qupada

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Probably best to look at it as a competitor to a Xeon D system, rather than any full-size server.

We use a few of the Dell XR4000 at work (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ipovw/poweredge-xr4510c), as they're small, low power, and able to be mounted in a 2-post comms rack.

Our CPU of choice there is the Xeon D-2776NT (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/226239/intel-xeon-d2776nt-processor-25m-cache-up-to-3-20-ghz/specifications.html), which features 16 cores @ 2.1GHz, 32 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and is rated 117W.

The ostensibly top of this range 4584PX, also with 16 cores but at double the clock speed, 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and 120W seems like it would be a perfectly fine drop-in replacement for that.

(I will note there is one significant difference that the Xeon does come with a built-in NIC; in this case the 4-port 25Gb "E823-C", saving you space and PCIe lanes in your system)

As more PCIe 5.0 expansion options land, I'd expect the need for large quantities of PCIe to diminish somewhat. A 100Gb NIC would only require a x4 port, and even a x8 HBA could push more than 15GB/s. Indeed, if you compare the total possible PCIe throughput of those CPUs, 32x 4.0 is ~63GB/s, while 28x 5.0 gets you ~110GB/s.

Unfortunately, we're now at the mercy of what server designs these wind up in. I have to say though, I fully expect it is going to be smaller designs marketed as "edge" compute, like that Dell system.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 months ago (5 children)

It does however affect getting updates from government agencies, and others who insist on only disseminating real-time information to the public via Twitter.

For instance: https://twitter.com/WakaKotahiWgtn

This is the account for traffic events (road closures, traffic accidents, etc) in my city. Not signed in, the latest visible post is from February 2023.

Since I don't have a twitter account, this is now functionally useless.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago

Since the realistic competitor here is probably magnetic tape, current-generation (LTO9) media can transfer at around 400MB/s, taking 12 hours and change to fill an 18TB tape.

Earlier archival optical disk formats (https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/798) claimed 360MB/s, but I believe that is six, double-sided discs writing both sides simultaneously, so 30MB/s per stream. Filling the same six (300GB) discs would take about an hour and a half.

Building the library to handle and read/write in bulk is always the issue though. The above optical system fit 1.9PB in the space of a server rack (and I didn't see any options to expand further when that was current technology), and by the looks is 7 units that each can be writing a set of discs (call that 2.5GB/s total).

In the same single rack you'd fit 560 LTO tapes (10.1PB for LTO9) and 21 drives (8.4GB/s).

So they have a bit of catching up to do, especially with LTO10 (due in the next year or so) doubling the capacity and further increasing the throughput.

There's also the small matter that every one of these massive increases in optical disc capacity in recent years has turned out to be vapourware. I mean I don't doubt that they will achieve it someday, but they always seem to go nowhere.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago (3 children)

From the video description:

I have been a Samsung product user for many years, and I don't plan to stop anytime soon

And all sympathy I had for this person just vanished. If you don't demand better, they will keep doing - and getting away with - shit like this.

Voting with your wallet might be the one voice you have left in this world, what a way to squander it by continuing to buy products from companies whose representatives behave in this manner.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I was going to say out of Half Life (as in the 1998 original), so we're clearly thinking about much the same era :)

I think it's the slightly crispy edges where the blurred background starts, combined with the overall... flat... appearance.

Cute cat though.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

The estimated training time for GPT-4 is 90 days though.

Assuming you could scale that linearly with the amount of hardware, you'd get it down to about 3.5 days. From four times a year to twice a week.

If you're scrambling to get ahead of the competition, being able to iterate that quickly could very much be worth the money.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And spatulas. Don't forget the spatulas.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'd be curious to see how much cooling a SAS HBA would get in there. Looking at Broadcom's 8 external port offerings, the 9300-8e reports 14.5W typical power consumption, 9400-8e 9.5W, and 9500-8e only 6.1W. If you were considering one of these, definitely seems it'd be worth dropping the money on the newest model of HBA.

I'm definitely curious, would only personally need it to be NAS + Plex server for which either of the CPUs they're offering is a bit overkill, but it's nice that it fits a decent amount of RAM, and you're not forced to choose between adding storage or networking.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Single-sided drives can be up to 4TB though, no?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It was linked a little up thread, but since you're (probably) referring to the "Space-cadet" keyboard, it was seven.

Technically, they drew a distinction between the "shift" keys (of which there were three), and the other modifiers (four).

In modern times (or for Linux at least), Meta has essentially coalesced with Alt, so the modifiers we've retained are Control, Alt, and Super (Windows), with only "Hyper" having been lost along the way.

The remaining two shifts (also lost to time) were "Top" (symbols) and "Front" (Greek), with the Greek supporting combining with shift (there's a table on that Wiki page).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I bought one of the really sturdy kind (weighs about 40kg / 88lb). Uprights are solid 100mm/4" rounds of pine, none of that hollow cardboard tube nonsense.

My XL-sized void loves to haul arse into the room and leap right from the ground to the top level (around 1.6m / 5'3" from the floor), which makes the thing rock side to side fairly precariously. He hasn't knocked it over yet, but some day I'm sure he'll come in too hot.

view more: next ›