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...
AMD Will Build 64-bit ARM based Opteron CPUs for Servers, Production in 2014
Last year AMD officially became an ARM licensee, although the deal wasn't publicized at the time. Fast forward to June 2012 and we saw the first fruits of that...
32 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/29/2012Iomega StorCenter NAS Lineup Refresh: 2-bay px2-300d and 4-bay ix4-300d
Iomega's network storage family consists of three lineups: ARM-based EZ single-bay network attached hard disk for home users ARM-based ix series for value-focused consumers x86-based px series for performance-focused consumers (These come...
14 by Ganesh T S on 10/18/2012Boston Viridis ARM Server Gets x86 Binary Translation Support
We covered the launch of the Calxeda-based Boston Viridis ARM server back in July. The server is makings its appearance at the UK IP EXPO 2012. Boston has been...
12 by Ganesh T S & Johan De Gelas on 10/18/2012Synology Launches 12-bay DS2413+ and Wi-Fi Enabled 2-bay DS213air
Synology has been on a tear lately, with product launches happening in quick succession. Approximately a month back, we had the launch of the 2013 2-bay lineup (DS213 and...
13 by Ganesh T S on 10/2/2012Making Sense of the Intel Haswell Transactional Synchronization eXtensions
Intel has released additional information regarding the Transactional Synchronization technology (TSX) inside their upcoming Haswell processor; it's basically an instruction set architecture (ISA) extension to make hardware accelerated transactional...
29 by Johan De Gelas & Cara Hamm on 9/20/2012ioSafe N2: A Disaster Proof NAS with Synology DSM
ioSafe used to manufacture disaster proof NAS solutions / backup appliances such as the ioSafe R4. The R4s used to cost upwards of $10K, weighed more than 120 lbs...
14 by Ganesh T S on 9/18/2012Synology Launches DS413 and DS413j 4-Bay NAS Units
A couple of weeks back, we covered Synology's launch of the 2013 2-bay NAS lineup, the DS213 and the DS213+. The most interesting aspect of the launch was the...
7 by Ganesh T S on 9/18/2012Breaking the SATA Barrier: SATA Express and SFF-8639 Connectors
Pretty much all high-end client SSDs have no issues saturating the current 6Gbps SATA interface. We've talked about a move to PCIe based SSDs but these are the connectors...
20 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/13/2012Intel Developer Forum 2012 - Justin Rattner Keynote Live Blog
The last day of IDF is always reserved for the Intel technology research keynote. This keynote has nothing to do with product announcements, or roadmap updates for the next...
15 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/13/2012Intel's Xeon Phi in 10 Petaflops supercomputer
Intel announced the Xeon Phi ("Knights Corner") a few months ago and bought the Qlogic infiniband team and Cray fabric team to bolster its HPC efforts. A clear signal...
15 by Johan De Gelas on 9/11/2012Ivy Bridge Gets 4K Display Support in October
This October Intel will be providing a driver update for Ivy Bridge that will enable 4K x 2K resolution support as well as hardware accelerated 4K video decode. You'll...
17 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/11/2012Intel's Next Unit of Computing: 4"x4", Core i3, Systems Targeted at $399
Intel tasked its engineers with building the absolute smallest fully featured compute unit possible. The result is something Intel markets as the Next Unit of Computing. This isn't a...
35 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/11/2012Intel Haswell Architecture Slides (IDF 2012)
If you didn't follow our live blog you can check out the first Haswell architecture disclosure slides in the gallery below.
4 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/11/2012Intel Haswell Architecture Disclosure: Live Blog
Intel is about to give us the first architectural details on its 4th generation Core processor microarchitecture, codename Haswell. Follow the live blog for full details as we get them!
42 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/11/2012Intel's Haswell: 20x Lower Platform Idle Power than Sandy Bridge, 2x GPU Performance of Ivy Bridge
If you've been following our IDF Live Blog you've already seen this, but for everyone else - Intel gave us a hint at what Haswell will bring next year...
23 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/11/2012Intel Developer Forum 2012 - Dadi Perlmutter Keynote Live Blog
Today we're trying out something new: a beta version of our new Live Blog engine. As long as WiFi and cellular networks cooperate, we'll be providing live coverage from...
12 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/11/2012AMD Introduces SeaMicro SM15000 with Piledriver and Ivy Bridge Compute Cards
In its first major announcement since the acquisition by AMD, SeaMicro unveiled its SM15000 server. This is an updated version of the standard 10U SeaMicro chassis with 64 compute...
9 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Johan De Gelas on 9/10/2012Building the 2012 AnandTech SMB / SOHO NAS Testbed
The market for network attached storage (NAS) devices has registered huge gains over the last few years. In keeping up with the market trends, the coverage of NAS units...
74 by Ganesh T S on 9/5/2012LRDIMMs, RDIMMs, and Supermicro's Latest Twin
Most of the servers in the datacenter, especially the ones running virtualization, database, and some HPC applications, are more memory limited than anything else. There are several server memory...
26 by Johan De Gelas on 8/3/2012Dell Announces New Precision M4700 and M6700 Mobile Workstations
Today Dell is updating their Precision Mobile Workstation lineup with two new model, the 15.6” M4700 and the 17.3” M6700. Along with Ivy Bridge processors, Dell is adding new...
26 by Jarred Walton on 7/24/2012










