Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sat, 22 Feb 2003 15:52:11 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sat, 22 Feb 2003 15:52:11 -0500 Received: from franka.aracnet.com ([216.99.193.44]:47557 "EHLO franka.aracnet.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sat, 22 Feb 2003 15:52:10 -0500 Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 13:02:12 -0800 From: "Martin J. Bligh" To: Larry McVoy cc: Mark Hahn , "David S. Miller" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call Message-ID: <2080000.1045947731@[10.10.2.4]> In-Reply-To: <20030222195642.GI1407@work.bitmover.com> References: <1510000.1045942974@[10.10.2.4]> <20030222195642.GI1407@work.bitmover.com> X-Mailer: Mulberry/2.2.1 (Linux/x86) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2342 Lines: 51 >> Interesting. Given the profit margins involved, I bet they still >> make more money on servers than desktops and notebooks combined >> (the annual report doesn't seem to list that). And that's before >> you take account of the "linux weighting" on top of that ... > > Err, here's a news flash. Dell has just one server with more than > 4 CPUS and it tops out at 8. Everything else is clusters. And they > call any machine that doesn't have a head a server, they have servers > starting $299. Yeah, that's right, $299. > > http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/series_pedge_servers.htm > > How much do you want to bet that more than 95% of their server revenue > comes from 4CPU or less boxes? I wouldn't be surprised if it is more > like 99.5%. And you can configure yourself a pretty nice quad xeon box > for $25K. Yeah, there is some profit in there but nowhere near the huge > margins you are counting on to make your case. OK, so now you've slid from talking about PCs to 2-way to 4-way ... perhaps because your original arguement was fatally flawed. The work we're doing on scalablity has big impacts on 4-way systems as well as the high end. We're also simultaneously dramatically improving stability for smaller SMP machines by finding reproducing races in 5 minutes that smaller machines might hit once every year or so, and running high-stress workloads that thrash the hell out of various subsystems exposing bugs. Some applications work well on clusters, which will give them cheaper hardware, at the expense of a lot more complexity in userspace ... depending on the scale of the system, that's a tradeoff that might go either way. For applications that don't work well on clusters, you have no real choice but to go with the high-end systems. I'd like to see Linux across the board, as would many others. You don't believe we can make it scale without screwing up the low end, I do believe we can do that. Time will tell ... Linus et al are not stupid ... we're not going to be able to submit stuff that screwed up the low-end, even if we wanted to. M. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/