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The dominant use case for the last decade or so has been web servers hitting caches to do low-CPU low-causality CRUD operations. That looks unlikely to change in the next decade, so keep your Intel stock. That said, for a lot of interesting use cases, like that king-hell postgres database sitting in the middle of the swarm, or video processing, or streams processing, or indeed any situation in which thousands-to-millions of simultaneous actors need to work on the same shared state, this sort of system starts looking real interesting. As a thought experiment, think of this system like a GPU, except every single processor is a fully capable 2 GHz i5 running Unix, and instead of having to deal with the CUDA or OpenCL API, you can just write erlang (or haskell; .. or whatever) code and it will run. And instead of having 2-8G of RAM, you have 48G. And instead of having arcane debug tools, you have recon and gdb and ddd. I don't think there is a pendulum, I think there's a spectrum and has always been one; pragmatism should always rule, and your use case is not my use case. There isn't going to be an objective winner ever, no matter how close Intel may get to covering much of the sweet spot. |