Re:Intel demonstrates a 28-core processor running at 5GHz
by dijit on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @05:48AM
(#17236195)
Think of it this way; if you're paying the license based on physical CPU socket (commonly the case) then it makes sense to scale vertically.
If you're a cloud provider, it also makes sense to have very large capable machines to increase your density.
Power consumption in datacenters is typically a significant cost of total hosting. (I pay the same as what a server costs in power consumption per year, per server)
So if you can have double the compute, with the same power draw, it's worth double the price in the first year alone, typically servers have a 3-5y life-cycle. So you can extrapolate that to "a server that is double the cost but the same power draw can be worth 5x as much as a slower CPU". but that's the cut-off..
For many servers the flat rate fee of: the license of anything that runs; the motherboard, the drives, the memory, the PSU, the cabling, the space, the power consumption means that it can be economical to egregiously spec out on CPU; if that's the bottleneck which is the case in a lot of virtual or build environments.
If you're a cloud provider, it also makes sense to have very large capable machines to increase your density.
Power consumption in datacenters is typically a significant cost of total hosting. (I pay the same as what a server costs in power consumption per year, per server)
So if you can have double the compute, with the same power draw, it's worth double the price in the first year alone, typically servers have a 3-5y life-cycle. So you can extrapolate that to "a server that is double the cost but the same power draw can be worth 5x as much as a slower CPU". but that's the cut-off..
For many servers the flat rate fee of: the license of anything that runs; the motherboard, the drives, the memory, the PSU, the cabling, the space, the power consumption means that it can be economical to egregiously spec out on CPU; if that's the bottleneck which is the case in a lot of virtual or build environments.