By: Wes Felter (wmf.delete@this.felter.org), October 12, 2018 1:30 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on October 12, 2018 2:01 am wrote:
> I see no reason why a cloud computing company would EVER want multi socket servers in today's
> world of dozens of cores per socket. It adds additional cost while providing no additional
> benefit. In order to succeed an ARM server vendor does not need to support more than one socket
> per system. There's a ton of market to exploit that has no need for multi socket.
Single socket is easier to deal with because of the lack of NUMA (except AMD), but most of the cost factors favor 2S, such as needing half as many BMCs, NICs, etc. Ultimately the price of processors is artificial so vendors can make 1S or 2S cheaper; Intel is steering customers towards 2S while AMD is trying to make 1S and 2S equally competitive. And of course you can always buy a 2S server and only populate one socket as long as you watch out for the I/O gotchas.
> I see no reason why a cloud computing company would EVER want multi socket servers in today's
> world of dozens of cores per socket. It adds additional cost while providing no additional
> benefit. In order to succeed an ARM server vendor does not need to support more than one socket
> per system. There's a ton of market to exploit that has no need for multi socket.
Single socket is easier to deal with because of the lack of NUMA (except AMD), but most of the cost factors favor 2S, such as needing half as many BMCs, NICs, etc. Ultimately the price of processors is artificial so vendors can make 1S or 2S cheaper; Intel is steering customers towards 2S while AMD is trying to make 1S and 2S equally competitive. And of course you can always buy a 2S server and only populate one socket as long as you watch out for the I/O gotchas.