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Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

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Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#71
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the sake of the generations that come after us, we really should not dump valuable material into space. I somehow doubt the electronics in space would be recovered and recycled properly.

Nothing is recycled properly. Recycling was a story told to ease consumers minds so they keep on consuming. The stuff you throw away ends up on a landfill, in the sea, or on a ship to someplace else where it gets burned and then buried. Sending it to space makes absolutely no difference.

Most steel and aluminum and nearly all copper is recycled

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#72
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, absolutely not. orbital datacenters are never going to happen, it doesn't matter whether you try to frame them as compute or storage or whatever else. the extreme density of these SSDs is actually an anti-feature in the context of spacecraft hardware. the RAD750 CPU [0] for example uses a 150nm process node. its successor the RAD5500 [1] is down to 45nm. that's an order of magnitude larger than chips currently ma…

In the limit, packing transistors tighter should mean more radiation resistance, not less, because you can shield them with a smaller mass of water or lead or whatever.

It would be funny if lead-acid batteries end up being space-grade, should the lead be able to serve as a radiation shield.

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#75
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, absolutely not. orbital datacenters are never going to happen, it doesn't matter whether you try to frame them as compute or storage or whatever else. the extreme density of these SSDs is actually an anti-feature in the context of spacecraft hardware. the RAD750 CPU [0] for example uses a 150nm process node. its successor the RAD5500 [1] is down to 45nm. that's an order of magnitude larger than chips currently ma…

AFAICT[1] the latest generation of SpaceX Starlink satellites use AMD Versal XQR SoCs, which are built on a 7nm process with components like the main processor (dual-core ARM Cortex A-72) and memory (DDR4) clocked in the gigahertz, not megahertz, range.[2] At least some of these SoCs models (presumably the lower-clocked ones) are certified for geosynchronous orbits, not just low-earth orbits. [1] https://www.pcmag.co…

Just to put in my 2 cents as someone tangential and sometimes a little too close for comfort for the field: with FPGAs (aka the half of this SoC doing the real work) there's often a lot of work that goes into radiation tolerance and hardening which are different things. It's not like you can just put the chip in space and be done. You have to do things like scrubbing the "bitstream" regularly for errors, triple-module-redundancy (aka cut yourself to 1/3rd of the chip's capacity), and other stuff.

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#76
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is recycled properly. Recycling was a story told to ease consumers minds so they keep on consuming. The stuff you throw away ends up on a landfill, in the sea, or on a ship to someplace else where it gets burned and then buried. Sending it to space makes absolutely no difference.

Most steel and aluminum and nearly all copper is recycled

How do you know?

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#77

At current enterprise NVMe prices, the drives alone for this must easily push past the $500k to $1M mark. It's fascinating to see this level of density, but it’s strictly going to be hyperscaler or high-end defense/research budget territory for a long time.

It is kinda neat how the density can trickle down. When an individual SSD can hold tens of TBs, recent-gen drives can do millions of random reads/s each, and one socket can handle lots of RAM and many cores, it doesn't take the fancier chassis with two sockets or lots of storage bays to handle pretty substantial data work.

On the other hand, current part prices are not neat; a commodity platform only helps so much if none of what you want put in it is affordable! And other factors like power and cooling can push you away from optimizing for density. I just like that along with the ludicrious becoming possible, merely great stuff becomes more feasible.

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#78

There's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to see if something like Starlink can use something like this to cache media content and reduce their overall data moving through the constellation. It could even be worth it to have some satellites in higher orbits (even GEO if the ground hw can reach it) dedica…

/me turning in my sleep muttering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#79
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, absolutely not. orbital datacenters are never going to happen, it doesn't matter whether you try to frame them as compute or storage or whatever else. the extreme density of these SSDs is actually an anti-feature in the context of spacecraft hardware. the RAD750 CPU [0] for example uses a 150nm process node. its successor the RAD5500 [1] is down to 45nm. that's an order of magnitude larger than chips currently ma…

AFAICT[1] the latest generation of SpaceX Starlink satellites use AMD Versal XQR SoCs, which are built on a 7nm process with components like the main processor (dual-core ARM Cortex A-72) and memory (DDR4) clocked in the gigahertz, not megahertz, range.[2] At least some of these SoCs models (presumably the lower-clocked ones) are certified for geosynchronous orbits, not just low-earth orbits. [1] https://www.pcmag.co…

What is the designed lifespan of a Starlink satellite?

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#80
post #72
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the limit, packing transistors tighter should mean more radiation resistance, not less, because you can shield them with a smaller mass of water or lead or whatever.

It would be funny if lead-acid batteries end up being space-grade, should the lead be able to serve as a radiation shield.

IIRC, metals aren’t great shields because of secondary particles emitted after the first one hits the shield.
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