A new inflection point? Definitive Commodity Server Organisation/Design Rules
Summary : For the delivery of general purpose and wide-scale Compute/Internet Services there now seems to be a definitive hardware organisation for servers, typified by the E-bay "pod" contract . For decades there have been well documented "Design Rules" for producing Silicon devices using specific technologies/fabrication techniques. This is an attempt to capture some rules for current server farms. [ Update 06-Nov-11 : "Design Rules" are important: Patterson in a Sept. 1995 Scientific American article notes that the adoption of a quantitative design approach in the 1980's led to an improvement in microprocessor speedup from 35%pa to 55%pa. After a decade, processors were 3 times faster than forecast.] Commodity Servers have exactly three possible CPU configurations, based on "scale-up" factors: single CPU, with no coupling/coherency between App instances. e.g. pure static web-server. dual CPU, with moderate coupling/coherency. e.g. web-s...