Scott, Evan, Nathan those are some really thought provoking answers. Evans point about cloud providers is especially interesting - as we are seeing more and more Openstack being used in private clouds , to create clusters 'on demand' we should be aware of this.
And regarding the point "I'm not an expert in fab economics, but I don't believe it would not significantly add to production costs." Errr... I admit my ignorance too, though I should know a lot more as I am currently working with ASML - who make advanced semiconductor lithography machines! On 26 July 2017 at 00:20, Nathan Moore <ntmo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> >> Re: having a specialized, low-power core, this is clearly something >> that's already been successful in the mobile device space. The big.LITTLE >> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE> ARM architecture is >> designed for this kind of thing and has been quite successful. Certainly, >> now that Intel and AMD are really designing modular SoC-like products, it >> wouldn't be terribly difficult to bake in a couple of low power x86 cores >> (e.g. Atom or Xeon-D + larger Skylake die in Intel's case; Jaguar + Zen in >> AMD's case). I'm not an expert in fab economics, but I don't believe it >> would not significantly add to production costs. >> > > The > "textbook" answer to integrated circuit manufacturing is that there > need be no dependence of device cost on number of gates/device complexity. > Fundamentally, you're just printing/etching a slightly more complicated > mask on a circuit board. The number of gates and the probability of > defects are probably proportional - didn't AMD sell 6 and 3 core processors > for a while? I always assumed those were 4 or 8 core procs that had > critical defects in one of the cores. Sorry, no first-hand knowledge > though. > > Jim Lux probably knows the real answer. > > > Nathan > > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > >
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