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A comment on Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally big, competitively small. Parent comment

Re:Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally bi... by spideymans on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:03PM (#26715220)
Shouldn't datacenters attempt to minimize idle time though? A server sitting at idle is a depreciating asset that could likely be put to more productive use if tasks were rescheduled to take advantage of idle time (this would also reduce the total number of servers needed).
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Re:Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally bi... by deelowe on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:18PM (#26715405)
Utilization is a very difficult problem to solve. The difference between peak and off peak utilization can be as much as 70% or more depending on the application.
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Re:Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally bi... by gumby on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:16PM (#26715366)
That is definitely the objective but the reality is that load is not* uniform over the day. So you are paying to keep some number of servers hot (I don't know about spinup/spindown practices in modern datacenters).

I doubt this applies to HPC (the target market for this part) as they either schedule jobs closely or could, I imagine, shut them down. But I'm not in that space either so this is merely conjecture.

* I am sure there are corner cases where the load is uniform, but they are by definition few.

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