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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't find anything on pricing and availability, but, despite my enthusiasm for Windows-proof servers, I am not sure if having a lot of discrete servers in a 3U enclosure is better than having a lot of containers running on, say, 3 1U servers. Containers (or even VMs) are much more manageable than 48 physically distinct machines (to say nothing of having 4 on each board, meaning an upgrade or defect on one means needles downtime for three others).

If we could turn it into a NUMA machine with 48 CPUs, that would be a totally different story.

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If we could turn it into a NUMA machine with 48 CPUs, that would be a totally different story.

This particular version seems to only support 1Gbit Ethernet, so I don't know how well that will work.

Still, we're talking about 192 cores with 384 Gbytes of RAM, that's got to be useful for some kind of workloads. Can you get that kind of density with Intel or AMD?

> Can you get that kind of density with Intel or AMD?

The new Xeon Phi's will have an external DDR3 bus. It's a different beast, intended for a different usage, but I always loved to misuse technology ;-)

> Still, we're talking about 192 cores with 384 Gbytes of RAM

Seeing as you're going to be keeping 48 copies of the same OS in that memory whether you want to or not, you're going to need those 384G.

I just checked a random server: OS and all process images are using 119MB, *48 = 5.5GB. I think I'll do just fine with the remaining 378G.

These machines are designed for very specific workloads. Don't expect to be able to run Oracle or Exchange on them.

It is written "there is no general availability" (even if they are shipping to selected partners).

From what I recall hearing, the initial demand for ARM "micro-servers" has been from big, um, Facebook-ish operations for whom cost is king rather than smaller, enterprisey places where versatility and manageability are higher priorities. That would seem to fit with the limited availability.

Me: "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!"

Them: crickets

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