←back to thread

AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space

(www.tomshardware.com)
499 points baal80spam | 5 comments | 05 Nov 24 19:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.852s | source
Show context
WaitWaitWha ◴[05 Nov 24 22:19 UTC] No.42055684[source]▶
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).

replies(6): >>42056005 #>>42056091 #>>42056099 #>>42056181 #>>42056582 #>>42056781 #
1. fijiaarone ◴[06 Nov 24 02:05 UTC] No.42056781[source]▶
In 1996 we set up a rack (department store surplus) of Cyrix 586 (running on 486 socket C motherboards) running at 75mhz with 16mb of RAM and could serve 100 concurrent users with CGI scripts and image maps doing web serving and VOIP with over 1 million requests a month on a single T1 line.

Good luck doing that on a load balanced rack of 96 core AMD servers today.

replies(2): >>42057557 #>>42060752 #
2. simfree ◴[06 Nov 24 06:29 UTC] No.42057557[source]▶
Peak requests per second (and whether a SIP invite or CGI script being run) would be very useful to know.

SIP hasn't gotten much heavier, nor CGI scripts, and tiny distros like OpenWRT can do a lot with little iron.

Heard lots of rough ADSL era VoIP stories, hopefully you weren't struggling with that back then.

3. einsteinx2 ◴[06 Nov 24 11:59 UTC] No.42060752[source]▶
Are you seriously arguing that a rack of modern servers can’t handle 100 concurrent users?
replies(1): >>42067922 #
4. bigfatkitten ◴[06 Nov 24 19:30 UTC] No.42067922[source]▶
It would be harder than it needs to be with modern software 'engineering' practices.
replies(1): >>42090995 #
5. SR2Z ◴[08 Nov 24 22:33 UTC] No.42090995{3}[source]▶
...a RACK full of 96-core servers could give a whole core to each user and still have hundreds to spare.