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Bert22306
Yes indeed, good for Quanta, bad for Dell and HP, eh? None of this is surprising ...
escher
HP and Dell have created their own Frankenstein monster, which now has the ...
Taiwanese server makers outflanking traditional OEMs
Rick Merritt
2/14/2013 3:01 AM EST
Keep the silicon simple
Quanta echoes its customers in wanting simpler hardware. Google led the way for big data centers by designing its own stripped-down servers that eliminated unwanted features and interfaces. Facebook has followed and extended the trend, promoting it as an ad hoc standard through its Open Compute Project.
"The semiconductors we are adopting now are still too feature rich," Yang said. "For instance, they typically have more USB ports and PCI Express lanes than we need--we have to pay the cost and power consumption of those ports even if we don’t use them."
As for ARM server SoCs, "I don’t think there’s any future" for the 32-bit chips out today, he said. For the 64-bit parts coming this year and next, "my engineering team is evaluating them now, collecting data from all the vendors, so we will have more detail in another quarter or two," he said.
Similarly, Yang takes a wait-and-see attitude on the use of flash as a new high performance tier in server memory. The focus on cost at big data centers makes flash a difficult sell, he said.
Related stories:
Quanta echoes its customers in wanting simpler hardware. Google led the way for big data centers by designing its own stripped-down servers that eliminated unwanted features and interfaces. Facebook has followed and extended the trend, promoting it as an ad hoc standard through its Open Compute Project.
"The semiconductors we are adopting now are still too feature rich," Yang said. "For instance, they typically have more USB ports and PCI Express lanes than we need--we have to pay the cost and power consumption of those ports even if we don’t use them."
As for ARM server SoCs, "I don’t think there’s any future" for the 32-bit chips out today, he said. For the 64-bit parts coming this year and next, "my engineering team is evaluating them now, collecting data from all the vendors, so we will have more detail in another quarter or two," he said.
Similarly, Yang takes a wait-and-see attitude on the use of flash as a new high performance tier in server memory. The focus on cost at big data centers makes flash a difficult sell, he said.
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rick.merritt
2/14/2013 11:09 AM EST
How do you see the server business shifting in the cloud era?
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marcopol
2/15/2013 7:43 AM EST
To me this seems to be a general drawback of outsourcing the manufacturing and the know-how to an ODM. In long term, you rise a competitor.
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rick.merritt
2/15/2013 11:19 AM EST
Indeed contacts at HP bewail the fact the few systems engineering experts they have in servers are approaching retirement age.
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FuturePlus
2/15/2013 3:57 PM EST
All's I know is that memory DIMM failures for these big cloud servers is the #2 failure in the data center. Not only do they need simplier IC's but more reliable memory subsystems.
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rick.merritt
2/15/2013 4:41 PM EST
Whats the problem with the DIMM failures as far as you have heard?
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przemek
2/15/2013 5:18 PM EST
Funny because there was a recent article on Japanese DRAM industry, failing because they insisted on high-overhead manufacturing and testing for quality, and being undercut by competition which adopted shortcuts. I guess the chicken are coming home to roost.
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escher
2/17/2013 8:20 PM EST
HP and Dell have created their own Frankenstein monster, which now has the advantage of knowing more about making their products than the OEMs do (ref: Ricks comment about HP systems experts retiring with no one to take their place).
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Bert22306
2/18/2013 2:01 AM EST
Yes indeed, good for Quanta, bad for Dell and HP, eh? None of this is surprising though, right?
Now, how about Foxconn/Apple? I that the next article we'll be reading along these lines?
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