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."
VM's (Score:4, Interesting)
Think of all the VM's you can run.
Re:Hmmm, who needs a hard drive. (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.
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".
GPU extra ram (Score:1, Interesting)
"Maybe once my GeForce/Radeon card has 16 bays"
That's actually a very good idea. If they did make graphics cards where we can put a lot of DDR3 on them, then it would greatly help work in GPGPU/OpenCL/CUDA etc.. which is exactly what people like NVidia want to happen.
Re:Got that? (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).
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
Ask and ye shall find.. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.topcelebs.com/archive/Marina-Sirtis.htm
(posting as AC with bag over head.)
Re:Blinkenlights (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah and then the cops kick in your door looking for your grow op.
Re:24GB is not 192GB (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically they make largish modules using lower capacity (but much cheaper) chips, buffered in such way that to the system they look like slightly slower high capacity ones.
There was a news story few days ago, saying that Intel just certified them.