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Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

zdnet.com

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Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#31

Post by zrobotics »

drewg123 wrote: post #13
fasteo wrote: post #2

I've done some shopping around, and the best pricing I can find puts these 128GB RAM at about $1,500. Each. Yes, each. Some back of the envelope math -- or math in your head if you are good at that sort of thing -- put the price of 1.5TB of RAM at a cool $18,000. If my memory serves me well, I routinely bought 1Mb RAM modules for 5.500 Spanish pesetas (33 Euro). This was around 1987-1990 I believe. If my math is righ…

In 1993, one of my first tasks in a new job as a sysadmin was to install 256MB of RAM into a DEC Alpha 3000/500. I remember the RAM cost on the order of $20k... I don't remember the exact price, but I remember thinking that the RAM was worth more than I was, and I'd better not screw it up.

Definitely the time to be testing the ESD ground point first... And continuity for the wriststrap cord... In fact, better touch a grounded chassis at the same time!

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#32

Post by segfaultbuserr »

std_throwaway wrote: post #8
fasteo wrote: post #2

I've done some shopping around, and the best pricing I can find puts these 128GB RAM at about $1,500. Each. Yes, each. Some back of the envelope math -- or math in your head if you are good at that sort of thing -- put the price of 1.5TB of RAM at a cool $18,000. If my memory serves me well, I routinely bought 1Mb RAM modules for 5.500 Spanish pesetas (33 Euro). This was around 1987-1990 I believe. If my math is righ…

An Arduino UNO comes with 2 kB of RAM installed and retails for about 20$. If you want to get 1.5 TB of RAM by connecting them (not accounting for any overhead on each controller) you would need 800 Million Arudino UNOs which would cost you about 16 Billion Dollars.

> An Arduino UNO comes with 2 kB of RAM installed and retails for about 20$.

This is not an accurate calculation, first, the main cost of an Arduino is its PCB and the supporting electronics, plus some profit margins to cover the overhead for the manufacturer.

Also, the RAM is not "installed", the actual device where the 2 KiB RAM resides in, is etched on the same silicon chip of the Atmega328p microcontroller. A 328p only costs $2 each, and close to $1.5 in huge quantity [0]. Since it's pretty much a standalone device, needs nothing (not even an external crystal) but power, some wirings and two decoupling capacitors to operate in a minimum system (and yes, even this configuration can run standard Arduino code). Let use a conservative number, $3, it would "only" cost you about 2.4 billion dollars.

Furthermore, Atmega328p is marketed at a "mid-end" 8-bit microcontroller offered by Atmel, mainly for its GPIOs. If you use an ATTiny1614, which is basically the same hardware with much fewer GPIO pins, it would only cost $0.7 for each, let's use $1 as a conservative number, then it would only cost you 0.8 billion dollars for 1.5 TiB of RAM, which should already be considered a very impressive number, since you couldn't even get a NAND gate, or even a MOSFET in the late 1970s for less than one buck. If adjusted for inflation, today's price would be as low as ~$0.17 per 1024 bytes.

And then you consider the fact that it's not only a RAM, but in fact a computer... Isn't it a miracle of Moore's Law?

[0] https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology-At...

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#33

Post by termie »

basch wrote: post #24
jdsully wrote: post #18

This is a use case where persistent memory really shines. Its about 10x slower but you can get 1.5TB or it for less than $10,000. You don’t have to use the persistence - you can treat it as RAM.

with VROC or the Threadripper equivalent NVME CPU RAID, you can get 7Gbps read speed from a RAID5. Thats DDR2 speed. Unless you truly need DDR4 speeds, I would think you would be better off for your money using CPU Raid and NVME. More drives, more speed. One guy used 8 drives and got 28Gbps. https://i.imgur.com/AuCWq3r.jpg

The throughput is amazing. The screenshot shows 28,375 MB/s — the capital B typically indicates Bytes whereas a lowercase b indicates bits, so your Gb/s translation is a little confusing. The latency is still much higher than main memory or Optane, but that might be fine for many applications.

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#34

Post by jsjohnst »

dis-sys wrote: post #14

in case you don't have $18,000 to buy those fancy brand new DDR4 RAM - second hand 64GB DDR3 ECC REG RAM is about $100 each, a dual socket c602 motherboard such as my Z9PE-D16 has 16 memory slots, having 16 x 64GB = 1TB RAM in such a workstation costs you $1,600. bargain!

Does the Z9PE-D16 actually support 64gb DIMMs though? ASUS claims it only supports 32gb for a total of 512gb, but that could easily be because they didn’t update their marketing material rather than a technical limitation.

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#35

Post by soneil »

safeplanet-fesa wrote: post #15
ericcholis wrote: post #10

Is it just me, or is it becoming too commonplace for an article to have a video attached to it that is vaguely related? The video attached to this article is how to upgrade the mac mini to 32GB of ram. Interesting, but just left of adjacent in terms of how it's related to this article.

I have an even broader question: why do articles talking about some subject, have a random image representing the subject attached? For example, if an article talks about coffee, there will be a picture of a random cup of coffee or a random coffee tree field. I have never understood the point of it, but this has always existed in all forms of journalism.

I've worked with CMS where each entry pretty much required a "hero". Elsewhere in the system articles were thumbnailed as photo+headline, and attaching a random coffee.jpg caused less problems than trying to fix templates that expected photo+headline.

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#37

Post by beagle3 »

mark-r wrote: post #12

I want to know why ECC RAM isn't more common. With the amount of RAM going into today's computers, it's insane not to protect it.

It’s a market segmentation issue for Intel, which AMD has started undermining but has not yet frontally attacked - perhaps they still have plans to (ab)use it themselves.

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#38

Post by m3at »

Fun fact, it gets even more expensive (per GB) when you want to add RAM over 1.5TB, because Intel will crank up the cpu price just for higher ram support. Off the top of my head, the same cpu accepting 4TB was twice the price of the 1.5TB version, going at around $18000.

AMD's new epyc supports 4TB without artificial price increase, IMO some healthy competition for the server market.

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#39

Post by lazyjones »

tiernano wrote: post #5

1.5TB ram is grand and all, but the high end dell r9xx servers take a full 6 or 12TB for full load... fun note, the Xeon sp M models support the full ram...

Supermicro also has boards for up to 12TB DDR4... Even workstation boards that support 4TB.

Re: Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You

#40

Post by angry_octet »

m3at wrote: post #38

Fun fact, it gets even more expensive (per GB) when you want to add RAM over 1.5TB, because Intel will crank up the cpu price just for higher ram support. Off the top of my head, the same cpu accepting 4TB was twice the price of the 1.5TB version, going at around $18000. AMD's new epyc supports 4TB without artificial price increase, IMO some healthy competition for the server market.

Yeah people who need large RAM to compute will be buying lots of AMD.

I'd like to see how the flash-as-RAM devices work out for some of these apps, i.e. is it purely single-threaded random access or can it be batched/cached?

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