Want a PC With 192 GB of RAM? 353
ericatcw writes "Do you love the smooth, silky performance of a multi-core PC loaded to the gills with the fastest RAM? Take a look at Dell's new Precision T7500 desktop. According to Computerworld, the T7500 will come with 12 memory slots that can accommodate 16 GB of PC-106000 (1333 MHz) DDR3 RAM for a total of 192 GB. Dell's not the only one — Lenovo, Cisco (with blade servers reportedly up to 384 GB in memory) and Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture to enable unprecedented amounts of RAM. But beware! Despite the depressed DRAM market, loading up on memory could see the cost of RAM eclipse the cost of the rest of your PC by 20-fold or more."
Got that? (Score:2, Insightful)
loading up on memory could see the cost of RAM eclipse the cost of the rest of your PC by 20-fold or more
Uhh, yeah. Try 1000-fold! You know, since we're just making things up.
While we're at it.. I love when people say "Up to 10x OR MORE!" Like, anywhere from 0 to infinity. Nice.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
But fully half of them are quoted by people whose intelligence is below median.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well sure, 75% of those surveyed knew that!
Re:Got that? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Got that? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Got that? (Score:4, Funny)
and 2.629% of comments are so-called "Combo breaker"s. About 90% of them work ;). In other news: 2.6.29% of people don't understand decimal points, oddly enough.
Re:Got that? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Got that? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I know you had tongue-in-cheek, but one of the big advantages of Nehalem (i.e., Core i7) is that it does not require fully-buffered memory.
This reduces the initial cost and power requirements (and thus the lifetime cost).
Re: (Score:2)
But, will they sell me an application that can use that much RAM? I'm fresh out.
No point having that much gas if I've no car to put it in...
Re:Got that? (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 8
Re:Got that? (Score:4, Funny)
But after booting he will notice there is no more RAM free for applications.
Re: (Score:2)
Duke Nukem Forever.
Re:Got that? (Score:4, Funny)
I like to run a 64-bit version of Python and make a really big list. Or, you can run Java programs (for a while) with GC disabled.
Re:Got that? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like to run a 64-bit version of Python and make a really big list. Or, you can run Java programs (for a while) with GC disabled.
But Windows will still push the Java app out to the swap file, and load all the Microsoft apps installed on your system into memory, just in case you want them.
No such thing as too "Much RAM" (Score:3, Insightful)
But, will they sell me an application that can use that much RAM? I'm fresh out.
No point having that much gas if I've no car to put it in...
Some of was want more RAM than we will ever use. If I'm using all the available RAM on my system, then I don't have enough.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The idea behind 192GB across 8 cores (or 16 if you are marketing), is to run several virtual OSes at once.
Allegedly this is considered a good idea in the IT industry.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Video editing.
Hollywood will load up on these systems.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>fill it up with RAM from Dell, you end up paying $50,760
Well if you're willing to go with slower DDR2 16 GB sticks, that would only be ~$1600 * 16 == about $25,000.
Or if you're willing to settle for "only" 96 GB total memory, the DDR2 8 GB sticks would cost around $4000.
Man. I can't imagine having all that RAM. My Commodore Amiga only has 0.001 gig! My current XP-PC is only 1/2 gig. I have no idea what I'd do with almost 100 gig of RAM, except maybe turn-off the hard drive caching to speed t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure the design targets memory intensive applications like VMware ESX virtualization hosting servers. (You could also use Solaris Zones or Xen Server)
With 8-16GB of ram statically assigned to each Guest VM (Virtual Machine), 128GB only covers 7 to 15 hosted Servers (less ESX memory overhead)
If you're doing VDI (Virtualized Desktops with Vista), that's only up to 31 VM PCs per blade.
Storage is commonly not an issue/botteneck since a SAN is often used (It works even with VMotion).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Load the whole OS into ramdisk at bootup. Then have fun.
The whole OS? Most /.ers could load their entire porn collection into ramdisk with 192GB.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Got that? (Score:5, Funny)
This is slashdot. The acceptable answers are:
Now turn in your geek card.
Re:Got that? (Score:4, Funny)
Take a piece of paper and fold it 20 times... it will be 1,048,576 times as thick.
20 fold is 2^20
so.. (2 ** 20) * $1800 == 1.887436800 Billion Dollars
So..somebody is wrong. Didn't read TFA to tell whether it is you or the article.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
1000-fold? We've told you a million times, don't exaggerate!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
-40 is less than 10, after all,
Yes, but at least it's the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit.
This shall do (Score:3, Funny)
to run Vista. Finally h/w is catching up!!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Still......could it run Crysis on Vista?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I bought a medium range computer a year and a half ago and it runs Vista as fast as XP.
Re:This shall do (Score:5, Funny)
Why are people still modding these comments as funny?
Linux Zealots are the ones doing the modding. To them, comments like these are not only funny, but provide a kind of sexual release somewhat similar to viewing a nude photo of Deanna Troi.
Re:Obligatory Simpsons (Score:2)
Comic Book Guy: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere.
Re:This shall do (Score:5, Funny)
To them, comments like these are not only funny, but provide a kind of sexual release somewhat similar to viewing a nude photo of Deanna Troi.
OMG! Where???
Ask and ye shall find.. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.topcelebs.com/archive/Marina-Sirtis.htm
(posting as AC with bag over head.)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'd settle for a similar photo of Marina Sirtis, myself.
Re: (Score:2)
Vista, schmista...! (Score:5, Funny)
Just think of how many Xterms you can open on that machine!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Turn the desktop effects off to make it run fast. Actually, it even uses slightly less RAM then KDE 3.
BZZZZT, wrong!!! (Score:3, Funny)
No.
Just 5.477 orders of magnitude more RAM.
finallly! (Score:2, Funny)
at last, with 192GB ram, I can finally use Firefox.
Re:finallly! (Score:5, Funny)
My memory is largely filled with things I saw on porn sites. I like it that way.
Oh, wait. Did you mean RAM? Never mind.
Re: (Score:2)
Filled with the large things you saw on porn sites?
I hope they mean PC-10600 (Score:4, Informative)
Finally! (Score:2)
I can run Octave for more than a few hours without swapping!
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
I can finally run like thousands of useless linux instances. =P
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)
24GB is not 192GB (Score:4, Insightful)
I dont see 8x capacity reaching consummers anytime soon anyway. This sorta thing is just silly, if you have enough money this has been available for ages, for the consumer this is still a long way off
Re: (Score:2)
yea, slashdot I know- RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
and see page 2 of it.
"An 8GB DDR3 memory module of the same speed costs between about $250 and $300 today.
The price of 16GB DDR3 modules remains far loftier, however. They were first announced this month by vendors such as Samsung Electronics and Smart Modular Technologies.
Samsung won't say how much it plans to charge, but Smart is charging PC makers $3,400 today for 16GB 1333-MHz RAM modules, a Smart spokeswoman said."
Re: (Score:2)
When HP first started selling the Proliant DL380 G5 it supported 32GB RAM. With 8GB chips it can now support 64GB.
same here, the memory slots are forward compatible so you can scale up to ridiculous specs and virtualize everything
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
...are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture to enable unprecedented amounts of RAM.
I seem to recall some Tyan Phenom boards being available with roughly that much RAM, announced last year. 4 sockets, 8 DIMMs per socket, if I remember right. 32*4GB = 128GB, which is pretty close.
Ahh... here it is: http://www.dvhardware.net/article31242.html [dvhardware.net]
I recognize that it's just buzzwords/marketing and poor research, but they come off like Intel fanboys - like this is the first time 192GB of RAM has been "affordable" - if you can call it that.
Then again, it's computerworld. The last 3 articles of thei
Any Improvement is Better Than None (Score:2)
I'd be happy with even 6 or 8 slots. It's been largely worthless to try to run large amounts of ram on most OSs lately because with 2 or 4 slots at most on most motherboards, you're limited to 8 or 16GB. At least cheaply, since nobody can afford 8 or 16GB modules.
Hmmm, who needs a hard drive. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's going to take a substantial UPS to support that much power hungry RAM. Anyone else going to see their lights dim when they fire this system up?
Re:Hmmm, who needs a hard drive. (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, I don't know. Not according to here... [rampedia.com] And according to an AMD page, "Energy-efficient DDR2 memory uses up to 30% less power than DDR1 and up to 58% less power than FBDIMM."
According to here [interfacebus.com] a DDR2 DIMM needs 4.4 watts. Let's round up to 10 watts and say each DIMM is, oh, 4gb (pretty low, I'd say). That's 48 DIMMs to get up to 192, 96 to get up to 384. At a whopping 10 watts (pretty high) that's still ~ 500W for 192gb and ~1000W for 384gb. Cut the wattage down to 5W per DIMM and you get half (250W, 500W). >1000W "home user" power supplies aren't too uncommon these days [tigerdirect.com] (1600W on tigerdirect.com...)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah and then the cops kick in your door looking for your grow op.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or.... you could do like this guy and make a RAID with 24 SSDs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs [youtube.com]
You'd get 6Tb of storage for half the cost of the machine in the article... much more useful, no UPS needed.
Re: (Score:2)
Compressed swap (Score:2)
How is swapping to a RAMdisk any different than running without swap?
RAM Doubler by Connectix used two levels of swap: a RAM disk holding a swap file with compressed pages and a hard disk holding pages evicted from the RAM disk. It appeared to double usable RAM because so many applications' RAM data structures could compress so well. At least it would give your extra CPU cores something to do.
4GB RAM Is All You Need... (Score:3, Funny)
I see you're not running Eclipse (Score:5, Insightful)
Eclipse + VMWare ... you'll love every bit above 4G.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. the only thing I have is this crappy java app that likes to chew up 2.5GB RAM sometimes, but it'd easily eat 8 or 16GB too, it just needs to be taken out back and shot. If i really needed more RAM for something already 16GB (4x4GB) was quite doable with DDR2.
Re: (Score:2)
That was true back in 1991. The VGA monitor was 320x200 8bit color, A Large Hard Drive was about 80Megs. External Loading of data via Floppy Disks were slow. Modems were very slow 2400bps. Having 4GB of RAM for the current usage seemed excessive. As the speed to fill the memory would take so long that it wasn't worth using it.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes please... (Score:2)
And the prices are great, if you steer clear of 4 GB and so-far-non-existent 8 GB DIMMs. A 6 GB kit of three 2 GB sticks of the DDR3-1333 can be had for only 79 GBP (around 120 USD), and that's from a decent supplier (Crucial). Four of those in one of these beasts and you have a very useful 24 GB for relatively little spe
not even available on Dell's website (Score:2)
VM's (Score:4, Interesting)
Think of all the VM's you can run.
Not enough... (Score:4, Funny)
...640 GB should be enough for anybody.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I bookmarked that.
We'll be laughing at you in 10 years or so!
What Intel giveth... (Score:5, Insightful)
I Hope It Supports ECC (Score:2)
All that RAM would be great for virtual systems. But you need to get ECC RAM, which is much more expensive than the regular stuff. Without ECC, random errors would wipe out your system especially if you have 192 GB of the stuff.
This is a good thing, I think (Score:2)
to make ram cheaper again relative to hard drive size (in proportion).
8-9 years ago, in 2001, I already had upgraded to 1GB ram in my desktop PC. I suppose it was the 32bit limit and what not, but while hard drive space grew a lot back then, ram size growth really seemed to slow down since then. Even now the manufacturers are getting to grips with 64bit Windows and often the computers sold with 2GB ram (pretty much standard) can't be upgraded past 3.5GB with the limitations of the Windows software it came
Print Link (Score:2)
Does Slashdot get a cut of the advertising over at Computer World?
Question (Score:2)
Could you put together a device that ZFS'd up a buttload of old ram chips? The cost of ram doesn't seem to have much to do with how much ram storage is available on earth as much as it's speed and utility in today's hardware. Could you build a device that was essentially a huge ram bus for old chips addressable over ... I dunno a pcix or agp bus? Agp might not be good, but something that had big i/o in both directions. Someone please do this. I have tons of old ram sticks that I paid waaaaaay too much
Buy the RAM, get the server free! (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago when I was working at IBM, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the price of one of the pSeries line with 256GB of RAM. Given the commodity price for RAM for that kind of hardware, using 8x32GB cards, the cost for the RAM was about $1M USD. Which was about the price we charged for the box, with storage, CPUs, AIX license, etc. It was kind of like "buy the RAM, get the server free".
Please ban the word "leverage" (Score:3, Insightful)
"Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture"
Please tell me I'm not the only one that cringed at this example of newspeak? The word is *use*. "Apple are bringing out computers that **use** Intel's new Nehalem architecture".
The sentence isn't made any more profound, important or meaningful - no extra information is conveyed - by using faddish terms like "leverage"; designed exclusively to make MBAs sound like they have something to contribute (they usually don't).
Besides all that the topic is pointless since everyone knows we won't need more than 640K. ;)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The sentence isn't made any more profound, important or meaningful - no extra information is conveyed - by using faddish terms like "leverage"; designed exclusively to make MBAs sound like they have something to contribute (they usually don't).
Normally I'd agree with you on this sort of thing, but I don't think "leverage" and "use" are equivalent here. To me, "leverage" implies that they are taking advantage of a tool that applies more force than some other, simpler, tool. Metaphorically, this is exactly the point they are making--Nehalem can do more than its predecessors, and Apple is using that advantage. This seems like a case where reasonable people could disagree.
99 posts on this thread (Score:2)
Not really (Score:2)
I'm running an Ubuntu box, a browser up, an email package up, and instant messenger running, multiple editors open, Perforce open, open office open and am doing compiles. I am currently using 1.4 GB of RAM.
Boot time (Score:5, Funny)
Memory Testing: 201326592K OK
Yea no thanks
The Evolution of the Processor Wars (Score:5, Interesting)
When Intel "innovated" and gave Nehalem on-board DDR3 memory controllers, they did something else as well : they made a "mine is bigger than yours" move by adding 1 more memory controller and thereby giving AMD's Shanghai the one-up. Well, AMD apparently isn't taking that lightly as next year they'll be releasing an upgrade to Istanbul ( which will ship this year ) which uses Socket G34 [wikipedia.org] as well as a 12-core Socket G34 "chip" -- codenamed Magny-Cours -- which will basically be an MCM of 2 Istanbuls/Sao-Paolos. Socket G34 will purportedly support processors with 4 independent DDR3 memory controllers -- AMD's "mine is bigger than yours" riposte to Intel.
Business as usual it seems.
jdb2
Re:The Evolution of the Processor Wars (Score:4, Funny)
.. next year they'll be releasing an upgrade to Istanbul..
Not Constantinople?
Much cheaper to go with DDR2 (Score:5, Informative)
And that, my friends, is why you shouldn't buy Intel processors supporting DDR3 only (Core i7 or Nehalem-based Xeon). For large memory config, DDR2 is cheaper and motherboards with lots of slots are more common (try to find one with 32+ DDR3 slots: it does not exist !). Check this out: a config supporting 128GB at about 1/6th the cost of the one referenced in TFA ($50k):
WTF would you do with 192GB of RAM on a desktop? (Score:3, Informative)
WTF would you do with 192GB of RAM on a desktop? Easy:
RAMDisk, and VMs.
A nice big ramdisk will put most consumer-grade SSDs to shame, performance-wise.
A future in which every desktop has this kind of RAM available is a bright one indeed -- you'll never see a "Loading" screen again. The only time you'd be stuck waiting on permanent storage would be during boot, and while committing writes to disk. For many common desktop applications (web browsing, gaming) there's little need to commit much to permanent storage at all.
And hell, it's even easier to use this kind of memory on the server side. Memcached all the way. The kids over at facebook, with their multi-terrabyte memcached installation spread over hundreds (thousands?) of boxes would probably KILL for systems based on these motherboards -- a single 192GB box would be much cheaper to build and maintain than 6 32GB boxes. They could reduce the number of racks in their datacenters dramatically.
The biggest question would be whether or not a single box based could provide adequate IO bandwidth to get at all that data.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless Windows 7 is doing a lot better than Vista or XP, a lot of devices won't come with 64-bit drivers. If you have one of these devices, running the 64-bit version of Windows isn't an option. And if you run the 32-bit version, you're can't address more than 3.5 GB.
Even if you have the 64-bit Windows, most of the apps you're running won't have 64-bit versions. So no single app can use all that extra RAM. If you have a lot of big apps running at once (say, 8 GB total) you'll see a lot less VM thrashing. Bu
Re: (Score:2)
2007 called. They want their argument back.
Seriously, I've been running Vista x64 for over a year, and Win7 x64 for a few months, with not a single driver issue. I have 4GB in my desktop, and it's nice to be able to use it all. Even for those with less than 4GB physical RAM, or with all 32 bit apps, there are still some huge advantages to x64 in terms of memory management.
I'm also running "Hyper-V Server" on a homebuilt box with 6GB RAM, and it handles 8-10 VMs without breaking a sweat.
Re: (Score:2)
The dawn of time called. It wants its argument back: "I don't have a problem, therefore there is no problem."
Yes, some people have no trouble finding drivers for their 64-bit Windows systems. Many more do.
Re: (Score:2)
One word: Oracle.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A feature that I
d love to see added to a motherboard is to add 1-4 dedicated slots that can be configured as a ramdisk at the BIOS level. That way you'd need no drivers and it would survive a reboot. Surely this could be done fairly easily.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, you kids and your fancy limitless random access memory and direct access storage devices.
When I was a kid my first PC had 5000 bytes of RAM, of which only 3500 were available for user applications (the remaining 1500 bytes reserved for the OS.) The screen showed 22 characters across and 23 characters down, each character as big as your thumb. It used 16 different colors, all 16 of which were ugly. If we wanted graphics we had to sacrifice a few characters from the alphabet and remap the 8x8 pixel ch