There’s been a couple of interesting things published about things I’ve been working on/with recently.
The OpenPOWER Foundation did a press release on initial white box server design for POWER8. With the hardware, there’s a software stack: firmware and operating system stack developed by IBM, Google and Canonical. Basically, there’s going to be 96 threads per socket with 230GB/sec of memory bandwidth in your cloud, yo.
Obviously, there’s a bunch of stuff that can be talked about more in the future, post release of all these things. But it’s pretty cool to be able to see some information heading out the door in the lead up to POWER8 systems being available.
Interesting development.
Related mention here: http://www.dbms2.com/2014/04/30/hardware-and-storage-notes/ (last para) – on how cloud vendors are moving towards Power and ARM (which are on two sides of processing spectrum as the zdnet commenter noted).
It would be interesting to see how the future of open hardware
platforms unfold.
The RDMA improvement, especially looks good, considering many
high performance applications (HFTs prominently) are bypassing storage stack with
Infiniband + RDMA.