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."
I hope they mean PC-10600 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Got that? (Score:5, Informative)
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...)
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."
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):
Re:Got that? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Got that? (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:24GB is not 192GB (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 theirs posted to /. were full of logic errors.
Re:Got that? (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:Got that? (Score:2, Informative)
Um... That would be you. Saying that there is a 20-fold increase means that it was 20 times larger, not 2^20 times larger. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-fold [merriam-webster.com])