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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."
Actually, I don't. I'd love some PC-106000 RAM.
Or you could read the article and see that if you buy said Dell at $1,800, and fill it up with RAM from Dell, you end up paying $50,760, which is over 20-fold. But please don't let the article get in the way of you bitching about the article. Where's the fun in that?
Hmm, I don't know. Not according to here... 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 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 (1600W on tigerdirect.com...)
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
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):