Because there is actually very little market for large SMP machines. And those few large SMP machines which are sold are almost never used as large SMP machines, instead being partitioned, either hard or soft, into generally much smaller machines. And that market is further shrinking as core counts per socket expand.The HP Superdome was originally an Unix server up to 64-sockets. HP switched from Itanium cpus, to the x86 cpus. And slapped on Linux ontop and reduced to 16-sockets, apparently. Why did HP not keep 64-sockets? Is that because Linux scales bad? Or "to keep the cost down"?
Money is certainly an issue in this segment. For the most part the large SMP machines are considered by everyone to be fully legacy machines. No one designing a new application system is targeting large SMP machines because they are all cost/performance losers. And as I pointed out, you pricing on the P595 doesn't pass the laugh test, esp since we have historical documented list pricing for a fully configured P595 from the 2008 TPC-C submission that completely disagrees with your statement. And Linux scales fairly well, despite your opinion on the matter.It does not make sense to keep the cost down, as big SMP servers are the highest premium segment costing very many millions. For instance, the old IBM P595 costed $35 million, only 32-sockets. Money is not an issue in this segment. This segment is the most expensive segment, and commands the highest prices. It is like selling the most expensive sports car with plastic interior, to "keep the cost down". Or sell the most expensive car with only 200 horse power effect motor, to "keep the cost down". These things will never happen, if you can afford a million dollar sports car, then you can afford a decent interior or a better engine. Money is not an option. My take is that, because there have never been a large 16-socket Linux server before, Linux must necessarily scale bad. So it would not be a point of selling Linux onto their 64-socket Infinity servers. HP tried to do that before, google "Big Tux Linux", where Linux had utterly bad scaling on 64-socket server with cpu utilization of 40% or so, under full load. HP learned from their lessons, and now repackages their Unix servers with Linux, and decreasing size.
No the largest SMP servers ever released were SGI Origin 2K/3K(MIPS/IRIX based) and SGI Altix 3K/4K(IA64/Linux based) machines supporting upwards of 1024 sockets in fully cache coherence SMP systems. The x86 based successor to these systems the UV 2K and UV 300 systems support up to 256/32 sockets respectively in a single cache coherent SMP system and run Linux. As far as 16 socket x86 servers, IBM had them a decade ago. And yes, they ran Linux.This Linux kernel developer, did not understand that Bonwick (the father of ZFS) talked about SMP servers, and not clusters. There are no 1024 SMP servers out there, and never has been. The largest SMP servers are old Unix servers, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, with 64-sockets (Solaris had a 144-socket server years ago). Linux largest server was 8-sockets until the last year, when HP repackaged their Unix servers to Linux. There never have existed 16-socket Linux servers before, let alone 1024 cpu SMP servers. Lot of ignorance (FUD?) from the Linux camp.
So, while you may be ignorant of the actual history, the reality is that it exists and you can still buy them today if you want.
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