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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

Could someone a little more familiar with buying their own hardware tell me how much hardware equivalent to a c5.12xlarge (48 cores, 96 GB) would cost?

Spot prices are around $0.80/hr, which puts total compute cost at $7k/yr.

On demand is $2.04/hr ($17k/yr), reserved is 1.20/hr ($10k/yr).

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Not exactly what you asked for. But, we bought an AMD server to test at our HPC cluster. AMD EPYC 7302P (16cores, 32 threads), 512 GiB of 3200 MHZ RDIMM, 10GBE, 3.2TiB of 12Gbps SAS SSD. It came out to be approx 48000 DKK (excluding VAT). That is approx. $7000. Fewer cores machine with faster clocks and we mostly use it for its memory channels(8).

Our typical buy - 2 socket intel cascade lake Xeon Gold 6256(12 Cores, 24 threads) with 768 GiB of RDIMM costs us approx. 70000 DKK or $10200.

The biggest cost here is memory. Just to give you an idea.

I was just thinking the other day when HN were discussion Cloud vs Metal. How little has the DRAM prices changed in the past 10 years. While CPU core went from 10 to 64 Core, ( Not exactly Moores's law at least it is 6.4x the difference ). DRAM median prices has remain mostly flat until recently, we finally got pass $10 /GB ECC RAM and are now close to $5/GB. Which is still very expensive.

SLC NAND SSD could be had for $0.4/GB, I failed to see why DRAM should be priced at 10x higher.

Current gen hardware is about 10-15k. If you buy used or legacy hardware (like what c5 runs on) you can get much more bang for buck.

Here's an eBay listing for 2 machines with similar CPU config for 400+shipping: https://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-COMPUTER-48-CORE-DUAL-XEON-24...

Buyer be wear but there are deals to be had. That said purchasing the hardware is step one. Setting up PXE, network storage, cluster mgmt, recycling and upgrade, etc is a full time job passed a specific scale.

Not colocated, but in the US, you can find a dual EPYC 7742 (64 cores) with 512GB of ram (with ssds, hdds, and bandwidth included) for $1000/m.

This should absolutely demolish the c5.12xlarge, especially if you need any disk IO or bandwidth.

Or from a different provider, a Dual Epyc 7281 (32 cores) with 256GB (and ssds, hdds and bandwith included) for $400/m.

You can get cheaper if you're willing to host in Europe. And this is dedicated, so no additional power or storage or maintenance cost. Stuff breaks, they replace it. Also, your commitment is 1 month.

To add context to the downvotes you've acquired: I didn't downvote you, but I think I understand why others did. Your parent comment was asking about 96 GB of RAM, and you posted a reply talking about 512 RAM. I suspect others thought you were talking about 512 MB (ie. 0.5 GB of RAM, which is common in very cheap hosting) rather than the 512 GB of RAM you actually commented on. When I first read your comment, I admit I first saw "512 MB", but you quite clearly wrote "512 GB".

tldr; The number "512" when talked about in the context of RAM is assumed to be measured in MB, but 512 GB is also a less-commonly-encountered amount of RAM. :)

Yeah for big iron EC2 makes more sense. Still you can find similar eg this refurbished for 6k https://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/SecondaryIn...

mhm, interesting question... i am not dabbing in the server space just in consumer hardware...

1x ryzen 3990x with 64 cores(128 vcores) would be 4k € 1x a mainboard ~0,5k € 1x 128 GB RAM ~ 0,7k € Storage, whatever you need 0.5k case + power supply 0.3k

so 6k all around for a much higher perfomance pc...

a ryzen 24cores(48vcores) ~ 1k 1x a mainboard ~0,3k 1x 96GB Ram ~0,5k Storage, whatever you need 0.5k case + power supply 0.3k

so 2.6 k should be around the same in raw consumer hardware

Not the same as buying hardware, but Hetzner offers dedicated AMD Epyc 7502p instances (32 cores, 128GB RAM, free egress) for less than 150€/month.

So you can just get somewhere between 5 to 7 of those instances for the price you're paying for your single EC2 instance.

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