Comment on Data centers will look ridiculous with tiny future servers.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 month agoThe other use case was for hosting companies. They could sell “5 servers” to one customer and “10 servers” to another and have full CPU/memory isolation. I think that use case still exists and we see it used all over the place in public cloud hyperscalers.
Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are a good argument for discrete servers like this. We’ll see if a new generation of CPUs will make this more worth it.
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 1 month ago
128-192 cores on a single epyc makes almost nothing worth it, the scaling is incredible.
Also, I happen to know they’re working on even more hardware isolation mechanisms, similar to sriov but more enforced.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sure, which is why we haven’t seen a huge adoption. However, in some cases it isn’t so much an issue of total compute power, its autonomy. If there’s a rogue process running on one of those 192 cores and it can end up accessing the memory in your space, its a problem. There are some regulatory rules I’ve run into that actually forbid company processes on shared CPU infrastructure.
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There are, but at that point you’re probably buying big iron already, cost isn’t an issue.
Sun literally made their living from those applications for a long while.