AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space

Oh my, allow me to reminisce.

When the Intel 80386-33 came out we thought it was the pinnacle of CPUs, running our Novell servers! We now had a justification to switch from arcnet to token ring. Our servers could push things way faster!

Then, in the middle 1991, the AMD 80386-40 CPU came out. Mind completely blown! We ordered some (I think) Twinhead motherboards. They were so fast we could only use Hercules mono cards in them; all other video cards were fried. 16Mb token ring was out, so some of my clients moved to it with the fantastic CPU.

I have seen some closet-servers running Novell NetWare 3.14 (?) with that AMD CPU in the late '90s. There was a QUIC tape & tape drive in the machine that was never changed for maybe a decade? The machine never went down (or properly backed up).

NW 3.12 was the final version I think. I recall patching a couple for W2K. NetWare would crash a lot (abend) until you'd fixed all the issues and then it would run forever, unless it didn't.

I once had a bloke writing a patch for eDirectory in real time in his basement whilst running our data on his home lab gear, on a weekend. I'm in the UK and he was in Utah. He'd upload an effort and I'd ftp it down, put it in place, reboot the cluster and test. Two iterations and job done. That was quite impressive support for a customer with roughly 5,000 users.

For me the CPU wasn't that important, per se. NWFS ate RAM: when the volumes were mounted, the system generated all sorts of funky caches which meant that you could apply and use trustee assignments (ACLs) really fast. The RAID controller and the discs were the important thing for file serving and ideally you had wires, switches and NICs to dole the data out at a reasonable rate.