Re:The Server At Peak X86
by fulafel on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @12:31AM
(#12537077)
There's aren't any big architectural reasons that x86 would need to be less power efficient. Intel already had a go at that side but very few people bought the low power server chips (Avoton etc). AMD also hasn't had much luck with low power server chips (see SeaMicro etc).
One big reason is that halving the CPU power consumption doesn't nearly halve the server power consumption, but it often goes pretty close to halving the system performance. And CPUs are pretty efficient at idling so you're really only paying for the power consumption when there is work to be done - instead paying for larger fleet of reserve servers.
And of course scaling to more but slower servers means a lot of expensive software/admin complexity.
One big reason is that halving the CPU power consumption doesn't nearly halve the server power consumption, but it often goes pretty close to halving the system performance. And CPUs are pretty efficient at idling so you're really only paying for the power consumption when there is work to be done - instead paying for larger fleet of reserve servers. And of course scaling to more but slower servers means a lot of expensive software/admin complexity.