

Using Atom 330 with server applications - BarsMonster
http://3.14.by/en/read/atom-330-dedicated-server-nvidia-ion

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mmt
_why can’t we have 8-16 slots in low-cost systems?_

.. or 24-64 slots on mid-range systems, for that matter?

Because, unless it's serialized (like FBDIMMs), there's a linear growth in
number of traces (and something line n^2 growth in board surface area taken up
by them) for memory, not to mention a more complex (or at least bigger) memory
controller.

I'm sad that fully buffered memory didn't take off, as I'm sure the power
consumption problem would, eventually, have been solved.

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BarsMonster
Well, I am not talking 16 channel memory controller :-) 16 slots for 2 memory
controller channels. 8 slots per channel. Line count should be reasonable.

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wmf
That isn't possible with DDR1/2/3 RAM because the signal quality degrades with
each slot; with more than 3 or 4 DIMM slots the signal would be garbage.

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BarsMonster
Ok, then we need DDR3 replicators :-)

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jbellis
Pretty sure Atom doesn't support ECC memory. Running a server w/o ECC is a bad
idea.

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BarsMonster
Well, most of low-end 1U servers goes on non-ECC ram, and main problem is
still HDD reliability.

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jrockway
The main problem that you notice, that is.

I don't use ECC RAM in my desktop, and I notice that one a year or so my
"every-30-days fsck" detects a filesystem error when I have not uncleanly
unmounted the disk. That is either a filesystem bug, or memory corruption.

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kljensen
What? No comments. This is cool -- but why would I do it instead of some kind
of VPS?

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JeremyChase
I currently host on an VPS and have been considering a switch to an Atom based
server. Some of the reasons for me:

* With VPS systems you generally have to run one of their kernels, or at least Linux. Very few BSD VPS sites and none allow me to run OpenBSD, which is what I would like.

* The low cost Atom systems give you _much_ more ram and hard disk than the VPS sites for comparable cost. In the $30 range a VPS will give about 512M of ram and 10-20G of hard disk space. Most of the Atom/low cost dedicated hosts are roughly the same cost and give 2-3G of ram and 60-100G of drive space. (I hadn't seen SSD's used before)

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listic
Maximum available RAM seems to be limited to 2G on 945 series chipsets that
are used with many Atoms.

Just clarifying.

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BarsMonster
That's right. But on nVidia ION platform limit is 4Gb.

