5 ms·

Depends on whether there's market demand. If there's something useful about having 32 32-core chiplets connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lane

by dsr_ 7y ago

Depends on whether there's market demand. If there's something useful about having 32 32-core chiplets connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM, that could happen. But getting all that compute logic coordinated in one place might not be that economically desirable compared to offloading to GPU-style specialized parallel processors, or building better coordination software to run distributed systems, or...

eloff 7y ago
Bigger servers just get divided up into more VMs. As long as it's cost effective to scale vertically, it will continue to happen at the cloud platform level.
- zrm 7y ago
  It'll be interesting to see what these high core count servers do to The Cloud though. Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of single and dual-core servers in their offices that cost half a million dollars and consumed >10KW of electricity day and night. That made it attractive to put everything in the cloud -- spend $250K on cloud services instead of $500K on local hardware and you're ahead. But their loads haven't necessarily changed a lot since then, and we're now at the point where you can replace that whole rack with a single one of these high core count beasts with capacity to spare. Then you're back to having the latency and bandwidth of servers on the same LAN as your users instead of having to go out to the internet, not having to pay for bandwidth (on both ends), not having to maintain a separate network infrastructure for The Cloud that uses different systems and interfaces than the ones you use for your offices, etc. People might soon figure out that it's now less expensive to buy one local server once every five years.
  - eloff 7y ago
    I think it's always been vastly cheaper for the hardware. But it gets more complex when you look at the TCO. With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. Although now probably everyone is running their own mini cloud with kubernetes, even in the cloud - and that should make it relatively cheap. Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. I'd say always start with the cloud, and you'll know if or when you could do (part) of it cheaper yourself.
    - zrm 7y ago
      > With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. That doesn't really change much when the difference is a four figure sum spread over five years. > Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. Would it really take a full time position to maintain two physical servers? That's a day or two for initial installation and configuration which gets amortized over the full lifetime, OS updates managed by the same system you need in any case for the guests, maybe an hour a year if you get a power supply or drive failure. If the maintenance on two physical machines add up to a full week out of the year for the person already maintaining the guests, something has gone terribly wrong. Which itself gets balanced against the time it would take the same person to configure and interact with the cloud vendor's provisioning system -- probably not a huge difference in the time commitment. > And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. Most companies will do about the same business this year as they did last year plus or minus a few percent, so it's really the common case. And if you unexpectedly grow 200% one year then you use some of that unexpected revenue to buy a third server. Where the scalability could really help is if you could grow 200,000% overnight, but that's not really a relevant scenario to your average company operating a shopping mall or a steel mill.
      - eloff 7y ago
        Certainly if you have someone already on the payroll who can take responsibility for the hardware part time, that makes it a lot cheaper. That's a different skill set though, so it's not true for every company. With respect to changing workloads, I wasn't thinking so much about scale, which I think isn't that hard to plan for, but more about changing requirements. If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound. Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM So, basically a mainframe on a chip? Honestly, how would that work? Is all that memory coherent? There are a couple of reasons why mainframes cost so much, and some of them are technical. I keep expecting servers to evolve into a multi-CPU non-coherent RAM, but the industry keeps doubling down on coherent RAM¹. At some point servers will turn into a single-board blade hack (that you can mount on a blade hack, piled on a hack), I wonder for how long CPU designers can sustain our current architecture. 1 - Turns out people working full time on the problem have more insight on it than me, go figure.

by dsr_ 7y ago

eloff 7y ago

Bigger servers just get divided up into more VMs. As long as it's cost effective to scale vertically, it will continue to happen at the cloud platform level.

zrm 7y ago
It'll be interesting to see what these high core count servers do to The Cloud though. Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of single and dual-core servers in their offices that cost half a million dollars and consumed >10KW of electricity day and night. That made it attractive to put everything in the cloud -- spend $250K on cloud services instead of $500K on local hardware and you're ahead. But their loads haven't necessarily changed a lot since then, and we're now at the point where you can replace that whole rack with a single one of these high core count beasts with capacity to spare. Then you're back to having the latency and bandwidth of servers on the same LAN as your users instead of having to go out to the internet, not having to pay for bandwidth (on both ends), not having to maintain a separate network infrastructure for The Cloud that uses different systems and interfaces than the ones you use for your offices, etc. People might soon figure out that it's now less expensive to buy one local server once every five years.
- eloff 7y ago
  I think it's always been vastly cheaper for the hardware. But it gets more complex when you look at the TCO. With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. Although now probably everyone is running their own mini cloud with kubernetes, even in the cloud - and that should make it relatively cheap. Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. I'd say always start with the cloud, and you'll know if or when you could do (part) of it cheaper yourself.
  - zrm 7y ago
    > With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. That doesn't really change much when the difference is a four figure sum spread over five years. > Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. Would it really take a full time position to maintain two physical servers? That's a day or two for initial installation and configuration which gets amortized over the full lifetime, OS updates managed by the same system you need in any case for the guests, maybe an hour a year if you get a power supply or drive failure. If the maintenance on two physical machines add up to a full week out of the year for the person already maintaining the guests, something has gone terribly wrong. Which itself gets balanced against the time it would take the same person to configure and interact with the cloud vendor's provisioning system -- probably not a huge difference in the time commitment. > And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. Most companies will do about the same business this year as they did last year plus or minus a few percent, so it's really the common case. And if you unexpectedly grow 200% one year then you use some of that unexpected revenue to buy a third server. Where the scalability could really help is if you could grow 200,000% overnight, but that's not really a relevant scenario to your average company operating a shopping mall or a steel mill.
    - eloff 7y ago
      Certainly if you have someone already on the payroll who can take responsibility for the hardware part time, that makes it a lot cheaper. That's a different skill set though, so it's not true for every company. With respect to changing workloads, I wasn't thinking so much about scale, which I think isn't that hard to plan for, but more about changing requirements. If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound. Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it.

marcosdumay 7y ago

> connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM So, basically a mainframe on a chip? Honestly, how would that work? Is all that memory coherent? There are a couple of reasons why mainframes cost so much, and some of them are technical. I keep expecting servers to evolve into a multi-CPU non-coherent RAM, but the industry keeps doubling down on coherent RAM¹. At some point servers will turn into a single-board blade hack (that you can mount on a blade hack, piled on a hack), I wonder for how long CPU designers can sustain our current architecture. 1 - Turns out people working full time on the problem have more insight on it than me, go figure.