“Transmeta founder Dave Ditzel says we can expect servers with
hundreds of Crusoe CPUs later this year. But the dedicated, small
form factor boxen won’t look anything like today’s SMP kit – even
though Ditzel and partner in crime Gary Stimac (who pioneered
Compaq’s server business and has launched a start-up to OEM
Transmeta servers) were SMP pioneers.”
“We thought people want to scale to hundreds of CPUs, and
almost all of the software out there like webservers already scales
that way,” he told us at the LinuxWorld Expo in New York.
“It’s parallel processing but not symmetric shared
memory,” he says. “And that adds – remember I was at Sun
Microsystems for a lot of years – huge cost as well as delay
introductions by probably more than a year. So the advantage you
get from getting a system into the market a year sooner more than
compensates any advantage you get from the SMP programming
style.”
“Instead, the Crusoe servers will be based on simple message
passing parallel processing MPP, as used by say Beowulf and
other technical, stateless clusters.”