Apple is expected to introduce new rack mountable servers today at 9:00 am pacific time. Possibly another product as well. We'll be watching.
Well it sure is nice looking. Check out the hot pluggable hard drives (4!) That means you can plug one in without restarting the machine (can you remove one on the fly as well?) It's supremely slick the way the whole thing slides out so you can get at the insides - you don't even have to remove any of the cables which stay attached in the back. That's some nice work. Very typical of Apple.
On the technical side it's nice, but as usual not quite what the high end people were hoping for. Sure it has PC2100 DDR SDRAM, but the frontside bus is still at 133 mhz. My guess is that this means the performance improvement from the DDR memory will be only slight. At least one message board speculator suggested that in the dual processor configuration each processor somehow had the full 133 mhz bus bandwidth to memory with no contention. Not sure if that is possible (doesn't seem like it, but what do I know?)
In any case, these should sell well inside Apple's niche markets. I don't think apple would release this unless they already had a certain number of sales lined up. Bio-tech, hollywood, and to some extent education seem like the key markets. If your software is altivec enabled (video stuff and gene sequencing seem like the top two applications) then these things will rock. Otherwise it's kind of hard to see why anyone would shell out the extra cash for these over the basic linux on x86 server.
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- jim 5-14-2002 6:00 pm
Well it sure is nice looking. Check out the hot pluggable hard drives (4!) That means you can plug one in without restarting the machine (can you remove one on the fly as well?) It's supremely slick the way the whole thing slides out so you can get at the insides - you don't even have to remove any of the cables which stay attached in the back. That's some nice work. Very typical of Apple.
On the technical side it's nice, but as usual not quite what the high end people were hoping for. Sure it has PC2100 DDR SDRAM, but the frontside bus is still at 133 mhz. My guess is that this means the performance improvement from the DDR memory will be only slight. At least one message board speculator suggested that in the dual processor configuration each processor somehow had the full 133 mhz bus bandwidth to memory with no contention. Not sure if that is possible (doesn't seem like it, but what do I know?)
In any case, these should sell well inside Apple's niche markets. I don't think apple would release this unless they already had a certain number of sales lined up. Bio-tech, hollywood, and to some extent education seem like the key markets. If your software is altivec enabled (video stuff and gene sequencing seem like the top two applications) then these things will rock. Otherwise it's kind of hard to see why anyone would shell out the extra cash for these over the basic linux on x86 server.
- jim 5-15-2002 5:45 pm