
Intel’s High-End Cascade Lake CPUs to Support 3.84 TB of Memory per Socket - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13059/intels-upcoming-cascade-lake-cpus-to-support-384-tb-of-memory
======
dantiberian
A few months ago Intel pulled a stunt where they showed a 28 core 5GHz CPU,
implying it was a production CPU that would ship this year. They failed to
mention that it was attached to an industrial compressor to supply the
necessary cooling for the overclocked CPU, and that it was a server socket
([https://www.anandtech.com/show/12932/intel-confirms-some-
det...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12932/intel-confirms-some-details-
about-28core-5-ghz-demonstration)).

Since then, whenever I see a headline with Intel in it, I heavily discount it
until I can verify the facts. They’ve damaged my trust, and I suspect many
others.

~~~
nordsieck
Case in point:

> chips will support up to 3.84 TB of memory per socket ... due to combining
> 512 GB Optane DIMMs and 128GB DDR4 DIMMs

> ...

> in a 6 x Optane and 6 x DDR4 configuration, they will provide 3072 GB of 3D
> XPoint memory and 768 GB of DDR4 RAM for a total of 3.84 TB of memory

Optane DIMMs don't really have the performance characteristics of traditional
DRAM. It sounds like the real capacity per socket is 12 x 128GB = 1.53 GB,
which is the same capacity as the previous generation.

That being said, I'm optimistic about Optane DIMMs - it seems like an
interesting performance point in between DRAM and SSDs.

~~~
djsumdog
But what market are they even trying to hit here? DDR4 prices are insane, but
home consumers don't run large NUMA systems.

Data center admins are going to be able to get the capitol for real DDR4 over
Optane. They'd need to be ordering a lot of servers before the price point
becomes significant enough that they'd order an Optane configuration and
decide to benchmark them.

I'd be curious about the real benchmarking at that point. It there a
performance boost to simply have more memory, even if some of it is Optane, or
is it better to have a lower capacity without the Optane sticks? I have a
feeling this will vary heavily by application too.

~~~
naveen99
I thought the real advantage of Optane was bypassing the pcie bus, with much
larger bandwidth of dimm: 80GB/s instead of 12GB/s

~~~
tgtweak
DDR4 dimm read throughput is about 20GB/s per dimm. PCIe 3.1 x4 is 16GB/s. I
feel very comfortable claiming that these optane dimms will not reach 20GB/s
of sustained performance.

The advantage here being latency (and thus single queue throughput)

~~~
naveen99
But pcie bus is shared with other cards. So 8 dimms is 8x faster than 8 pcie
cards.

~~~
saati
> But pcie bus is shared with other cards.

No, it's not, that's the whole point of pcie, and dimms share the memory bus
anyway, so the whole point is moot.

~~~
AnonymousR
Well, it depends. "True" pcie slots do not share the bandwidth, but depending
on available CPU lanes, which is awfully few in the last years on Intel - 16
lanes in top of the line i7? thats one graphics card - the slots are switched
to 8x/8x, 8x/4x/4x and so on when populated.

M.2 slots are a whole another story, they are usually connected to the chipset
instead of CPU on desktop motherboards (and finding this information for any
particular board is difficult). The chipset is connected with CPU through DMI,
which equals to pcie 4x and this is shared with everything on chipset - satas,
gigabit ethernet, usb 3...

------
morrbo
From what I remember the cooling unit alone required 1200W just to run and was
the size of a small air conditioning unit, conveniently hidden under the
table.

(edit: obviously i've replied to the wrong comment, this is aimed at Intel's
deceptive techniques which is currently the top comment)

------
quantumwoke
I've weighed up the pros and cons, and my next processor will be the 32 core
AMD cpu. This seems much better value than anything Intel has to offer.

~~~
opportune
The last gen 1900x (3.8 GHz 8 core) is on sale now for only $300

AMD becoming competitive again is one of the better things to happen in tech
in recent years

~~~
mastax
The 2700 is available for $225 on Amazon.

~~~
mtanski
Yeah, depends if you want 2 memory channels or 4 memory channels.

~~~
mastax
Ah, forgot the 1900x was Threadripper.

------
ksec
What I really wanted to know is the performance difference in Postgre / MySQL,
between 128GB of DRAM, with 1TB of SSD, 1TB of Optane via PCI-E, and Optane
DIMM.

~~~
spacentropy
Here's some benchmark for MySQL, SSD vs Optane (Intel vs Intel):
[http://dimitrik.free.fr/blog/posts/mysql-
performance-80-ga-i...](http://dimitrik.free.fr/blog/posts/mysql-
performance-80-ga-iobound-sysbench-optane-vs-ssd.html)

~~~
sixothree
Not optane dimm though?

------
ScottBurson
Come on, AnandTech! 3840GB != 3.84TB -- that's mixing binary and decimal
systems. Say either 3840GB or 3840/1024 = 3.75TB.

~~~
btgeekboy
They are correct here. TB is for decimal, TiB is for binary.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix)

~~~
ScottBurson
No. Their "GB" numbers are actually GiB; DRAM always uses binary units because
it's addressed in binary. (Maybe if they used the correct suffix, they
wouldn't have made the error.)

------
jstewartmobile
Cores! Gigahertz! Terabytes! Odds are... still f-ing busted.

How will the numbers look after the next Spectre/TLBleed/etc patch?

I'd be more impressed by a boring processor that works.

~~~
imglorp
Good question. It's probably WAY too soon to expect any hardware that's not
full of vulnerabilities in the pipeline, TPM, and microcode. They need to
redesign their cores from the ground up. When will that happen?

~~~
twtw
Never. Not going to happen.

~~~
jstewartmobile
That OC is scoring at -4 is proof of that.

