Performance per watt

It’s good to see Google’s Luiz Andre Barroso bring attention to the performance per watt problem the industry faces. With Apple abandoning PowerPC for next-gen Intel processors supposedly because of Intel’s better perf-per-watt roadmap, and now Google lecturing at the ACM, perhaps the industry really is going to start taking note. Sun’s UltraSparc T1 gets a good plug from Barroso who was apparently working on a similar design at DEC before HP flushed everything good about that company down the crapper. Which is good news if you’re a Sun shareholder since it pretty much solidifies what we already suspected: Google will be a big T1000 customer.

In my shop we’ll continue to run Opteron in most places, but the T1 and ZFS ought to be a pretty solid combo for NFS file serving. It’s attractive enough on paper at least that for the first time in years I’m actually interested in getting a Sparc-based box in for some testing!