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Comment by pulse7 | Hacker News Reader

With more and more cores and RAM soon we will not need warehouse-scale anymore... everything will be on a single server again - for almost all needs... one can get servers with more than 10TB of RAM and soon we will have more than 1000 cores...

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> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

There's probably an S curve on this, right? At some point the super high level languages and frameworks that we use to conveniently create software quickly at the cost of poor efficiency, would have to peak, right?

Only if there's a moderate amount of effort put into optimization. Without it, it's easy to use bad algorithms or bad implementations and there is no limit on slowness.

This is for consumer software, but scientific software has actually gradually evolved and gotten faster on a consistent basis (according to bill joy)

You can get a 480-core x86 server with 32TB of RAM right now if you want, but I have a hard time seeing the utility of such a thing. Having one giant thing that costs $500k and fails as one unit never seemed terribly convenient to me.

I'd guess that's for shops that are severally space and power constrained relative to their needs and/or need to move around immense amounts of compute.

eg: sports media that need to ship container-offices around the world three times a year. Two of those, one as a cold spare, running immutable OS images, a honking big disk array, and thin clients or laptops. simplifies HVAC, power, noise control, and networking requirements, plus it's only one system to test, validate, and secure, vs a bunch of workstations.

Utility is intense offline data crunching, which will be much more cost efficient and less complex than equal cloud based or self hosted distributed setup.

You're assuming they won't find stuff to do with more computing power. Based on how software has bloated over time, even machines like you're talking about will be used for simple stuff.

Speed of light lag, and contention at the memory crossbar, get you at some point.

No it won't.

Customers demand perfect uptime and companies are compelled to deliver it.

Which means you need to have a highly-available architecture which requires multiple servers across multiple disparate data centres. Especially when it's hosted in the cloud.

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