4 ms·

It depends on so many factors (hosting costs, design/availability of motherboards/servers, workload easily parallelizable across multiple servers, etc) But Int

by mrb 9y ago

It depends on so many factors (hosting costs, design/availability of motherboards/servers, workload easily parallelizable across multiple servers, etc) But Intel does the same. The 2-socket http://ark.intel.com/products/91768/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2697A-v4-40M-Cache-2_60-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/91768/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-... is superior in every single aspect to the 4-socket https://ark.intel.com/products/93796/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-4660-v4-40M-Cache-2_20-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/93796/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5... but yet the 4-socket CPU is priced 1.6× higher...

GordonS 9y ago
> The 2-socket... is superior in every single aspect to the 4-socket... Except density :) If both Intel and AMD do this, then I guess data centre admins do see the increase in density as worth the extra cost. Does this increase in density have yet more additional cost implications in terms of cooling?
- dom0 9y ago
  8S and 4S servers (or even bigger systems) have always been extremely expensive; 2S has been the norm for many years. Being able to stuff two 2S nodes in 1U pretty much negates the density advantage of a 4S system, without the quadratic increase in price that a scaled-up systems have. (Also, density is usually limited by power dissipation, so the lowered power efficiency of bigger systems becomes an additional con there.)
djsumdog 9y ago
If you have limited physical space, I can see taking the premium in cost for things like storage or CPU power. Larger data centres also have the capital to spend to squeeze out the cost of those components.
sliken 9y ago
Heh, except for the most important part of having twice the performance, twice the cores, and twice the ram inside a single node with a single kernel. Not all tasks can be split across nodes. If you need 4TB in ram you have to get the more expensive quad socket CPU.

by mrb 9y ago

GordonS 9y ago

> The 2-socket... is superior in every single aspect to the 4-socket... Except density :) If both Intel and AMD do this, then I guess data centre admins do see the increase in density as worth the extra cost. Does this increase in density have yet more additional cost implications in terms of cooling?

dom0 9y ago
8S and 4S servers (or even bigger systems) have always been extremely expensive; 2S has been the norm for many years. Being able to stuff two 2S nodes in 1U pretty much negates the density advantage of a 4S system, without the quadratic increase in price that a scaled-up systems have. (Also, density is usually limited by power dissipation, so the lowered power efficiency of bigger systems becomes an additional con there.)

djsumdog 9y ago

If you have limited physical space, I can see taking the premium in cost for things like storage or CPU power. Larger data centres also have the capital to spend to squeeze out the cost of those components.

sliken 9y ago

Heh, except for the most important part of having twice the performance, twice the cores, and twice the ram inside a single node with a single kernel. Not all tasks can be split across nodes. If you need 4TB in ram you have to get the more expensive quad socket CPU.