Subj : Re: X86S
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : tenser
Date : Fri Apr 26 2024 06:06 am

On 25 Apr 2024 at 06:56a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...
 
 pF> -=> tenser wrote to Spectre <=-
 pF> 
 pF>  te> That was kind of what the OEMs all wanted, which meant that
 pF>  te> the desktop market and low-end servers all went x86_64, and
 pF>  te> Itanium was relegated to the high-end, where it only had
 pF>  te> marginal market penetration.  Eventually, x86_64 took over
 pF>  te> there, too (at least by volume), in part thanks to the
 pF>  te> hyperscalars paving the way for large-scale x86 deployment
 pF>  te> in server environments.
 pF> 
 pF> It seems lots of people underestimated the power of lots of cheap Intel
 pF> boxes. Central Computers in San Francisco was my idea of an auto-scaling
 pF> group - traffic increases on the web site? I could call them and get a
 pF> server built in 24 hours. They were 4 blocks away.
 pF> 
 pF> The year before we'd been running Sun for both the database and front-end
 pF> of a web site using some Netscap web server - the following year the
 pF> front-end was all cheap white boxes running Apache on Linux.

100% this.  Google started out going down that road, but
then the need to scale hit them in the pocketbook and they
realized that they could scale _horizontally_ by buying
lots and lots of cheap, shitty computers and putting them
into racks themselves.  You didn't _need_ a big Sun Ultra
Enterprise E10k machine with all sorts of redundancies baked
in, and for the pricetag of that one box, you could buy 10x
more in raw compute capacity in cheap PCs.  You also didn't
need a super expensive Oracle database to run it all.  And
if one of those machines crashes?  Oh well, you've got 999
more that'll keep running.  Eventually someone will wander
through the data center and reboot the ones that crashed.

Of course, it helped that search is an embarrassingly parallel
problem.  And nowadays Google datacenter machines are marvels
of modern engineering that you can't buy on the open market
(but you can buy similar machines from Oxide!).

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