[geeks] SGI had an Atom system "on the drawing table"

[Jody Stephens]

Excerpts from Lionel Peterson's message of Thu May 21 06:04:08 -0600 2009:

[snip]

> "If someday brought to market, a single-rack system based on the
> Silicon Graphics Molecule concept computer would offer the computing
> power and memory bandwidth of more than 750 high-end PCs, SGI said,
> yet it would consume less than half the power and less than 1.4
> percent of the physical space."
> 
> That could have been interesting...

I believe this is actually a Rackable design. More a continuation of
what they have been doing, rather than something new. A dumb cluster
with ethernet. However, Rackable has always been very power conscious.
I seem to remember reading a paper somewhere indicating that for a
given power footprint and problem (likely web serving,) more would be
gained out of larger number of weaker processors than a smaller number
of faster, but more power hungry, processors.

I wish that NUMAlink 5 would get productized, but I'm guessing that
NUMAlink is dead. I also kind of wish the old SGI had made more of an
effort to push NUMAlink down the price chain.

Jody