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Want a PC With 192 GB of RAM?
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."
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.
Whale
to run Vista. Finally h/w is catching up!!
Eclipse PDE and Me
at last, with 192GB ram, I can finally use Firefox.
Actually, I don't. I'd love some PC-106000 RAM.
Insert overused can finally run vista comment.
I can run Octave for more than a few hours without swapping!
May the Maths Be with you!
Just in time for Windows 7
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I believe dell has this to compete with the Sony which is a great sell on their website
-Are you there yet? If not, why not?
I can finally run like thousands of useless linux instances. =P
You got the touch!
having just checked, DDR3 PC10600 only comes in 2GB at th moment, and even server sticks dont easily come in 16GB modules
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
Still not enough RAM to run Vista
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.
With 384GB RAM, get a good UPS and generator and run your entire system in RAM. Use a hard drive in case the power goes out (dump to hard drive). Seems like this would be a rather fast system. Forget about "no swapping," just don't use any disk at all... hehe.
Sure, people thought Windows was slow because it was low on memory, this computer will prove that untrue. Just wait until you click the 'Start' button and Vista spends 5 minutes searching through 192 GB of memory looking for the hook.
As my computer instructor said in 1991, the 4GB address space of a 32-bit CPU is all that you will ever need. Now that I have a computer with a 64-bit CPU/OS and 4GB RAM, I find it hard to justify upgrading more RAM (unless the price for another 4GB is dirt cheap) since running out of memory is not an issue.
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 spend. Bring it on!
These new systems aren't even available on Dell's website yet. The new poweredge machines won't be available until the 30th. Don't know about the workstations.
Think of all the VM's you can run.
I've got 6GB of ram on my Mac Pro and it has never been filled up. I've yet to see any application that has taken advantage of at least 75% of my current amount of ram.
Being a vendor in the semiconductor industry whose client's business is strictly DRAM, this is very good news. Finally a reason to buy an assload of ram and rid the market of some of the DRAM glut that's built up.
Build a system with more ram slots and the users will fill them.
greed@All_Evils:~#
I don't run that many concurrent applications. Well, I do, but xterms don't seem to use much RAM.
Emacs' day has arrived.
t
You can tell your neighbours that your entire house is one huge Blinkenlights project. Double the geek points if you live in Silicon Valley.
...640 GB should be enough for anybody.
Trolling is a art,
Why?
...inflatable woman with more orifices and some creepy slashdot weenies will fill them up!
...Microsoft shall taketh away.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
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."
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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 with. What happens when the standard size will be 4GB? OS X will be well equipped for it with snow leopard.
And about time we abuse it. :]
Eclipse + VMWare ... you'll love every bit above 4G.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Servers&articleId=9130538&taxonomyId=68
Does Slashdot get a cut of the advertising over at Computer World?
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 for back in the day, and I'd like to be able to claim that they weren't a waste of money. :)
Everyone should have a couple hundred gig in their portfolio.
Don't bury it in the backyard.
P.S. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for one of these monsters to hibernate.
Just think of how many Xterms you can open on that machine!
No sig today...
as the Mac Pro is effectively limited to 6GB or 24GB.
The 4-core Mac Pro has only three usable RAM slots which accept at most 2GB DIMMs. The 8-core model has six usable slots which accept 4GB DIMMs.
For whatever reasons, Apple machines often do not work with higher density memory modules. As is typical at Apple, it would not be surprising if the low end model was intentionally crippled.
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".
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
"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. ;)
"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.
99 posts on this thread and no "640k should be enough for anyone" jokes? This place is going to the dogs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But I think I will wait for the 193GB model...
8MB of RAM, I couldn't possibly need all of that memory....
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.
The cake is a pie
Memory Testing: 1K OK
... 5 hours later
:)
Memory Testing: 201326592K OK
Yea no thanks
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.
Comic Book Guy: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
No.
Just 5.477 orders of magnitude more RAM.
Seriously, if they'd just pushed a little harder they could have supported 1337 MHz RAM. I don't know what geek wouldn't have jumped at that.
Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
had only 4 MEGAbytes of RAM. In those days I didn't even know what a gigabyte was, let alone a terabyte. While my computer today with 4GB, clearly does a lot more than my old DOS machine, the question is, am I actually doing that much more than before? Not really.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of VM's on one machine! Oh, wait...
Yes I am waiting for computer like this. I can now open up unlimited number of tabs on FF and reach the end of internet.
13234762 3DMark06 score thankyouverymuch.
Or about 4000 with Vantage.
I use them both and because of your comment now I'm checking my RAM usage: 711MiB of my 2GiB. This is with Eclipse, VMWare running an XP instance, plus others common utilities: Firefox, Pidgin, Liferea, etc. I'm running Ubuntu. Something makes me think you're on Windows Vista.
Check out my cross-platform apps
The Tylersburg chipset supports 18 DIMMs so if one wants to buy crazy-expensive 16GB DIMMs the max is actually 288GB of RAM.
Looking quickly and i don't see any sensible priced above 2gb sticks, also on newegg 4gb sticks cost insanely much.
I also wonder what motherboards, i'd like to know where i can buy myself an mobo which supports 12 sticks, that could bring me to 24gb which should suffice for now.
I'm currently using only 4Gb :( That being this 4Gb set is really expensive 1066Mhz DDR2 Corsair Dominator set and additional sets aren't readily available.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
First came the MHz Wars, then came the Core Wars, now come the On-Board Memory Controller Wars.
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 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
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.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Apple their newest MacPro workstation which comes with Intel's latest processor and the newest technology. Aimed at professionals, the starting price is $2499 for single quad core system. There's outrage. People start building systems on newegg.com using older, slower processors and older technology for $400 and claim Apple is ripping you off because they can build a desktop for much cheaper. Dell announces their newest workstation starts at $1800 with few details other than maximum memory is 192GB and Intel's newest processors. No outrage about how you can build a desktop on newegg for cheaper than Dell.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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):
With this much RAM, the only reason to have a HDD is for incremental backup, just in case my computer freezes... Oh wait, I'm running Windo[BSOD]
the headline should read Hardware vendors prepare for Windows 7
What I want is a system with maybe 8GB of working RAM [Even that is a bit much for Linux, but I'll find a way to use it], a bigass battery-backed ramdisk made of maybe 64GB of slower DDR RAM, and then a couple of Velociraptors in RAID 1, which will continuously back up the ramdisk in addition to providing slower storage for things like archives and video.
Now windows will eat most of my disk on those damn pagefile and hiberfil files.
With computers loaded up with this much RAM, and with Virtualization technologies such as VMware and Hyper-V why cant we have entire virtual server clusters running completely in RAM other then the excruciating cost?
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.
21 Tb of memory on a single linux system. And the the theoretical limit is on 128 Tb!!
http://www.sgi.com/global/es/newsroom/2009/gsm21tb.html
I can see it now, Fedora wanting 2x your RAM for a swap partition. A nice 1 Tb drive dedicated just to swap. Excuse me, my computer is paging, I'm going to step out for lunch...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
http://www.topcelebs.com/archive/Marina-Sirtis.htm
(posting as AC with bag over head.)
I can mean it when I say:
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don't read spam
semantics are everything!
DRAM has been stuck for some time at 2GB modules for the sweet spot. Nehalem's triple-channel architecture is actually going to extend this, because it naturally provides an intermediate upgrade (3x2GB = 6GB) over the current 4GB standard. While 4GB modules are available, you do have to pay a 50-100% premium for them and I doubt anyone other than SFF users with single-memory-slot m/bs actually have a good reason to get them.
Almost no one makes 8GB modules, and you pay an even bigger premium if you want one, and 16GB is not likely to happen until well after DDR4 (or even DDR5 or whatever technology comes along to replace it).
In short, this system doesn't seem to be designed for anything. If you have a specific need for this much memory, you are in the market for a supercomputer, not a Dell. It's difficult to imagine how one could justify the expense for filling out the RAM slots when, for the same money, you could probably buy a small data farm -- perhaps with less memory, but with extra CPUs to bridge the performance gap.
"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."
What's so smart about that? Getting away with the ridiculous pricing?
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
Sun currently sells a AMD based server with 512G of ram. Look at the Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server.
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4600/index.xml
It has been out for several months.
Of course they aren't using a measly 12 memory slots, rather 64.
/linux
...save the ignorant. It's par for course to buy third party.
"Or, were you saying that the common user thinks it is easier to fsck around with MS's registry?"
The common user doesn't mess around with the registry. My extended family members have had windows machines for a decade or more, and collectively they have no idea the registry exists.
A big ramdisk might put SSD to shame - but not for long, I think. Also, there'd be a big caching penalty (time).
Big ramdisks would be nice for something like Eclipse, but I'd say it'd be hard to justify the cost. Better price-point to go with SSD.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
with 192GB of Ram you don't NEED swap :)
just disable it in the installation, it will bark saying that is dangerous, but man you have frigging 192GB you can run like 100 copies of Crysis simultaneously or like , 2 virtual machines with Vista!
charging PC makers $3,400 today for 16GB 1333-MHz RAM modules, a Smart spokeswoman said."
Wow, that's smart. Especially when said by a smart spokeswoman.
I'm concerned with a system having this much storage. I'll explain with my LOC/h analogy.
When 16x DVD burners were released, the number of Libraries of Congress/hour (LOC/h) that could be burned increased dramatically since the introduction of CD-R's many years back.
Lets say with 16x DVD burners one could burn 12 LOC/h. With 192 GB - or more - of memory, we are looking at copying 10,000+ LOC/h - that is copying the contents of the memory filled with the LOC to another server.
Since 1 LOC/h gives the MPAA and the RIAA a major migrane, 10,000+ will at the least have them peeing their pants.
She only needs to sell one. Sounds pretty smart to me.
No. I have 8 GB and I struggle to fill 3 GB of that. I'm sure there are people out there doing high res graphics that need a lot, but 192 GB is just ridiculous.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
1TB of RAM in an IBM x3950!
Why run virtual OSes with that much hardware?
With 8 cores, I could dedicate 2 to Vista, 2 to XP, 2 to whatever Linux distro I want and then have another two cores for backup performance if required while doing stuff in one OS.
Why couldn't they just build an OS KVM?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And how do you hibernate all those VMs?
... Windows 7 ?
Great, now I will be able to play WoW without ANY lag.
Maybe even a few of my accounts at the same time on the same machine....think of the possibilities.... dual-boxing here I come!
The line should read: "12 memory slots that can accommodate 16 GB of PC-106000 (1333 MHz) DDR3 RAM EACH for a total of 192 GB." Wupty do, gawd awful amounts of RAM.
But...is a 14 billion 3DMark06 (2638 in Vantage) score still enough?
Thats the biggest issue with high ram systems, is disk IO, in hpc thats always the biggest issue to face. We spend lots of effort on that, huge multi channel disk arrays striped raid0, trying to get all that data into ram for processing. Fast disk io is the magic art behind heavy high ram hpc.