When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · January
· · · · 27 (2 entries)
Happy · It’s like this: you get a slightly-scary physical symptom and you go and tell your doctor and she frowns and says “well, we better run some tests and make a date with a specialist”, and you go to the specialist and he works you over and looks at the tests and says “yeah, that’s a weird one, it happens sometimes, we don’t know why, it might happen again, it won’t hurt you, don’t worry about it.”
Laptops and Servers · It just dawned on me that in a desk-side box, heat is not a major problem because it’s got a room to cool it off, usually without too many other computers in it. Laptops, however, are like back-room “mainframe” servers in that heat is a big deal. In the one case you’re worried about your users’ gonads and in the other your HVAC budget, but the problem is the same. Right now, the heat budget is a big concern for the guys at Sun who design our biggest servers. It’s no secret that our throughput computing initiative is partly about this: lower clock speeds, more cores, thread-level parallelism. Am I predicting that laptops with SPARC processors will be leaping off the shelves next quarter? I wouldn’t go that far. But I am smelling converging design spaces.
