| Khuutra said: Stuff's about to start going bananas, isn't it? I don't even know what the practical application of this stuff means! |
The practical application is HUGE for server virtualization.
Right now, the company I work for is using a system I designed & configured in which we have six servers that would traditionally each be installed on their own physical piece of hardware, that are instead virtualized on one badass hardware server. This server is running dual, quad core CPUs (for a total of 8 cores) and 3 RAID1 arrays using Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. We are able to run all six servers with a total of 12 virtual processors on a single hardware server that only has 8 physical processor cores without any slowdown, this is because VMWare uses something called Virtual Symetric Multiprocessing to schedule out clock requests across all CPU cores.
With a total of 24 processor cores (12 per physical processor) and a ton of memory, you could theoretically run as many as 12-16 (or more) virtual servers on one physical machine, each with two virtual processors, without any siginificant slowdown (assuming your storage device can keep up with this). The cost savings are tremendous for enterprise server virtualization, but have few benefits outside of this application vs a standard quad core processor configuration. Desktop applications wouldn't see a huge boost because they will most likely not be programmed with 24-32 CPU cores in mind.
Now just imagine a quad processor server, with each processor having 16 cores. That's 64 processor cores on one piece of hardware, holy crap! Add in 128GB of RAM and just imagine how much you could do with that.
EDIT: The power savings are also incredible, if you can virtualize 12 or more traditional hardware servers onto a single server, the financial savings as well as the reduced impact on the environment are great.
