My experience was a bit different. I first saw a Starfire when we were deploying a bunch of Linux servers in the DC. The Sun machine was brilliant, fast, enormous, and far more expensive per unit of work than these little x86 boxes we were carting in.
The Starfire started at around $800K. Our Linux servers started at around $1K. The Sun box was not 800x faster at anything than a single x86 box.
It was an impressive example of what I considered the wrong road. I think history backs me on this one.
> It’s a bit sad that nobody gives a shit about performance any more.
Everyone gives a shit about performance at some point, but the answer is horizontal scaling. You can’t vertically scale a single machine to run a FAANG. At a certain vertical scale, it starts to look a helluva lot like horizontal scaling (“how many CPUs for this container? How many drives?”), except in a single box with finite and small limits.
The Starfire started at around $800K. Our Linux servers started at around $1K. The Sun box was not 800x faster at anything than a single x86 box.
It was an impressive example of what I considered the wrong road. I think history backs me on this one.
> It’s a bit sad that nobody gives a shit about performance any more.
Everyone gives a shit about performance at some point, but the answer is horizontal scaling. You can’t vertically scale a single machine to run a FAANG. At a certain vertical scale, it starts to look a helluva lot like horizontal scaling (“how many CPUs for this container? How many drives?”), except in a single box with finite and small limits.