[Adium-devl] Hardware plans

[David Smith]

On Aug 19, 2007, at 8:11 AM, Evan Schoenberg wrote:

> Thanks to a -very- generous donor (I don't know yet whether he  
> wants to remain anonymous or not, so I'll keep it that way for  
> now), we have the funds to get an XServe, for which Thomas of  
> Network Redux has awesomely promised us free hosting with rack  
> space.  I think we'll get quite a few tangibles from having a  
> powerful OS X based server. Colin has offered to set up and  
> administer an automated build environment for automatic compilation  
> and testing of commits.  We've discussed previously running a  
> Jabber server for use by Adium developers... and so on.

If we're going to have this much power available I think we should  
brainstorm additional uses. One thing that sounds nifty to me is a  
custom build maker. You'd submit (email?) a patch to the server, and  
it generates a build and sends the download link back. SubEthaEdit  
Server? Would we get any benefit from being able to deploy custom  
Cocoa stuff serverside? Also, 10.5 Server has some rather neat team  
collaboration stuff.

>
> The real question, I think, is timing.  Looking at http:// 
> buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Xserve you can see that it's been 2  
> weeks over a year since the last XServe line refresh by Apple.  My  
> gut is that it's worth waiting a bit - it looks like the next chip  
> for the XServe will most likely be a quad-core chip with some  
> significantly improved performance.  What do y'all think?

Intel is ramping up for the launch of the 45nm shrink of the Xeon on  
November 19th. Improvements are:

45nm manufacturing lowers power consumption/raises clock frequencies  
slightly
"SSE4": some specialized instructions for specific tasks (popcnt),  
plus some to allow for easier automated vectorization
Much faster divide, square root, shuffle instructions
Virtualization performance improvements
50% more L2 cache

Overall expected improvement: ~20%, with some specific applications  
doing much better (DIVX, for example, is MUCH faster)

That said, it's unclear how Apple's plans will interact with this.

After that it'll be fairly dry on the processor front until the  
second half of '08 when the introduce a new architecture.

>
> Finally, does anyone have an ADC Select or Premiere hardware  
> discount they aren't planning to use this year and would be willing  
> to let us use to be able to further upgrade the new machine as we  
> order it, whenever we decide to do that?

Upgrade-wise, do we want to focus on reliability, functionality, or  
performance? i.e. more memory, OSX server, RAID, redundant power  
supplies, etc...


I also agree with Chris's suggestion to investigate multiple minis.  
XServes may not be the optimal choice in this situation.