Re:The Western Digital WD Black SN850 Review: A Fast PCIe 4....
by reacharavindh on Sunday March 21, 2021 @08:39AM
(#26529971)
Yes, there certainly are operational reasons to go big with non consumer-grade servers. In many cases, it is warranted. I was only imagining the lower end of infrastructure needs where a provider can get away with consumer grade hardware and achieve substantially lower costs. Say, a provider building their own racks of ITX motherboards with consumer CPUs. I’m sure there are enough Retail SKUs to be purchased in open market for small scale...
I think backblaze did just that with hard drives when they were starting out
I think a lot of Devs have had the surprise that their laptop has higher single core performance than a server.
I don't know to what extent but space is certainly a premium. For a unit of rack space you want to maximise the cores and memory.
With a server grade multi socket CPU, you're also likely to pair it with at least 512gb of ram.
Consumer CPUs have a much lower limit. Though Threadripper is a bit higher.
There's also the availability side of things. How many CPUs can you get to populate your datacenter?
Will it be easy to order 500 consumer CPUs if you're not a retailer? Intel/AMD do want to steer their enterprise customers to higher volume parts.