Instead of a dumb rack -- four posts and screw holes in the right places -- you get a blade chassis 72U high. Centralized but redundant power supplies with integrated monitoring and per-feed software control. A built-in KVM. Large slow(er) fans that push more air more efficiently and more quietly, or perhaps a liquid cooling system that provides a clean, standardized disconnect for each component. Assignable resources -- instead of running virtual machines, you run re-configurable real machines, where you start by selecting a number of processors with associated RAM and add in storage.
On the one hand, this will have less in common with consumer hardware, so economies of scale will not be shared. On the other hand, server hardware is already substantially different from high-end consumer hardware, so it's probably not that big a deal.
Heh - I was working with a MIPS processor designer on this exact model of device in 1999 - we basically just sketched out the idea and talked about what it would take to have a fabric rack with a standard set of interconnects so that various vendors could build cards to go into it.
We discussed the challenges of various signaling that would prevent companies from being willing to participate. But this idea is really old.
Is it that different, though? Form factor of the machine/fans is different for a server and the Xeon chips have multiprocessor and ECC support. That's about it, right?
Instead of a dumb rack -- four posts and screw holes in the right places -- you get a blade chassis 72U high. Centralized but redundant power supplies with integrated monitoring and per-feed software control. A built-in KVM. Large slow(er) fans that push more air more efficiently and more quietly, or perhaps a liquid cooling system that provides a clean, standardized disconnect for each component. Assignable resources -- instead of running virtual machines, you run re-configurable real machines, where you start by selecting a number of processors with associated RAM and add in storage.
On the one hand, this will have less in common with consumer hardware, so economies of scale will not be shared. On the other hand, server hardware is already substantially different from high-end consumer hardware, so it's probably not that big a deal.