Besides compressing network traffic, hardware compression could be interesting for applications like zram--somewhat expands what you can store in RAM with (perhaps surprisingly?) less random page-read latency than even an SSD.
Besides compressing network traffic, hardware compression could be interesting for applications like zram--somewhat expands what you can store in RAM with (perhaps surprisingly?) less random page-read latency than even an SSD.
Of course they'll tend to pick cases where it helps a lot, but they claimed 50% wall time and 25% power savings on a Hadoop job, and they emulate the zlib API.
If I'm reading right this was with a Sandy Bridge-based Xeon; time saved by the coprocessor could be greater when the CPU is slower.
Really interesting--thanks for the pointer.
Maybe for like... $1000... AMD would have a solid offering. But $3000 for this? Really?
http://www.serversdirect.com/Components/Motherboards/id-MB46...
Oct-core Atom, Integrated IPMI, 4xGBe ports for $360. And since it is an x86 platform, you don't have any software migration issues.
This is a dev kit not a commercial offering...