Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances for large in-memory databases

896 vCPUs and 32TB RAM... I do not want to see the license cost for SQL Server on one of these! Doing some quick maths: 2vCPUs = 1 Core (give or take) so I think these are 8 x 56 Core Xeons... SQL Enterprise (needed to use the 32TB of RAM fully) is around 7K per core, so the license for SQL alone would be $3.13 Million... It looks like Windows Server 2022 Datacenter is another 6.1K per core, so $2.75 million for that... $6 Million for licencing on SQL and Windows alone... And at $407.68 for the base rate (PAYG) it's another $3.4 Million for the hardware per year...

As far back as 2011, I was reading articles from this blog: https://www.1024cores.net/

I remember thinking: "That's crazy! One kilo-cores! They're processors, not memory!"

Then, almost immediately, it started sinking in that this is what Moore's law means. That yes, sooner or later, I'll be working on a single system with more than a thousand cores (or hardware threads) in it.

This behemoth of a server probably has 8 sockets and I'm guessing it is the size of half a rack or thereabouts.

An upcoming AMD EPYC processor is rumored to have 256 cores (512 threads), which means that a "normal sized" server will have 512c/1024t soon at a more reasonable cost: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/328692-future-256-core...

Similarly, Intel is planning a processor with 288 cores within a year, although it may or may not have hyper-threading: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21276/intel-previews-sierra-f...

A challenge I like to pose to software developers is this: If you were given one of these servers, and you could install your software on it, would it get 100x faster for one user than a server with just 10 vCPUs?

Wow... This is really Big Iron!