ZDNet

Any experts care to explain what this means?

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), February 18, 2000

Answers

It's unclear to me what the ramifications are but I think Intel is underestimating the number of low-end 'economy servers' in use in production environments. Why do I say this?

Because one way to achieve a modicum of stability in a Windows server environment is to avoid the 'big iron' approach - i.e. rather than load all your services onto one single expensive mega-machine, you run a single function on an inexpensive low end machine. This is almost opposite of the approach frequently taken in the UNIX enviroment - UNIX is clearly better at running multiple processes simultaneously while maintaining stability. Linux (a specific flavor of UNIX) may change this however because Linux is less expensive than Windows server. Linux is clearly gaining ground in the Internet server arena.

The inexpensive server/ single application approach is how we do our DNS, email, network monitoring, et al. on Windows servers and have found it excellent from a stability standpoint - we literally have not rebooted our DNS server machines for several months (though we do regularly restart the DNS processes each time a DNS update is made).

Web servers however, are bit of a different story.

Given Intel's past experience with the infamous floating point processing error on the first generation of Pentiums, I'd look for them to be much more proactive on this one.

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), February 18, 2000.

Thanks, Arnie. I'm moving to Linux myself. :)

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), February 18, 2000.

Sounds to me like a "slip-up" that will conveniently force users to buy only the higher cost systems using RDRAM. I'm sure that Intel is really crying over that coincidence.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), February 18, 2000.