PC builders, build a system around this processor chip

[DJofSD]

http://betanews.com/2015/05/06/intel-releases-xeon-e7-v3-processors-featuring-up-to-18-cores/

[LottaKash]

I am certainly no expert or anything special at all, when it comes to computers, but wouldn't you have to have software written to take advantage of all those cores ?...

For the average computerist, I don't think that there would be much advantage with 18 cores without the accompanying software to take advantage of all that processing power...

[DJofSD]

The OS takes care of most of the concerns. Various apps used by developers are already written to be able to utilize multiple cores as are a number of compute intense apps which are used by graphic artists and editors. And, there are libraries and techniques available to exploit those cores for developers writing their own apps.

[GameTheory]

I am certainly no expert or anything special at all, when it comes to computers, but wouldn't you have to have software written to take advantage of all those cores ?...

For the average computerist, I don't think that there would be much advantage with 18 cores without the accompanying software to take advantage of all that processing power...
You are likely already using a multi-core computer, and have been for years now. I type this on a 6-core machine, and have another one with 4 cores (but that pretends it has 8 thanks to another technology). Almost all newish software that can benefit from multiple cores already uses it. That's been a major trend of the last 10 years or so -- they stopped making a single CPU as fast as possible (we don't double speed on a single-core basis as often as we used to) but they keep adding more cores so multi-threaded jobs can get done faster and more jobs total can be done at once...

[LottaKash]

Thanks DJofSD, and Game Theory, for the info...I have a better understanding of this point now..

I have an i7 with a Quad Core...

As an aside to that.....Now if only AT&T would upgrade my internet line, I would be in Heaven....I am at the end of the cabinet, and have the slowest internet speed of all clients on my Cabinet line....And they won't put in a new cabinet....Plus, where I live, other than Satellite Service as an alternative, there are no other options for me...(I have words for at&t, but I won't say them here... :D )

[TonyMLake]

http://betanews.com/2015/05/06/intel-releases-xeon-e7-v3-processors-featuring-up-to-18-cores/

What operating system will you be using? Will you be using a server OS?

[DJofSD]

What operating system will you be using? Will you be using a server OS?
I did not say I was building a system. However, for the high end of the chip line, a server is where those high core count chips are intended. And likely they would be something Windows as a part of the Azure infrastructure.

[TonyMLake]

I did not say I was building a system. However, for the high end of the chip line, a server is where those high core count chips are intended. And likely they would be something Windows as a part of the Azure infrastructure.


Yeah, I know. I have three Xeon based servers. I think you'd get a bigger bang for your buck with Linux.

If I built it, I'd put CentOs on it.

I'd run only SSD drives, make sure you got plenty of RAID. Let's say 1+0, hot swappable.

After that, it depends on what you're trying to do. You might benefit from some decent graphic cards, but then again, they might not matter.

I can't imagine IIS even comparing to Linux on utilizing that, but, I'd have to look at it a while to be sure. What EXACTLY would this theoretical machine do?

[MJC922]

To a large extent virtualization and the related licensing of vSphere in the enterprise has driven what you're seeing over the past decade for more and more cores. vSphere licensing is sold by the socket so you will buy a Dell PowerEdge Server for example with dual sockets (two CPUs) you can order it with VMware ESXi already installed on it, installs on a 1 or 2GB tiny SD card, anyway the more cores per CPU the more virtual machines you will be able to host. Rule of thumb awhile back was about 3 VMs per physical core. So you do the math on that, 18 x 2 and you may host 100 or so VMs (windows server OS instances) on one physical server that has two of these 18 core CPUs. Really though, for awhile now the CPUs have not been the bottleneck in the equation, it's the storage subsystems have been the bottleneck, and solid state drive usage in storage arrays is just now starting to gain some momentum to mitigate. You don't host 100 VMs and get any kind of smooth operation on one or two hard drives. You get a SAN or two and on several large RAID-10 arrays you can handle the I/O all of these virtual instances produce concurrently.

[TonyMLake]

To a large extent virtualization and the related licensing of vSphere in the enterprise has driven what you're seeing over the past decade for more and more cores. vSphere licensing is sold by the socket so you will buy a Dell PowerEdge Server for example with dual sockets (two CPUs) you can order it with VMware ESXi already installed on it, installs on a 1 or 2GB tiny SD card, anyway the more cores per CPU the more virtual machines you will be able to host. Rule of thumb awhile back was about 3 VMs per physical core. So you do the math on that, 18 x 2 and you may host 100 or so VMs (windows server OS instances) on one physical server that has two of these 18 core CPUs. Really though, for awhile now the CPUs have not been the bottleneck in the equation, it's the storage subsystems have been the bottleneck, and solid state drive usage in storage arrays is just now starting to gain some momentum to mitigate. You don't host 100 VMs and get any kind of smooth operation on one or two hard drives. You get a SAN or two and on several large RAID-10 arrays you can handle the I/O all of these virtual instances produce concurrently.


I see the network connection as an even worse bottleneck, but, it all depends. With SSD's that systems gonna scream.

As an alternative to VMWare, there is VBox. not as fast, but easy as pie to use.

With this machine under a *nix host, you can run extensions for all guest OSes, so, Windows, Mac, Linux will run UNDER the main kernel, all at once, like VMWARE, probably a little slower in picoseconds hehe...