James Hamilton: Very Lower Power Servers Progress

There is a growing gap between memory bandwidth and CPU power and this growing gap makes low power servers both more practical and more efficient than current designs. Per-socket processor performance continues to increase much more rapidly than memory bandwidth and this trend applies across the application spectrum from mobile devices, through client, to servers. Essentially we are getting more compute than we have memory bandwidth to feed.

We can attempt to address this problem two ways: 1) more memory bandwidth and 2) less fast processors. The former solution will be used and Intel Nehalem is a good example of this but costs increase non-linearly so the effectiveness of this technique will be bounded. The second technique has great promise to reduce both cost and power consumption.

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Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.