
Kingston displays 384GB of DDR4 in top-secret Intel server at CES - rbanffy
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34788/kingston-displays-384gb-of-ddr4-in-top-secret-intel-server-at-ces/index.html
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dangrossman
I can't wait for the DigitalOcean of RAM to appear. $5/mo VPS with 20GB
RAMdisks, please.

~~~
nkurz
Anandtech had a nice recent article on server memory types and costs:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/7479/server-buying-
decisions-m...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7479/server-buying-decisions-
memory)
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7044992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7044992)).
It prompted me to go through and do some math.

If you want to cram as much RAM in a server as practical, you'll currently be
using 32GB LRDIMM's which currently cost ~$600 ($20/GB). Some dual-processor
motherboards will take 24 of them (3 ranks * 4 channels * 2 processors) for a
768 GB total:
[http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x9d...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x9dr7-tf_.cfm)

(The 1.5TB description for the board presumes the soon to be released 64GB
LRDIMMS.)

This would be $15000 for just the 768GB of RAM. Let's guess another $5K for
the rest, so $20K for the machine. At 20GB of dedicated RAM per VPS, you can
fit ~40 of them on the machine. $20K / 40 = $500. Since this ignores power and
connectivity, I think you'll be waiting a while for a $5 month plan. Although
perhaps you could overprovision and swap out a lot?

Viewed alternatively, the sweet spot for selling RAM does not involve putting
as much of it as you can in a single machine. You'd cut the cost of your RAM
per GB a lot (down to about $10/GB) if you stuck with older lower density RAM
put a bunch of low price blade servers in a single box.

~~~
orik
Space in a datacenter gets prohibitively expensive fast.

You'd need a real nifty virtualization platform to oversell RAM like we
currently oversell bandwidth and cpu time.

A high performance swap farm might be the way to go with things, but things
break when everyone starts using huge pages.

~~~
wlesieutre
Right, the trouble with RAM is that if someone wants to keep a pile of data in
memory, it has to stay loaded. I would hazard a guess that memory consumption
on servers tends to be much less spiky than CPU is, and that's part of why a
"DigitalOcean of RAM" is difficult to do.

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hyperbovine
Honest question: why is this exciting? I'm using a server with 284gb as I
write this, and it's several years old.

~~~
Theodores
Are you sure you have 284Gb?

384Gb is 256Gb + 128Gb or 3 * 128Gb - simple powers of two stuff going on here
to arrive at 384Gb.

284Gb is 256Gb + 16Gb + 8Gb + 4Gb - or - 256Gb + 32Gb - 4Gb where the 4Gb is
used for something such as video ram.

That is not simple powers of two.

~~~
nkurz
I think a single character typo of '2' for '3' is a more plausible
explanation. It also fits better with the message "Why is this special? It's
the same thing I've had for years."

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wtallis
Slightly OT question: what is meant by a chipset supporting Thunderbolt, as
the one in this demo is rumored to? Does it mean that there are pins on the
chipset that can be connected directly to a Thunderbolt connector, or is it
just a meaningless statement that the chipset provides PCIe lanes that could
be routed to a Thunderbolt bridge chip, or something else?

~~~
latch
They didn't' say the chipset supported thunderbolt, they said the server did.
That means the motherboard they are using has a thunderbolt controller on it,
something like: [http://ark.intel.com/products/71880/Intel-
DSL4510-Thunderbol...](http://ark.intel.com/products/71880/Intel-
DSL4510-Thunderbolt-Controller)

~~~
wtallis
_" We speculate this is Grantley-EP and Wellsburg PCH. If so, the server
supports Thunderbolt and features DDR4 speeds of 2400 and 3200MHz. However,
these specs are pure conjecture."_

They're obviously under the impression that a new generation of CPU+chipset
provides some degree of Thunderbolt support that is lacking in server
components currently on the market: either that Intel's requiring Thunderbolt
controllers to be included on the motherboard, or that the CPU or chipset
provides a Thunderbolt controller.

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daniel-cussen
Looks like 24 RAM daughter boards, for 16 GB per board.

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ballard
Good to see progress, but ram types have a long adoption event horizon.

384 GiB isn't whopping, 16 TiB would be considering there are 8 TiB boxes
right now.

