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To: Rob Young who wrote (88203)	9/13/1999 3:35:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Rob, <Not a "weakness", a feature. Tell me how hard a 4-CPU Merced or a McKinley is going to work 64 Gigabytes of SDRAM OR RDRAM?> What's wrong with that? There will be several server makers out there who can't wait to build 4-way Merced systems with 32 GB of SDRAM. (64 GB is a stretch, though.) When you're doing stuff like data mining, the more memory the better. After all, if you have terabytes of data sitting in large air-conditioned RAID cabinets, the more you can keep accesses localized to DRAM, the better. <A 64 Gigabyte 4-CPU system doesn't make sense for several reasons, the least of which it has 1-$1.8 million (1 to 1.8 million looking at 4 Gig boards commodity prices TODAY 1.8 and tomorrow 1 million MAYBE) dollars worth of memory in a $100,000 box.> I don't get it. Compaq's 8-way Xeon system can support up to 32 GB of memory, although most of the theoretical capacity will be wasted because of Xeon's 32-bit limitations. PC Magazine tested one such server priced at $85,000, although they never said how much memory was in the system. A 128 MB DIMM w/ ECC goes for $180 to $350, so 64 GB of it will cost $92,000 to $179,000. In other words, the typical Xeon 8-way system cost less than $100K with perhaps a few gigs of ECC SDRAM in it. The memory cost alone for 64 GB of ECC SDRAM won't go above $200K. Merced is likely going to follow in Xeon's pricing structure, though by then Xeon itself may be lower-priced. Where do you get your $1 million figure from? But in all fairness, I agree that not all servers will require that much memory, even the Alpha 21364. And perhaps I should correct myself and say that the memory capacity limitation isn't that big of a weakness. Besides, RDRAM branch channels aren't that hard to implement, although the slight increase in latency could be rather significant for a system which relies on very low latency memory accesses. Tenchusatsu