Maximizing Multicore Servers
By Pam Baker
In the perennial push for greater speed and more robust functionality, multicore servers have been promoted as the solution for the future. But despite their obvious benefits in cost-effective and faster parallel processing, there are significant trade-offs. Chief among these are pushback from application developers, skill transfer, memory limitations, provisioning and governance. How can IT managers best harness the gain in speed with minimum risk?
Same Song, New Verse
"Multicore has been on the hype cycle recently, but it is not a new technology. Larger server systems, such as many RISC-based systems running UNIX, have had multicore for several years," says Austin, Texas-based David Stirling, lead systems engineer at The Home Depot. "What we are seeing now is a lot of hype, with Intel and AMD on the bandwagon marketing to consumers."
One cause of confusion is the lack of a standard to describe relative performance. "There are some segments of the market that still believe clock rate [in GHz] is the only meaningful information by which processor performance can be gauged," says Doug Rollins, Director of Research and Development, MPC Computers (Gateway) in Nampa, Idaho. "However, with multicore -- in particular, quad core -- processors, this simply isn't true."
Intel and AMD think "CPU numbers" provide a more valid assessment of processor performance. For example, despite the slower clock rate of a current Xeon 5300 quad core series processor, it may outperform a current Xeon 5100 dual core series one under certain workloads. Furthermore, the extra performance can also translate to lower power consumption. (article continues)
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