Hacker News Reader

Comment by Uptrenda | Hacker News Reader

What is up with the price? 40k for only 2 x 48 cores and a mediocre 2 ghz clock rate. Modern processors are way more efficient than older processors but I simply can't imagine the efficiency adds up to (simplistically) $416 per core...

Very interesting memory bus though... 1 TB / s? That is cool, but I would still much rather get a crap load more cores at a reasonable price then be able to send around data that efficiently. Granted, I am definitely not the target audience for this.

View on HN

See, and I had the opposite opinion. I work with HPC all the time (computational biology) and have built (small) clusters. When I saw the price I thought — yep, that make sense for a novel (and core heavy) HPC node. It’s on the high end, but not an outrageous price. Normally with something so new, you never actually see a price (if you have to ask...).

Especially when you consider that this is a new HPC architecture, that’s not an unreasonable price. As others have mentioned, this is a SKU you’re buying to evaluate a significantly larger purchase.

There isn’t exactly a lot of pricing pressure on the processors. Top end HPC always has the biggest margins because this is a market where absolute speed tends to trump all other factors, including price. A better price comparison might be an IBM Power HPC node — another fairly novel architecture built for raw speed and HPC.

Plus, it is entirely possible that the cost difference of the node (compared to x86) is completely covered by the power savings. HPC is very power hungry. So a significant savings there could make up for an increased node cost.

This is a scaled down version of a single unit that’s designed to go into supercomputers by the thousand, where the cost of the whole system is hundreds of millions of dollars, consuming megawatts of power.

You would probably buy one of these to facilitate testing and development of codes to run on a big one.

No doubt the memory vs cpu balance is correct for what these computers are doing.

If you need that kind of memory bandwidth you'll probably know already, and maybe this will even look cheap.

HBM not only has lotsa bandwidth(tm) but also much better latency?

Latency in conventional DDRx memory is limited by the DRAM array itself, which doesn't change with the interface (DDR, GDDR, HBM, ...). Essentially, with regular DRAM, you cannot do better than the contemporary low-latency DDRx memory. You might chose to increase latency to increase throughput, though.

> Essentially, with regular DRAM, you cannot do better than the contemporary low-latency DDRx memory. You might chose to increase latency to increase throughput, though.

My understanding is that, given how memory systems work right now, typically it's the opposite: increasing throughput decreases latency.

it's almost as if the price of the system reflects more than core count.

in any case, anyone buying one of these is doing so as a poc for a larger procurement.

they're not for tourists.

What’s the SHA256 hash rate and power consumption? Only partially joking btw!

Nobody mines Bitcoin on CPUs since about 2012~. And there are far more reasons to want access to reasonably priced computation than just crypto-asset mining (like research - or what the Internet was originally about.) But I suppose dunking on an entire industry is just what the cool kids do now to seem in the know?

Doesn't matter that none of these critics ever address a single use-case beyond what little info they can gleam from memes. It's particularly obnoxious. But whatever. People who use this tech are all idiots, right, and couldn't possibly know how to add up a balance sheet. Lol, it use lotssa powerr. BRRRRRrrrrrrrr. soo stupid of them to waste that much power for absolutely no reason.

Only partially joking btw!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com