Hacker News Reader

Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Is it? I mean, bargain basement budget desktops have more cores than a typical server of 10 years ago. A 24 or 32 core server can't really be considered that exotic these days, can it?

View on HN

On HN anything that EC2 doesn't provide is considered exotic. And cheap servers still only have 16 cores/32 threads.

To some extent true, but when core counts increase, they tend to double. Given the very new version of PG and Linux required to get these scalability benefits, it is nice to seem them pipelined ahead of the EC2 curve...it takes a long time and a lot of work to correctly alleviate lock contention and get new versions of Linux disseminated (the new LTS from Canonical will do a lot...I believe it features 3.2)

The number of places that run e.g. 4U $10,000 HP servers with 4 socket, 16 core Opteron servers is reasonably low I think.

Change the branding to Supermicro and cut the cost to $5,000 and suddenly, many dedicated host providers out there have these servers. We're probably only 2-3 years away from this core count being a $2,000-$3,000 box. Throw ARM and Tilera architecture and whatever AMD is doing with the acquisition of SeaMicro in there and it might even accelerate that pace.

Not everybody buys HP... A 1U Supermicro 4-socket 64-core Opteron server with 32GB RAM costs $3850.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239...

Since databases are the bottleneck in a lot of apps, it makes a lot of sense to spend a ton of money on them. $10k will cover roughly the monthly wage of a good DBA. It won't cover anywhere near the costs of getting a software team to optimize everything for "web scale performance". The only reason you wouldn't want a 64 core machine is that Oracle will try to charge per core, so a machine with less cores and better per-core performance might be more cost effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com