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The pain and promise of x86 servers

Advances in x86 server technology have been relentless. Year-on-year improvements in price-performance and advances in power efficiency have driven down the costs of commodity-based infrastructure. At the other end of the spectrum, you can now pretty much build your own virtual supercomputer or mainframe with modern x86 clusters …

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Anonymous Coward
Go

Another interesting question

is what role x86 is playing (and how that role is developing) in the products & services developed (and/or sold) by Reg readership.

-tim
Go

Real security?

Can we get any x86 thing to deal with access control properly? Many new chips work 3/4 of the time but allow full access to other stuff 1/4 of the time. Makes me secure with putting my stuff on the "cloud"

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
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I don't understand

Can you explain the meaning of access control, and what 'Many new chips work 3/4 of the time but allow full access to other stuff 1/4 of the time' means.

taeverso

Anonymous Coward
WTF?

Ummm @-tim WTF

Haven't a clue as to your complaints about proper access contril only 75% of the time. Do elaborate.

Henry Wertz 1

Access control

@-tim, different OS I guess? Access control is really not a function of the chip. x86 (since 386) has had memory protection and virtual memory (actually since 286, but not fully featured then.) Really that's all you need for enforced access control.

Anyway, I'm really in the category of "accumulated" hardware at home though. I have an Atom netbook, a P4-3.0, and 3 or 4 other systems, the *newest* of those has an Athlon XP 2200+. Thank goodness Ubuntu and gentoo's system requirements don't keep bloating like some systems I could name.

Tony Reeves 1

What About The Important Servers

How about a similar study on real servers, the ones running UNIX, that do most of the real work.

Matt Bryant
Boffin
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RE: What About The Important Servers

I suppose the "real servers" are a pretty-much known quantity, whereas all the vendors (and the industry analysts) are really interested in what's being done with x86/64 and how it's moving into new areas. After all, the x64 server market is growing whilst the UNIX server market is shrinking.

dz-015

Not exactly related, but...

... what happened to the reader study about increasing adoption of Apple stuff in the workplace? I never saw the results of that appear anywhere and I was curious.

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