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Xserve Specs?

Originally posted by mikeyredk
A single 1 ghz g5?
that doesnt' make sense does it
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Why not? Not everything needs a super powerful processor. I use Sun V10/V120's for DNS/DHCP servers because they are small, energy efficient, handle the task at hand and very affordable. While an Intel solution could be cheaper and more powerful, the additional power is not needed. Sun also offers great service with a solid stable platform and OS. Processing power is not required in every situation.
 
1ghz G5 would be slower than the current Xserve. That would only make sense if it was much, much cheaper. Perhaps the Xserve would become a sub $1000 G5? lol
 
Originally posted by SpamJunkie
1ghz G5 would be slower than the current Xserve. That would only make sense if it was much, much cheaper. Perhaps the Xserve would become a sub $1000 G5? lol
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Maybe it's an "iServe". Low end computer for the home, hidden away somewhere safe. Then you buy some cheap remote terminals. (I know, I know... someone might have noticed I'm a little stuck on the terminals idea lately).

Or for clustering?
 
Originally posted by Lanbrown
Why not? Not everything needs a super powerful processor. I use Sun V10/V120's for DNS/DHCP servers because they are small, energy efficient, handle the task at hand and very affordable. While an Intel solution could be cheaper and more powerful, the additional power is not needed. Sun also offers great service with a solid stable platform and OS. Processing power is not required in every situation.
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well another reason is that the existing sales of powermacs will crush the sales of the 1 ghz xserves unless they offer more ram capacity or other special features
 
A 1Ghz G5 Xserve would still be faster than a 1.3Ghz G4 for bus reason alone, not to mention being able to queue and dispatch more instructions.

However, I doubt Apple develops a lowend G5 Xserve because it would interfere with the Powermacs unless it was severely stripped. It'd make a nice render box at $1499 though.
 
Originally posted by mikeyredk
well another reason is that the existing sales of powermacs will crush the sales of the 1 ghz xserves unless they offer more ram capacity or other special features
Click to expand...

How many Power Macs can you get into the standard 19" rack? You can get more IU devices in there then Power Macs. What if you wanted a server just for web, or ftp, or DNS, SMTP, etc. All of those tasks don't need 2GHz or even dual processors to handle light to moderate loads. Thinking that every system needs a fast processor is ludicrous and is the thinking that Intel and company wants people to believe.

Do you know how many DNS request a low-end Sun box can handle? You can run an entire region of a large company on two boxes. Make the primary DNS and secondary DHCP on one and make the other the primary DHCP and secondary DNS. You do not need dual processors or the latest and greatest processor for some tasks. Anything extra is just more capital spent for something that would never be used, higher power and cooling requirements. All of those play a factor in the TCO. If you could get three 1GHz boxes for price of one dual 2Ghz box and you were not even going to be utilizing the full potential of the dual 2GHz, what was a better buy? Now you can setup a cluster for redundancy with money leftover.

What about a 1GHz box for home use to act as a raid storage, print server, etc? You don't need a dual 2GHz for that, or a graphics card, etc. I know many people who would jump at a low-end IU box just for that purpose.

I think you need to look at the bigger picture. Not everything needs fast processors and lots of RAM to run, or even additional PCI slots. If that were the case, no company would buy 1U servers.
 
Maybe it is dual 1.8 GHz Xserves

The 1GHz Xserve specs were apparently a typing mistake.

Considering that the last Xserves were not built with the then-fastest G4 processors I would bet on the same thing happening again. A dual 1.8 G5 Xserve would allow Apple to sell more of the dual 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMacs and not have to worry about supplies from IBM as much as with the higher clocked CPUs. As someone has stated here before me, servers do not need the most powerful processors but they do need to be heat efficient and thus reliable.
 
That was hilarious. Everyone having a tizzy because of a typo. Especially those that started arguing in favor of a 1GHz G5 Xserve!

I can't wait for more new PB tidbits to come out. I'm going through speculation withdrawl after WWDC.
 
did everyone forgot that the top of the line Xserve was actually slower than the the top of the line PM G4? it topped at 1.33GHz IIRC it was for cooling issues.

I wont b e suprised to see the new Xserves released with at slower speeds than 2GHz.

edit: actually I'm more excited about the new mobo, would they use SATA? PCI-X?

Thank you
MaT
 
Originally posted by sparkleytone
hrrrrm...

anyone else have a hard time believing that this beast can be fit into a 1U casing??
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no


Can someone enlighten me on the possibilities of this clustering setup? Would it have anything to do with hardware or is it purely a software thing?
 
Originally posted by dongmin
no


Can someone enlighten me on the possibilities of this clustering setup? Would it have anything to do with hardware or is it purely a software thing?
Click to expand...

That would depend on what type of cluster you want to do. Usually they are software based, but some are hardware based as well. It all depends on the application.
 
Originally posted by sparkleytone
hrrrrm...

anyone else have a hard time believing that this beast can be fit into a 1U casing??
Click to expand...

No, because IBM plans to use these processors for blade servers, which are generally smaller than or equal to a 1U form factor.

Remember that the large heatsinks on the Power Mac are there to keep the noise levels down. That is not a primary concern in a rack server environment, so they can use louder fans and smaller heatsinks.
 
So what's special about the cluster option? Does it require special hardware to work or is it just a software issue?

D
 
Looks like the difference between the cluser and the normal is a lack of video card and CD drive which would not be needed if it's just connecting onto a core Xserve. So, if you wanted an Xserve cluster, you'd buy a normal XServer and then as many cluster units as you wanted to add to it. I haven't looked at the Mac's cluset set up but I would expect that then you'd have to buy separate ethernet or fibre cards to connect all the cluster units into the fabric. Everything is admined by the normal XServe.
 
would the Xserve cluster nodes be any good for a render farm, as they have no graphics cards, but dont graphics apps these day push everything onto the gpu..or is this just for the local machine..I have no idea about this area so i'm just being curious.... If they just use the processor then an Xserve g5 controlling a g5 xServe cluder node rack and a xServe raid or two would be a sweet set up, with an army or g5 power mac's of course to design the scenes that need rendering.
 
Originally posted by dongmin
Can someone enlighten me on the possibilities of this clustering setup? Would it have anything to do with hardware or is it purely a software thing?
Click to expand...

clustering is essentially a two part proposition.

Physical:
You need to actually build a cluster of machines. this means they need to be connected together on a network.
For some configurations the network can be slow and high latency. A good example of this would be distributed rendering where CPUs could render alternate frames or they could render chunks of frames (to be assembled when done).
Other tasks need high speed and possibly ultra low latency network connections. Imagine a program that could spawn many many threads (streams of computation) and these threads were occasionally dependent on each other... that is stream "Q" can't start till stream "K" gets done and "Q" better finish because "X" is coming up and it needs that data from "Q".
For the lower bandwidth clusters, a 100BaseT network is fine.
Small clusters (few nodes) can actually use IP over Firewire, which has pretty low latency and good speed.
For high speed, but low cost networks Gig Ethernet is the way to go... but there are proprietary networking technologies that are very fast and super low latency like Myrinet (but they cost a fortune).

Software:
On the other end, you need some sort of Software support to actually cluster.
Some applications have clustering support built in. They often use a client/server approach where one master submits chunks of work to the other nodes then the master gets the returned work and reassembles it. Shake and the new xCode work kind of like this (AFAIK).
OS X also supports things like Suns Grid software and some other related Grid like products.
What I'm waiting for is a real OS Level (Kernel Level) plug and play clustering technology from Apple. Something that can distribute a local thread to any other node designated as a cluster member. Mach should be able to do this, you just need to run code that was written to be highly threaded.
 
Benchmark Results

I read one of the Apple benchmarks that talked about a single 2GHz model. There is no such an animal in the tower model. I wonder if those benchmarks were from the single 2GHz XServe?
 
would the Xserve cluster nodes be any good for a render farm, as they have no graphics cards, but dont graphics apps these day push everything onto the gpu..or is this just for the local machine..
Click to expand...

I don't have any real knowledge either, but I think what is going on is that the cards are doing their own rendering for the display, but this isn't enough power for actual rendering that is going on in a render farm. Graphics cards are getting powerful. I think I heard of somebody planning to include them in distributed computering programs, but they still aren't up to an actual main processor running large scale rendering apps. The cluster is working all as one large multi-processor computer so grpahics cards aren't needed for all of the nodes.

Allegory: Relate desktop computers offloading video computations to graphics cards like a father giving the teenage son yard work to do. Kids, not doign anything, saves the father time. Works great. If the father was going to start a landscape company, he doesn't want to hire a bunch of teenagers rather than a bunch of men.
 
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