If you're an enterprise that needs a single CPU server with 1.5TB of RAM (to run SAP HANA or some other in-memory DB most likely) then the RAM cost, or really the entire hardware cost, is probably the smallest line item in the entire business case, more or less a rounding error. The author seems to be approaching this from the standpoint of someone building a home rig for some reason.
<i></i><i>I've done some shopping around, and the best pricing I can find puts these 128GB RAM at about $1,500.<p>Each. Yes, each.<p>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.</i><i></i><p>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 right, that would be more than 4 million Euro for 128GB RAM.
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.<p>AMD's new epyc supports 4TB without artificial price increase, IMO some healthy competition for the server market.
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.
While each node of a server farm of these can be relatively cheap by enterprise budgets, an entire cluster of these machines is not (at $200k+ that’s the budget for an FTE, after all). Which is why I’d want to check if an Optane drive could be a strong consideration to shave some costs off for a reasonable trade-off in performance. Not sure if 10+ TB of Optane is viable enough to be at least an order of magnitude larger than the RAM capacity.<p>Also, 1.5 TB RAM became somewhat commonplace around 2014-ish. LinkedIn had to have Dell custom build them a 1 TB RAM machine around 2009. So 10 years later for the same build to be passé is fully reasonable when a lot of the market is doing massive or very latency sensitive graph calculations that won’t accept the variances of distributed algorithms.
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.
in case you don't have $18,000 to buy those fancy brand new DDR4 RAM -<p>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.<p>bargain!
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...
I just want to know why anyone will personally need 1.5TB of ram in their personal PC today. I'm not saying that 128gb is all we need. I'm sure in the future, we might all have 32TB in our future portal device. But what sort of work load or app could you possibly need 1.5TB of ram for?<p>On my personal desktop right now. I have 20gb of ram and over 250tabs open on Firefox, spotify, VCode, Postgresql, pgadmin, multiple evice & fbreaders, rabbitMQ, some nodejs servers, 2 linux containers, 1 docker container, mysql server, 10+ xterm sessions, a few screen sessions and I'm using 14Gb.
Seems the price hasn't come down much since 2015 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582497" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582497</a>)
From the experience with servers, having all DIMM slots populated(usually over two-thirds) clocks down the memory frequencies. Not something that you want for the maximum performance.<p>Its unclear what is this article about, yes large modules are expensive, but in DDR3 era 128gb dimms did not exist. You're paying the early adopter tax. If you want to get huge-ram systems for cheap, there are a lot of used 4-cpu servers, the whole system can be assembled for under $5k.
If you’re going to flip over the cost of RAM at the high end then you don’t want to hear about all the expensive proprietary stuff that clearly only costs pennies to make. I’m talking the special torque wrenches to remove motherboards or other chassis stuff.<p>It’s like Apples new Mac Pro and display. Those prices are just dialed that way to keep them out of home offices. It’s infuriating, yes, but prevalent.
I decided to put 32 GB of Ram in my home desktop some months back. I knew I didn’t need that much, but I figured macOS (it’s a Hackintosh) would use it for file caching or some such.<p>To my disappointment, it goes completely unused more often than not. According to Activity Monitor, I currently have around 7 gb just sitting idle.
I've not owned one of those mini-macs. Was a bit surprised how it was put together from a servicing perspective. Way too much work to do something as simple as replacing the RAM, which I guess is what the intent was. I guess I should be more surprised it was not soldered to the mainboard.