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by bcantrill 416 days ago
Niagara did not shape design decisions at all -- remember that Niagara was really only doing on a single socket what we had already done on large SMP machines (e.g., Starfire/Starcat). What did shape design decisions -- or at least informed thinking -- was a belief that all main memory would be non-volatile within the lifespan of ZFS. (Still possible, of course!) I don't know that there are any true artifacts of that within ZFS, but I would say that it affected thinking much more than Niagara.

As for Thumper using Opteron over Niagara: that was due to many reasons, both technological (Niagara was interesting but not world-beating) and organizational (Thumper was a result of the acquisition of Kealia, which was independently developing on AMD).

1 comments

Thanks. I had been unaware of the Starfire/Starcat machines.