<div dir="ltr"><div>Scott, Evan, Nathan</div><div>those are some really thought provoking answers.</div><div>Evans point about cloud providers is especially interesting - as we are seeing more and more Openstack being used in private clouds , to create clusters 'on demand' we should be aware of this.</div><div><br></div><div>And regarding the point "I'm not an expert in fab economics, but I don't believe it would not significantly add to production costs."</div><div>Errr... I admit my ignorance too, though I should know a lot more as I am currently working with ASML - who make advanced semiconductor lithography machines! </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 26 July 2017 at 00:20, Nathan Moore <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ntmoore@gmail.com" target="_blank">ntmoore@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid"><div dir="ltr"><div><br>Re: having a specialized, low-power core, this is clearly something that's already been successful in the mobile device space. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE" target="_blank">big.LITTLE</a> ARM architecture is designed for this kind of thing and has been quite successful. Certainly, now that Intel and AMD are really designing modular SoC-like products, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to bake in a couple of low power x86 cores (e.g. Atom or Xeon-D + larger Skylake die in Intel's case; Jaguar + Zen in AMD's case). I'm not an expert in fab economics, but I don't believe it would not significantly add to production costs.</div></div></blockquote><div> </div></span><div>T<font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">he</font><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> "textbook" answer to integrated circuit manufacturing is that there need be no dependence of device cost on number of gates/device complexity. Fundamentally, you're just printing/etching a slightly more complicated mask on a circuit board. The number of gates and the probability of defects are probably proportional - didn't AMD sell 6 and 3 core processors for a while? I always assumed those were 4 or 8 core procs that had critical defects in one of the cores. Sorry, no first-hand knowledge though. </font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Jim Lux probably knows the real answer. </font></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Nathan</div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid"><div dir="ltr"><div></div></div></blockquote></font></span></div><div class="m_7647414525144804535gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div></div></div></div>
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