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There's apparently a new "fastest chip on earth" - sell servers and workstations with them.

180 points posted to Dell, New Product Ideas by jmxz Apr 10

This sounds interesting:
IBM chip is fastest on Earth

IBM Corp. began shipping high-end computers Tuesday built around the fastest chip on Earth, a microprocessor that can carry out up to 5 billion instructions per second, surpassing the speediest competing processors built by rivals like Intel or Sun Microsystems.


Selling servers and workstations with such chips might have a number of advantages:

  1. Microsoft can't accuse you of contributing to Windows piracy if you sell these with No OS

  2. It'd help you compete against HP (who gets special advantages with Itanium thanks to their initial work on the chip), Sun and Fujitsu (who each have their high-end sparc lines; and IBM (who of course uses this chip)
  3. It'd probably make for a more fun Intel negotiation.
  4. All the old Apple guys who were vehemently anti-Intel might switch to you

jervis961
Apr 11		 I doubt IBM would part with the chip so Dell could compete against them with it, but who knows. I can't recall but didn't the article say the system needed a special liquid cooled solution to run properly?
phubert
Apr 11		 IBM has simply loved selling PowerPC chips, but Windows WON'T RUN ON IT.

PowerPC is not and has never _been_ compatible with Intel Itanium or x86 chip instruction sets. PPC's been around for a very long time. Power6 is merely the latest generation in the line... with, no doubt, more to come.
phubert
Apr 11		 But, sell servers and workstations based on them? Sure! All running Linux!
jmxz
Apr 11		 @jervis961: "I doubt IBM would part with the chip "

IBM was happy to sell Apple chips for many years.
They're happy to sell Microsoft chips for the XBox.
They're happy to sell Sony chips for the XBox.
They're happy to sell hard disks to most computer manufacturers.
No doubt Dell could make a good case to IBM - especially if they bring up Apple's switch to Intel.

@phubert: "IBM has simply loved selling PowerPC chips, but Windows WON'T RUN ON IT. "

Actually, I think it will - given that the Xbox OS (a tweaked windows) runs on the PowerPC-based chip inside it. Of course it won't run Vista - but then again, it seems nothing really runs Vista well?
phubert
Apr 11		 I don't know of any Windows desktop or server OS ported to PowerPC at this point... certainly none that is marketed. Xbox? What's that? :lol:
jmxz
Apr 11		 Sure. But internally I think they have them. Remember -

Windows ran fine on MIPS chips, and Tandem sold high-end servers with those (I believe Nasdaq still runs them).
Windows ran fine on Alpha chips, and Dec sold workstations with those
Windows was announced for PA-RISC; but soon after they killed it.

Microsoft's always been careful to not be too dependent on Intel/x86 (presumably so those guys wouldn't get all the profits). Perhaps Dell has something to learn from that too.
phubert
Apr 11		 I don't know about the hardware, but it's interesting that

NASDAQ - Windows 2003
DOW JONES - Solaris
NYSE - Linux
jmxz
Apr 11		 @phubert:
Though to be more fair, I think they all use all three to some extent.

Does Nasdaq really use a lot of Win2003? Or is it really NT?

Last I heard, Nasdaq's biggest systems are these Tandem (now HP) MIPS systems which had 500 CPUs upgraded to the newer MIPS s88000 CPUs a couple years ago. I know they were able to run NT, but I didn't think they were Win2003, considering that Microsoft announced that after Win NT Server 4.0 they were phasing out MIPS support. Of course Nasdaq's big enough that I imagine a bunch of custom engineering goes on there. Rumors are that those MIPS boxes also run some Microsoft software under the SQL Server brand to trick other customers into thinking that the ability of the MIPS/Tandem/SQL-Server-custom-engineering job implies that other product under the SQL Server brand can also scale.
phubert
Apr 11		 They upgraded to 2K3 from NT, according to a .doc that's out there...

Typically, the UNIX back-end processes have gone to Linux...
jmxz
Apr 11		 Really? The docs I see from Microsoft's site ( http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/a/d/cadc2f8c-3901-4b40-9429-fd071ba6... ), etc. talk about moving "two 4-node clusters to support its Market Data Dissemination System (MDDS)" or in other words, roughly 8 CPUs or so to SQLServer 2005 on Win2003.

Upgrading all the software for the 500+ MIPS CPUS that "run the Nasdaq Marketcenter, which includes the Nasdaq trading system for Nasdaq stocks; a trading system for stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange; and a trade-reporting system that connects to specific brokers" would have been quite a challenge. I was under the impression that this was to happen on their next major upgrade when they move to Itanium (previously scheduled to happen already, IIRC, but they did one more MIPS upgrade first instead).

(Microsoft gave Nasdaq as a reference when one of our customers asked about scalability; and this customer apparently checked the reference and was in turn amused to see it was Mips on which their databases scaled very well :-).
phubert
Apr 11		 I assume the one I saw (professionally done) referred only to the web front-end (which Netcraft shows as W2K3)
jmxz
Apr 11		 Drifting back on topic for Dell:

It looks safe to say that no major exchange runs their main trading systems with Windows-on-x86.

Without high-end Itanium or Power or Sparc based systems (HP's phasing out the MIPS ones) they're missing out on this rather lucrative market.
phubert
Apr 11		 so, perhaps they're afraid to rumble with 'the big guys' ... HP, Sun, and IBM have been in data centers for a long time...

Heck, I TOLD 'em to BUY UNISYS!! :-D
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