alt Hacker NewsSo this is something like a 5000 USD machine (https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/ampereone-cores-are-n...) And is designed as a cloud provider or telco edge machine (hence the erlang consultancy)
But if you are looking at a hosted erlang VM for a capex of one dollar then these folks are onto something
Cores really are the only way to escape the broken moores law - and this does look like a real step in the important direction. Less LLMs more tiny cores
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While not this exact server, from Hetzner, you can get an 80-core Ampere for just ~$200 per month.
(And that also includes hosting, egress, power, etc).
I really like the manycores approach, but we haven’t seen it come to fruition — at least not on general purpose machines. I think a machine that exposes each subset of cores as a NUMA node and doesn’t try to flatten memory across the entire set of cores might be a much more workable approach. Otherwise the interconnect becomes the scaling limit quickly (all cores being able to access all memory at speed).
Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap. If that can stay resident to a subsection of the CPU, that might lend itself better to a reasonably priced many core architecture.
I found out that Ampere is into edge and telco usage way after we got connected to do this work actually. I've been an Elixir dev and through that connected to Erlang for 7-ish years.
But I will certainly try to leverage my telco-connection to get to play with more of their kit if I can.
Azul did something like this back in the ‘10s for Java. But it’s one of those products for when you’ve put all you eggs in one basket and you need the biggest basket money can buy. Sort of like early battery backed storage. T was only fit for WAL writing on mission critical databases because one cost more than a car.
You mean, with something like "multiprocessing"?
The article is about 5000 Erlang nodes (BEAM VMs), not processes - a single BEAM instance can efficiently handle millions of lightweight processes, making this even more impressive from a density perspective.