Myths and Urban Legends About Dual-Socket Servers
amd.com
amd.com
With newer/faster ethernet standards you still need twice as many NICs but you can often split the lanes coming out of a switch chip and use a Y cable.
Are you one of the reasons why SEO spam sites are clicked on so often?
I don't think your poorly thought-through personal attack has any relevance to the topic. I clicked on the article because there was a submission in HN with the title "Myths and Urban Legends About Dual-Socket Servers". What leads you to believe SEO holds any relevance
This likely still remains a major market barrier for them: Outside of the always-be-optimizing hyperscalers, “ordinary” datacenter buyers tend to follow old patterns and rules of thumb from generation to generation.
Of course they'll like it even better if you bought two AMD chips instead of one, but they probably don't care as much whether you put those chips into one server or two.
The article was posted in 2023.
The are saying "buy a single EPYC instead of two of our competition".
There's nothing wrong per se with writing an article about your awesome product and why everyone should use it
They want a small box, because ISPs have limited space.
They want a single LACP group, because ISPs have limited ports, and to use only one IP address, because ISPs have limited addresses.
And they want to make it easy to plug in properly, so that they can reduce communication with the ISP.
These all add up to a dual socket node over two single socket nodes in one box. Although, as single socket capabilities increase, they may end up with a single socket node instead.
DRAM price per GB has been roughly flat for well over a decade - consumer prices hit $4/GB in 2011, and have fluctuated around there ever since - most of the drop in real cost since then has been due to declining value of that $4. Prices for large enterprise/hyper scalers are probably similar, as it’s a low-margin commodity market.
Two sockets gets you more memory channels and more DINNS, but as memory price causes the RAM/CPU ratio to drop, and single-channel bandwidth increases with DDR5, that becomes less important.
Of course that’s one of those things you can’t really say to customers, kind of like “you don’t really need 250hp in a passenger sedan”.
If/when they make a v-cache version of this, that'll most likely be even better: Zen5 v-cache doesn't have the clock speed penalty that previous generations did (because the cache is underneath instead of on top) and 96MB of L3 per core would be monstrous.
I had to check and I was amazed that there are companies selling workstations with dual EPYC processors, providing a whopping 256 CPU cores and over 2TB of DDR5. All in a desktop form factor. Amazing.