Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 22 Feb 2003 13:02:12 -0800 | From | "Martin J. Bligh" <> | Subject | Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call |
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>> Interesting. Given the profit margins involved, I bet they still >> make more money on servers than desktops and notebooks combined >> (the annual report doesn't seem to list that). And that's before >> you take account of the "linux weighting" on top of that ... > > Err, here's a news flash. Dell has just one server with more than > 4 CPUS and it tops out at 8. Everything else is clusters. And they > call any machine that doesn't have a head a server, they have servers > starting $299. Yeah, that's right, $299. > > http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/series_pedge_servers.htm > > How much do you want to bet that more than 95% of their server revenue > comes from 4CPU or less boxes? I wouldn't be surprised if it is more > like 99.5%. And you can configure yourself a pretty nice quad xeon box > for $25K. Yeah, there is some profit in there but nowhere near the huge > margins you are counting on to make your case.
OK, so now you've slid from talking about PCs to 2-way to 4-way ... perhaps because your original arguement was fatally flawed.
The work we're doing on scalablity has big impacts on 4-way systems as well as the high end. We're also simultaneously dramatically improving stability for smaller SMP machines by finding reproducing races in 5 minutes that smaller machines might hit once every year or so, and running high-stress workloads that thrash the hell out of various subsystems exposing bugs.
Some applications work well on clusters, which will give them cheaper hardware, at the expense of a lot more complexity in userspace ... depending on the scale of the system, that's a tradeoff that might go either way.
For applications that don't work well on clusters, you have no real choice but to go with the high-end systems. I'd like to see Linux across the board, as would many others.
You don't believe we can make it scale without screwing up the low end, I do believe we can do that. Time will tell ... Linus et al are not stupid ... we're not going to be able to submit stuff that screwed up the low-end, even if we wanted to.
M.
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