Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
Originally Posted By: javacontour
That's a small server compared to some I work on.
There are a few database servers I've supported that had over 1TB of RAM and a similar number of CPUs and that was ten years ago
I figure you & overkill would have played with these sorts of things
before Y2K!
Had the number of CPUs before Y2K, if you count 400MHz and perhaps 484MHz CPUs. But not the memory density until after Y2K.
The UltraEnterprise 6000/6500 theoretically could go to 30 CPUs, and 60gb of RAM. But it wouldn't be a very useful system as that left only one system slot left for I/O after the other 15 were used for CPU boards. Three SBus slots and whatever was found on the I/O board didn't provide many I/O channels and certainly no redundancy.
So 16CPUs and 32gb of RAM might be common, with the other 8 slots in back available for I/O boards.
When the SunFire 15000 came out, that would take 18 CPU/Memory boards with at the time, 32gb of RAM on each board, and later 64gb of RAM/board when the 2gb DIMMs were supported. So that meant a maximum configuration of 72 single core CPUs and a whole lot of memory
. Dual core CPUs followed, giving lots of cores in a box the size of a commercial fridge.
Compare that now to the Sun T5220/T5440 series with Core Multi Threading. The "cool threads" boxes are 2U and 4U servers with what appears to be 128CPUs (Maybe more, it's been a while since I've looked at the processor offerings) in a very small package. Not every CPU has a floating point unit. But for jobs that have lots of threads that don't need FP, they are an excellent choice.
