Sorry if this has been posted already, but I thought it could bring some interesting, albeit speculative, discussion regarding AMD's future Zen architecture.
It seems like whenever it is mentioned, we only talk about Zen and how it is related to gaming PCs or its comparison to Intel. We never seem to discuss how it might work in servers running in enterprise environments, or if that is even a possibility. I wonder if this means we will get inexpensive CPUs with high core counts for servers that are also power efficient. While competition with Intel in the consumer hardware business is great, competition in enterprise gear is also a great thing for all.
What do you guys think we might see with Zen in enterprise?
maybe if they can get process down to a science. high core count servers would love zen. something like 64 core per die is insane.
highly unknown, as we do not know how it works on normal desktops yet.
- for vm farms it might be good if it has a lot of cores cheaper than intel, and its performance isn't that bad.
- companies aren't keen on updating their infrastructure (so we shouldn't assume companies will grab them right away)
for what kind of use will they be good? *a kill scenario's
- lets say server that uses a lot of disk resources (r/w), will it be good? I don't know. Will it keep AHCI controller or jump to something better - designed for ssd's, or better - more requests per queue per set to controller.
- shared iis site server (a lot of cores is good, how will it deal with 100 or so ip's and iis profiles at once? -- chipset resource management)
- and lastly how will it perform in single threaded performance, lets say some shitty engine works on 1 thread and is killing it. How will it deal with it?
- temperatures... what are going to be its operating temps, will servers just power off once reaches 80'C? stuff like that happen when there are issues with cooling in datacenter (those happen) and its a hell. If it can survive longer before turning off then it could be much better choice for datacenters.
main point is that we don't know.
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