Two of the previous three posts I've made about our upgraded server infrastructure have focused on performance. In the second post I talked about the performance (and reliability) benefits of going with our all-SSD architecture, while in the third post I talked about the increase in CPU performance between our old and new infrastructures. Today however, it's time to focus on power consumption. Our old server infrastructure came from a time where power consumption mattered, but it hadn't yet been prioritized. This was before Nehalem's 2:1 rule (2% perf increase for every 1% power increase), and it was before power gating. Once again I turned to our old HP DL585 server with four AMD Opteron 880s (8-cores total) as an example of just how things...
Inside AnandTech 2013: CPU Performance
Last week I kicked off a short series on the hardware behind our current network infrastructure. In the first post I presented a high level overview of the hardware...
21 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/15/2013Calxeda's ARM server tested
ARM based servers hold the promise of extremely low power and excellent performance per Watt ratios. It's possible to place an incredible amount of servers into a single rack—there...
99 by Johan De Gelas on 3/12/2013Inside AnandTech 2013: All-SSD Architecture
When it comes to server hardware failures, I've seen them all with our own infrastructure. With the exception of CPUs, I've seen virtually every other component that could fail...
54 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/12/2013Inside AnandTech 2013: The Hardware
By the end of 2010 we realized two things. First, the server infrastructure that powered AnandTech was getting very old and we were seeing an increase in component failures...
15 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/12/2013QNAP Introduces Atom-based 12-bay TS-1269U-RP Rackmount NAS
QNAP's flagship NAS lineup, the TS-ECx79U-RP, checks all the boxes for a high performance enterprise NAS in a rackmount form factor for high end SMBs. These include quad GbE...
9 by Ganesh T S on 3/4/2013The new Opteron 6300: Finally Tested!
AMD unveiled their Opteron 6300 series server processors, code name Abu Dhabi, back in November 2012. At that time, no review samples were available. The numbers that AMD presented...
54 by Johan De Gelas on 2/20/2013Fusion-io Launches ioScale for Hyperscale Market
We haven't even had time to cover everything we saw at CES last week, but there are already more product announcements coming in. Fusion-io launched their new ioScale product...
15 by Kristian Vättö on 1/17/2013OpenCompute servers and AMD Open 3.0
Remember our review of Facebook's first OpenCompute Server? Facebook designed a server for their own purposes, but quickly released all the specs to the community. The result was a...
10 by Johan De Gelas on 1/16/2013Behind the Scenes of AnandTech's Server Tests [Video]
We've been quietly testing doing more video content on the site over the past year. I've done a few reviews over at our YouTube channel, and we also host...
30 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/18/2012Updating the 2012 AnandTech SMB / SOHO NAS Testbed
In early September, we published a piece detailing our SMB / SOHO NAS testbed. Subsequently, we received extensive feedback from readers regarding the testbed as well as the proposed...
24 by Ganesh T S on 11/29/2012AnandTech/Intel S3700 Roundtable Discussion & Webcast Videos Live
Intel invited me to attend SC12 and participate in a webcast for the launch of its new DC S3700 SSD. I joined Roger Peene from Intel's SSD Solutions and...
33 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/16/2012The Xeon Phi at work at TACC
The Xeon Phi family of co-processors was announced in June, but Intel finally disclosed additional details about the first shipping implementation of Larrabee. In this short article we'll go...
47 by Johan De Gelas on 11/14/2012Synology Launches SAS-Enabled Flagship 10-bay 2U RS10613xs+ NAS and RX1213sas Expander
Synology is a well respected brand in the low to mid-range NAS market. However, they missed a high-end flagship in their lineup to compete against products such as the...
3 by Ganesh T S on 11/13/2012Titan Takes #1 Spot on Top500 List with 17.59 Petaflops in LINPACK
Last month I took a tour of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and visited the final stages of the assembly of the Titan supercomputer. Titan brings together 18,688 compute nodes...
20 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/12/2012The Intel SSD DC S3700 (200GB) Review
When Intel arrived on the scene with its first SSD, it touted superiority in controller, firmware and NAND as the reason it was able to so significantly outperform the...
29 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2012The Intel SSD DC S3700: Intel's 3rd Generation Controller Analyzed
Today Intel is announcing its first SSD based on its own custom 6Gbps SATA controller. This new controller completely abandons the architecture of the old X25-M/320/710 SSDs and adopts...
43 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/5/2012AMD Launches Opteron 6300 series with "Piledriver" cores
Today AMD unveiled its new Opteron 6300 series server processors, code name "Abu Dhabi". The Opteron 6300 contains the new Piledriver cores, an evolutionary improvement of the Bulldozer cores. We...
22 by Johan De Gelas on 11/5/2012Inside the Titan Supercomputer: 299K AMD x86 Cores and 18.6K NVIDIA GPUs
Earlier this month I drove out to Oak Ridge, Tennessee to pay a visit to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). I'd never been to a national lab before...
129 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/31/2012ARM's Cortex A57 and Cortex A53: The First 64-bit ARMv8 CPU Cores
Yesterday AMD revealed that in 2014 it would begin production of its first ARMv8 based 64-bit Opteron CPUs. At the time we didn't know what core AMD would use...
114 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/30/2012

















