Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

hyperbovine

Honest question: why is this exciting? I'm using a server with 284gb as I write this, and it's several years old.

View on HN

> Honest question: why is this exciting?

DDR4 can be twice as fast as DDR3. The potential of getting that performance is pretty exciting to some people.

The BIOS screen pic in the article shows system memory speed of 2134 MT/s, which is equivalent to the high end of DDR3.

> DDR4 can be twice as fast as DDR3

Emphasis mine. DDR3 was theoretically supposed to be twice as fast as DDR2, but real-world benchmarks showed nowhere near that level of improvement.

DDR3 absolutely is twice as fast as DDR2, there's nothing theoretical about it. A person just needs to define their terms correctly and understand what is being measured.

Ok, so by what metric is DDR4 twice the speed, and what metric isn't it?

DDR4 is still bleeding edge, and it's about twice as fast as DDR3, so 384GB of DDR4 in a system that could go on sale in the next few months is very impressive in terms of the sort of performance gains that can be expected.

The capacity isn't exciting, the fact that it's DDR4 is.

Indeed, from the article,

> For those in the know, there currently isn't a publicly released CPU/chipset combination that supports DDR4 memory

Are you sure you have 284Gb?

384Gb is 256Gb + 128Gb or 3 * 128Gb - simple powers of two stuff going on here to arrive at 384Gb.

284Gb is 256Gb + 16Gb + 8Gb + 4Gb - or - 256Gb + 32Gb - 4Gb where the 4Gb is used for something such as video ram.

That is not simple powers of two.

I think a single character typo of '2' for '3' is a more plausible explanation. It also fits better with the message "Why is this special? It's the same thing I've had for years."

Please, GB not Gb.

This is 384GB, and it's DDR4.

That it's DDR4 might be exciting, but there's plenty of servers around that can take more - several of the servers we have at work can take 512GB or 768GB (though we've not put anywhere near that much in any of them).

with DDR4?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com