iPads? Who needs ‘em, I’m a fan of bigger things. Apologies for the poor quality, I just grabbed a quick iPhone shot of the server’s Task Manager when I noticed just how crazy it looked.
See all those little boxes under CPU Usage History – that’s a lot of cores – 48 real cores to be precise on a 4 socket AMD Magny Cours (12 Core Opteron 6100) box that I was using today.
That’s all in a very sleek 2U server that is remarkably quiet. The main memory bandwidth on that is able to move about 20 DVD’s worth of data a sec (that’s a guess but there are 16x1066Mhz DDR3 channels on it so in theory it could push about 130GByte/sec).
The 32\64 Core Intel Beckton (Nehalem EX) based R910 that has just been released looks even crazier as it has 32 Hyperthreaded cores to go with its 32 real cores, and even more insane RAM.
We’re clearly well into the multi-core\multiprocessor era now. While this box isn’t cheap (probably about €15k-20k in this config) it’s still a fairly standard off the shelf product. We probably wont be seeing 48 core desktops in the next year but we will have 12 Core systems by the summer (if they aren’t out there already) and we will have 48 core home systems within a few years. Seems crazy to be able to say that when I’m still using the first multi core PC that I ever bought and it’s not even three years old.
That is provided this whole iPad fad wears off – after all what sort of computer is it if you have no idea how much RAM or CPU it has and how much of that is actually being used? :)
1 comment:
That's a nice peice of kit alright mate. Agreed on th iPad pointless
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