Server upgrade: Successful
 | By Tayler Mayer Sunday, September 9th, 2007 |
Today we upgraded to a new processor chip and also increased the amount of RAM (Random Access Memory) from 1gb to 2gb. The new processor chip is a two core chip, which consumes less electricity, thus produces less heat. A cooler chip means it can run faster and consistently; additionally, the server room doesn’t have to be kept as cool saving on A/C costs. Our move to a Core 2 Duo chip is a statement: we are conscious, or “green”, about our environment. All this while delivering faster webpage loads to you, the visitor and user.
The new processor chip is 237% faster than the old chip.
The upgrade, which caused all of TaylerInfomedia’s websites to be unavailable, took less than 45 minutes. Then at approximately 5:05pm PST, we took it down one more time for a few minutes to upgrade the RAM.
Thanks for your patience! Our fast server just got faster!
September 9th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Glad you’re going green.
Thanks for the alert about the upgrade’s second downtime, btw.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:50 pm
It is incorrect to say that the core chip is “faster.” Clock speed is actually slower than other “pre-core” chips. This is about increased efficiency on sharing the workload. Instead of one pipeline, you have multiple pipelines on a chip to divide up the work load, increasing efficient use of shuttling data around. Increased efficiency means increased performance, which does not necessarily mean it’s faster per se but faster in producing results using “BIPS” – billions instructions per second.
This was like during 1970s and 1980s when MPP (Massively Parallel Processor) computers came out that had the same idea but it was at the size of computers and not chips which were single pipeline chips anyway. Now, it has shrunk down to the size of computer chips. Amazing!!
Core chips will be the way to go. Next year Core 8 or 16 will be available with the goal to add 1000s of cores on a single chip where by 2014 they say will have chips that can do 10 trillions instructions per second. Talk about burning rubber.
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