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New x86 8U servers with 32TB RAM, 480 physical cores, 15 PCIe x16 slots, 400GbE
- its_a_random_ac 3y agoKinda of crazy, my first computer had a million times less ram than this.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> Kinda of crazy, my first computer had a million times less ram than this. My first computer had a billion times less RAM than this: not even 32 KB (16 KB actually). My everyday computer has 2 million times the RAM of my first computer (16 KB vs 32 GB). And now we're waiting for the real dinosaurs here to comment!
- diarrhea 3y agoMy first computer had RAM.
- retrac 3y agoWhat gets me is how it has made all my intuitions about how to program incorrect with time. And I'm no dinosaur. I started with an old obsolete machine with 128 KB. I remember getting a hand-me-down PC with a 486 (virtual memory at last!) and 16 megabytes of RAM and I couldn't imagine how I could ever use that much memory, besides for multimedia. Still hard to imagine, sometimes. How long to sort a vector of 1 million simple elements? Intuition says about a minute, but it's milliseconds. How big a working set before cache thrashing? My intuition is attuned to single-digit kilobytes, but it's multi-digit megabytes now.
- imtringued 3y agoWhy would intuition say that sorting 4MB of data is slow? Assuming the worst case with 4 billion elements: log_2(4 billion) = 32 So 128 billion operations or 500GB of memory read and writes if everything is touched only once. Anything below that is peanuts. You need unimaginably large numbers to make sorting slow. How am I going to find that much data?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThere are also similar products being introduced by HPE, Dell, Supermicro, etc... Posted here since it's pretty surprising how far commodity x86 servers have come. For example, there are very few scenarios I can think of where even large startups would need more then 32TB of DDR5-4800 RAM or more then a few 400G Ethernet links on a single system.
- jeffbee 3y agoAs the marketing states, this isn't targeted to startups of any size, or any other organization capable of writing software. It has exactly one application: SAP HANA. SAP is a large and valuable company with many users of their terrible program, reputed to be among the worst programs ever perpetrated, which is nevertheless quite widespread.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt's very likely there will be some customers not running HANA shops. But anyways, whomever buys them, it probably has a small overlap with the average HN reader. So it's meant as an illustrative example in a familiar context. EDIT: Then again it's possible someone might buy it for personal use, e.g. if someone has multiple terabytes of spreadsheets that they need to work on simultaneously.
- doublerabbit 3y agoI'd buy one just for bragging rights. Why not have 32TB? I can think of many ways, use it as a ramdisk NAS, minecraft game servers..
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThat's a good point. Also, 32TB of memory is just barely enough for customers who want to surf online with half a million chrome tabs open.
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- wmf 3y agoIt's 480 cores. Typo?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoYup, just edited, thanks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 3y agoWith 32TB of ram it looks appealing to not even bother with a RDBMS and just use a full text database and keep everything in memory lol.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt's not Big Data until it's over 32TB now! (or 64TB if your a Power10 user)
- at_a_remove 3y agoYou laugh but I have done some crazy speedups via ramdisk techniques.
- doublerabbit 3y agoEarly Minecraft for one.
- tomsmeding 3y agoIf your data is mutable, as in most situations where one uses a database, you still have to hit the disk for writes and wait for a disk sync before continuing after the writes. Reads are indeed fast, but a proper RDBMS will instantly use all of that memory capacity for caching anyway, meaning that you get the same read speeds even with the RDBMS. No need to change your code.
- endisneigh 3y agoThere are certain algorithms that are more used on in memory data structures that could be leveraged and never touch disk, not just simply boosting a relational database. That being said my post was somewhat in jest
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoIf all that 15 PCIe x16 could be used for CXL at PCIe 5.0 speeds, that'd be just shy of 1TBps of attached memory, and one could hypothetically scale out to whatever size one wanted too. Samsung dropped a 256GB CXL memory drive quite recently. These numbers should keep climbing and climbing. Very early days still yes. Sure does seem like in-memory will be enough for most users soon. And CXL 3.0 introduces switching. So multiple servers can connect to the same memory device. Tons of interesting options to revise how things work as that starts to happen. The conventional ideas of networking are kind of silly when you can just have some other computer access the same memory.
- carlsborg 3y ago32TB ought to be enough for anybody.
- jeremycarter 3y ago!RemindMe 10 years
- tanseydavid 3y agoWell-played! I am old enough to remember the original quote that I am almost certain you are referencing. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...
- alberth 3y agoIs there a reason why AMD hasn’t gone past dual-socket setup to allow for this type of extreme scaling? I assume it’s simply due to market size being so small for a server so large?
- wmf 3y agoAlso Infinity Fabric may have poor performance beyond two sockets.
- cosmotic 3y agoThere's a diagram at https://www.storagereview.com/news/3rd-gen-intel-xeon-scalable-cpus-are-out https://www.storagereview.com/news/3rd-gen-intel-xeon-scalab... which does a good job showing the links between individual CPUs. There's a performance penalty to access data in memory attached to other CPUs, which reduces use cases.
- alberth 3y ago> ” There's a performance penalty to access data in memory attached to other CPUs, which reduces use cases.” Isn’t that NUMA. And even AMD has this issue with single socket chips because their chiplet design is NUMA.
- fulafel 3y agoAMD had higher socket counts in earlier HW (Opterons).
- tedunangst 3y agoI love the symbols on the cross connects to turn the two 4U into an 8U. CPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire_Rapids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire_Rapids
- housemusicfan 3y agoWho is still buying tower servers? Seems like a time machine back to the 90s but there must be a market....somewhere?
- MrFoof 3y agoSmall businesses in particular. I remember back in the day working in companies of 15-40 people. There'd be ONE server. That ran everything you needed -- auth, DNS, file sharing, email server, application servers, web servers for internal apps, database server for internal apps. Usually sourced from a local MSP - or at least you had a support contract with them. You didn't need a rack. You also had something that wasn't designed for a rack, so it could be in a secure back room with the switches, a UPS, a router, maybe some external storage... where it'd just sit quietly. Just has some big slow fans because that's all it needs. Trust me, still a thing in small businesses, small retail stores, restaurants, etc.
- johnvanommen 3y agoI do a lot of work with AI and I love towers. Basically, they're much much quieter than a 1U or a 2U server. I once tried using a HP DL320 in my office and the noise from the fans was unbearable.
- wmf 3y agoApparently you can replace 1U server fans with much quieter 40 mm Noctuas.
- foobarbecue 3y agoHow much does something like this cost?
- kitanata 3y ago[flagged]
- osti 3y agoI have a Dell R960 with 96 sticks of 64gb ram which sums up to 6TB. But damn would I love to have one of these, not only for the much higher capacity but also the higher memory bandwidth from ddr5.
- singron 3y agoAlso 12 power supplies and 24 fans. That's up to 96 amps @220V or 21KW, although I imagine it draws less than half that since the power supplies are n+n redundant. If you were thinking about getting one for home, a circuit for a typical electric drier or range wouldn't even be rated for this.
- hulitu 3y ago> Also 12 power supplies Connected to the same wall socket ?
- rekabis 3y agoDo these still come packaged with Chinese state-sanctioned malware that auto-installs itself from the UEFI/BIOS on every boot?