
Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You - Khelouiati
https://www.zdnet.com/article/want-1-5tb-of-ram-in-your-pc-it-will-cost-you/
======
DebtDeflation
If you're an enterprise that needs a single CPU server with 1.5TB of RAM (to
run SAP HANA or some other in-memory DB most likely) then the RAM cost, or
really the entire hardware cost, is probably the smallest line item in the
entire business case, more or less a rounding error. The author seems to be
approaching this from the standpoint of someone building a home rig for some
reason.

~~~
goatinaboat
I have been buying 1Tb+ servers for years now, most recently to run Redis.
$50k for a box is nothing when you consider we used to spend 10-20x that on
Sun or SGI boxes.

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fasteo
___I 've done some shopping around, and the best pricing I can find puts these
128GB RAM at about $1,500.

Each. Yes, each.

Some back of the envelope math -- or math in your head if you are good at that
sort of thing -- put the price of 1.5TB of RAM at a cool $18,000._ __

If my memory serves me well, I routinely bought 1Mb RAM modules for 5.500
Spanish pesetas (33 Euro). This was around 1987-1990 I believe. If my math is
right, that would be more than 4 million Euro for 128GB RAM.

~~~
drewg123
In 1993, one of my first tasks in a new job as a sysadmin was to install 256MB
of RAM into a DEC Alpha 3000/500\. I remember the RAM cost on the order of
$20k... I don't remember the exact price, but I remember thinking that the RAM
was worth more than I was, and I'd better not screw it up.

~~~
eesmith
graph of "Historical Cost of Computer Memory and Storage",
[https://jcmit.net/mem2015.htm](https://jcmit.net/mem2015.htm) . Memory data
at [https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm](https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm) .

1994 prices are US$30.0/MB or $8K for 256MB of PC-grade memory. Looks like the
DEC machine used 200-pin SIMMs, says
[https://www.memoryx.com/ms15da.html](https://www.memoryx.com/ms15da.html)
(listing 64MB for $200). Don't know how that compares.

BTW, $400 for a DEC Alpha 3000/500 at [https://www.ebay.com/itm/DEC-DIGITAL-
ALPHA-SERVER-3000-500-P...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/DEC-DIGITAL-ALPHA-
SERVER-3000-500-PE50A-A9-54-21149-02/173871227547) .

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m3at
Fun fact, it gets even more expensive (per GB) when you want to add RAM over
1.5TB, because Intel will crank up the cpu price just for higher ram support.
Off the top of my head, the same cpu accepting 4TB was twice the price of the
1.5TB version, going at around $18000.

AMD's new epyc supports 4TB without artificial price increase, IMO some
healthy competition for the server market.

~~~
angry_octet
Yeah people who need large RAM to compute will be buying lots of AMD.

I'd like to see how the flash-as-RAM devices work out for some of these apps,
i.e. is it purely single-threaded random access or can it be batched/cached?

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ericcholis
Is it just me, or is it becoming too commonplace for an article to have a
video attached to it that is vaguely related? The video attached to this
article is how to upgrade the mac mini to 32GB of ram. Interesting, but just
left of adjacent in terms of how it's related to this article.

~~~
safeplanet-fesa
I have an even broader question: why do articles talking about some subject,
have a random image representing the subject attached? For example, if an
article talks about coffee, there will be a picture of a random cup of coffee
or a random coffee tree field. I have never understood the point of it, but
this has always existed in all forms of journalism.

~~~
kd5bjo
For the print edition, the image is there to catch the eye of people that are
interested in the general topic as they scan through the publication to
determine what they want to read. I suspect it’s mostly vestigial for the one-
article-per-webpage digital edition, but it still helps convey some branding
in the particular choice and style of image.

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mark-r
I want to know why ECC RAM isn't more common. With the amount of RAM going
into today's computers, it's insane not to protect it.

~~~
beagle3
It’s a market segmentation issue for Intel, which AMD has started undermining
but has not yet frontally attacked - perhaps they still have plans to (ab)use
it themselves.

~~~
mark-r
ECC is exactly why my last system build was a Ryzen.

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amelius
tldr: 1.5TB costs $18,000

That's only about three times more expensive than if you'd extrapolate from
regularly sized DIMM modules.

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devonkim
While each node of a server farm of these can be relatively cheap by
enterprise budgets, an entire cluster of these machines is not (at $200k+
that’s the budget for an FTE, after all). Which is why I’d want to check if an
Optane drive could be a strong consideration to shave some costs off for a
reasonable trade-off in performance. Not sure if 10+ TB of Optane is viable
enough to be at least an order of magnitude larger than the RAM capacity.

Also, 1.5 TB RAM became somewhat commonplace around 2014-ish. LinkedIn had to
have Dell custom build them a 1 TB RAM machine around 2009. So 10 years later
for the same build to be passé is fully reasonable when a lot of the market is
doing massive or very latency sensitive graph calculations that won’t accept
the variances of distributed algorithms.

~~~
zamadatix
Last I checked Optane still cost more than RAM up to about 2 TB/server (dimms
or drives). It does scale significantly higher in drive form though.

~~~
devonkim
Optane is at $5k for a 1.5 TB drive while the OP quotes $18k for 1.5 TB of
RAM. [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory-
stor...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory-
storage/solid-state-drives/data-center-ssds/optane-dc-ssd-series/optane-
dc-p4800x-series.html)

Being able to reach 12 TB+ with something like Optane is much more likely than
with RDIMMs though, and memory latencies would probably get insane enough that
Optane would start looking viable anyway.

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tyingq
_" It will cost you"_

Well, less than any other time in history. Not sure I get the point here.

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jdsully
This is a use case where persistent memory really shines. Its about 10x slower
but you can get 1.5TB or it for less than $10,000. You don’t have to use the
persistence - you can treat it as RAM.

~~~
basch
with VROC or the Threadripper equivalent NVME CPU RAID, you can get 7Gbps read
speed from a RAID5. Thats DDR2 speed.

Unless you truly need DDR4 speeds, I would think you would be better off for
your money using CPU Raid and NVME. More drives, more speed. One guy used 8
drives and got 28Gbps.

[https://i.imgur.com/AuCWq3r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/AuCWq3r.jpg)

~~~
termie
The throughput is amazing. The screenshot shows 28,375 MB/s — the capital B
typically indicates Bytes whereas a lowercase b indicates bits, so your Gb/s
translation is a little confusing. The latency is still much higher than main
memory or Optane, but that might be fine for many applications.

~~~
basch
youre right, I didnt look closely at the buttons, I just assumed bits based on
the all caps used all over the interface.

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dis-sys
in case you don't have $18,000 to buy those fancy brand new DDR4 RAM -

second hand 64GB DDR3 ECC REG RAM is about $100 each, a dual socket c602
motherboard such as my Z9PE-D16 has 16 memory slots, having 16 x 64GB = 1TB
RAM in such a workstation costs you $1,600.

bargain!

~~~
jsjohnst
Does the Z9PE-D16 actually support 64gb DIMMs though? ASUS claims it only
supports 32gb for a total of 512gb, but that could easily be because they
didn’t update their marketing material rather than a technical limitation.

~~~
dis-sys
my understanding is that memory controllers are in the processors, motherboard
just provide the slots, it shouldn't be a limiting factor to stop you using
64GB DIMMs.

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tiernano
1.5TB ram is grand and all, but the high end dell r9xx servers take a full 6
or 12TB for full load... fun note, the Xeon sp M models support the full
ram...

~~~
lazyjones
Supermicro also has boards for up to 12TB DDR4... Even workstation boards that
support 4TB.

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segmondy
I just want to know why anyone will personally need 1.5TB of ram in their
personal PC today. I'm not saying that 128gb is all we need. I'm sure in the
future, we might all have 32TB in our future portal device. But what sort of
work load or app could you possibly need 1.5TB of ram for?

On my personal desktop right now. I have 20gb of ram and over 250tabs open on
Firefox, spotify, VCode, Postgresql, pgadmin, multiple evice & fbreaders,
rabbitMQ, some nodejs servers, 2 linux containers, 1 docker container, mysql
server, 10+ xterm sessions, a few screen sessions and I'm using 14Gb.

~~~
anarazel
I would love it for development (I work from home on personal HW) - multi-
socket NUMA machines behave differently enough that being able to continually
see how in-development software versions behave. And I just find it less
productive / more painful to do detailed performance work remotely. Latency is
one part, added time due to having to sync up code / build another, but
there's more that I can't really pinpoint.

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fulafel
Seems the price hasn't come down much since 2015
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582497))

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altmind
From the experience with servers, having all DIMM slots populated(usually over
two-thirds) clocks down the memory frequencies. Not something that you want
for the maximum performance.

Its unclear what is this article about, yes large modules are expensive, but
in DDR3 era 128gb dimms did not exist. You're paying the early adopter tax. If
you want to get huge-ram systems for cheap, there are a lot of used 4-cpu
servers, the whole system can be assembled for under $5k.

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ianai
If you’re going to flip over the cost of RAM at the high end then you don’t
want to hear about all the expensive proprietary stuff that clearly only costs
pennies to make. I’m talking the special torque wrenches to remove
motherboards or other chassis stuff.

It’s like Apples new Mac Pro and display. Those prices are just dialed that
way to keep them out of home offices. It’s infuriating, yes, but prevalent.

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Wowfunhappy
I decided to put 32 GB of Ram in my home desktop some months back. I knew I
didn’t need that much, but I figured macOS (it’s a Hackintosh) would use it
for file caching or some such.

To my disappointment, it goes completely unused more often than not. According
to Activity Monitor, I currently have around 7 gb just sitting idle.

~~~
microcolonel
Does Activity Monitor report the page cache/UBC size? Most of the time,
basically all of the memory I'm not using directly is filled with page cache.
The other big thing large memory typically does for me is delay GC in the JVM.

Typically the only time I use enough memory that my working files don't fit in
the page cache along with the application memory, is when I build Android.

It's possible you just don't have that much on your disk that you use.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
As of right now, 5.2 GB of RAM are being used for "Cached Files" according to
Activity Monitor (still 25/32 GB in use overall).

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sys_64738
I had a PC with 32mb back in 1997 when 16mb was he norm. Felt pretty nice.
Now, not so much.

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heelix
I've not owned one of those mini-macs. Was a bit surprised how it was put
together from a servicing perspective. Way too much work to do something as
simple as replacing the RAM, which I guess is what the intent was. I guess I
should be more surprised it was not soldered to the mainboard.

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jankotek
Hardware is dirt cheap today. 256GB RAM fits into normal high end workstation.

~~~
jsjohnst
The 2011 Mac Pro sitting under my desk has 128gb of RAM.

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pjmlp
Can't get enough to keep Android Studio happy.

