Using Atom 330 with server applications | Hacker News Reader

Using Atom 330 with server applications

3.14.by

17 pointsBarsMonster12 comments

why can’t we have 8-16 slots in low-cost systems?

.. or 24-64 slots on mid-range systems, for that matter?

Because, unless it's serialized (like FBDIMMs), there's a linear growth in number of traces (and something line n^2 growth in board surface area taken up by them) for memory, not to mention a more complex (or at least bigger) memory controller.

I'm sad that fully buffered memory didn't take off, as I'm sure the power consumption problem would, eventually, have been solved.

Well, I am not talking 16 channel memory controller :-) 16 slots for 2 memory controller channels. 8 slots per channel. Line count should be reasonable.

That isn't possible with DDR1/2/3 RAM because the signal quality degrades with each slot; with more than 3 or 4 DIMM slots the signal would be garbage.

Ok, then we need DDR3 replicators :-)

Pretty sure Atom doesn't support ECC memory. Running a server w/o ECC is a bad idea.

Well, most of low-end 1U servers goes on non-ECC ram, and main problem is still HDD reliability.

The main problem that you notice, that is.

I don't use ECC RAM in my desktop, and I notice that one a year or so my "every-30-days fsck" detects a filesystem error when I have not uncleanly unmounted the disk. That is either a filesystem bug, or memory corruption.

What? No comments. This is cool -- but why would I do it instead of some kind of VPS?

I currently host on an VPS and have been considering a switch to an Atom based server. Some of the reasons for me:

* With VPS systems you generally have to run one of their kernels, or at least Linux. Very few BSD VPS sites and none allow me to run OpenBSD, which is what I would like.

* The low cost Atom systems give you much more ram and hard disk than the VPS sites for comparable cost. In the $30 range a VPS will give about 512M of ram and 10-20G of hard disk space. Most of the Atom/low cost dedicated hosts are roughly the same cost and give 2-3G of ram and 60-100G of drive space. (I hadn't seen SSD's used before)

It's difficult to compare VPSes and el cheapo dedicated servers by specs alone because VPS hosts usually use server processors, ECC, and RAID while a $30 dedicated server is a POS. If that's what you want, fine, but everyone should understand upfront that they're not the same.

Maximum available RAM seems to be limited to 2G on 945 series chipsets that are used with many Atoms.

Just clarifying.

That's right. But on nVidia ION platform limit is 4Gb.

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