has 36- and 64-core processors on the market, is announcing its third-generation products, Tile-Gx, which includes plans for a 100-core processor. The chip will appear in 2011. Tilera officials hope the high-core count in its processors will help give the company traction in a space dominated by Intel and AMD, which currently are looking at eight-core processors.

Tilera Talks 100-Core Processor 

I find this interesting on several levels. First, and most obvious, are these guys for real? Do they have something that can run on “Industry Standard” servers? (By this I mean, can companies like IBM or HP make servers that could run these processors without too much proprietary work?) The linked article below appears to say they can.

The next big question is whether any of the big server vendors risk their relationships with Intel or AMD to try Tilera? Or has the recent anti-trust actions with Intel and AMD opened a door that might not have existed a few years ago?

Whatever, I’d sure like to start running some tests on these things.

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Making the choice between virtual and physical servers – Why Choose?

Image by JohnSeb via Flickr

 

the future of the physical server is secure, as there are still a number of reasons to use a physical server over a virtual server.

Making the choice between virtual and physical servers | Servers and Storage | TechRepublic.com

Scott Lowe writes about is experience and the policies in use at his place of work for the deployment of virtual machines versus physical servers. He states that the usual policy is to use VMs for everything unless there are compelling reasons for a plain physical server. He gives, as examples, Microsoft Communication Server instances and other examples where high I/O or CPU utilization would seem to preclude the use of or need for virtualization.

I’d like to suggest an alternative. One I’ve touched on before and one that my not be fully applicable in all instances with the software and hardware currently available:

All servers should be configured with a hypervisor as the base configuration. Even if the server will only run one OS and application it should still be installed as a VM. The main reason for this is HA/DR and provisioning time. There are undoubtedly performance issues that might need to be addressed, but modern server hardware, especially when combined with 10GBE can handle pretty much anything thrown at it.