alt Hacker NewsTruly mind boggling scale.
Twenty years ago we had just 1-2 cores per CPU, so we were lucky to have 4 cores in a dual socket server.
A single server can now have almost 400 cores. Yes, we can have even more ARM cores but they don't perform as well as these do, at least for now.
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On the other hand, at the time we would have expected twenty years of progress to make the cores a thousand times faster. Instead that number is more like 5x.
I wonder what percentage of 'big data' jobs that run in clusters would now be far faster on a single big machine with e.g. duckdb rather than spark
Nowadays very much most services can fit on single server and serve millions of users a day. I wonder how it will affect overly expensive cloud services where you can rent a beefy dedicated server for under a grand and make tens of thousands in savings (enough to hire full time administrator with plenty of money left for other things).
Indeed: the first dual core server chips only launched in 2005 afaik with 90nm Denmark/Italy/Egypt Opterons and Paxville Xeons but on the Intel side it wasn't until 2007 when they were in full swing.
700+ threads over 2 cores, can saturate 2 400gbe Nic's 500 wats per chip (less than 2 wats per thread)... All of that in a 2U package.... 20 years ago that would have been racks of gear.