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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

    CPU: 2,048 x86 cores (AMD Milan)
    Memory: Up to 32TB DRAM
    Storage: 1024TB of raw storage in NVMe
    Network switch: Intel Tofino 2
    Network speed: 100 Gbps

That's a pretty meaty server!

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That's for the rack.

Was going to say.. if they fit than in a 4U I’m about to make my datacenter 8 times smaller

I saw an IBM-funded research project that fit 1,024 ARM cores and 2-4 TB of memory into a 3U box. The box didn't include the liquid cooling system you needed to keep the thing running.

You could get that today with a 2U 4N Altra Max system.

Oh, it's funny that you can buy that as a server now. The research system was from 2015 I think.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these …

Noob here: any idea of the approximate price tag that should be expected for such a monster?

Looking at the hardware, I'd wag somewhere in the $2-3M range. Depends on how big of a profit margin they want to make or how scrappy they feel like being (could probably go as low as ~$1M if they can make it up in volume).

If they're following the typical 1/5x pricing model for support, that'd be roughly $500k/yr/rack. But it's also hard to do that while simultaneously describing Dell as "rapacious".

Thanks!

I suspect they are not going to be cheap at all lol, aside from being a very nice hardware package they also have an entire custom hypervisor platform which is intended to be one of the big plusses for the platform.

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