4 ms·

Why not, then, build a motherboard with many processor slots that can handle the linking then use traditionally sized processors? I don’t have the background he

• jacquesm 7y ago
  That's possible already. But usually it is done at the machine level rather than at the processor level (2, 4 and even 8 slot machines exist but are expensive) once you get over certain limits. The kind of problems people tend to solve on such installations (typically clusters of commodity hardware) are quite different from the kind of programs that you run on your day-to-day machine, think geological analysis, weather prediction and so on. At some point the cost of the interconnect hardware dominates the cost of the CPUs. Lots of parties, for instance Evan Sutherland (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723882) have tried their hand at this, but so far nobody has been able to pull it off successfully. Eventually it will happen though, this is an idea that's too good to remain without sponsors long.
  • cjsawyer 7y ago
    Thanks for the explanation!
  • smueller1234 7y ago
    2 socket servers are actually the norm and dominate datacenters. 4 is still common but usually only done for the ability to address a large amount of RAM in a single machine or niche commercial workloads. 8 socket x86 servers are very unusual.
    • shaklee3 7y ago
      To add context, this is mostly because the numa properties get weird. With 2 sockets all of the inter-socket links can go directly to the other processor, and xeons have 2-3 of those currently. With 4 and 8 you end up having strange memory topologies that has hops that are less predictable unless you know your application was written for it.