Some previous-gen versions of these have fallen into the price range that an individual could plausibly buy. For example, here's a used 152-core, 608GB RAM version for AU$10k: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SGI-ALTIX-4700-76-DC-itanium2-1-6-60...

Unfortunately, the power usage is ridiculous, something like 20 kW. That's what typically makes old big-iron impractical. At the mid-range, used hardware is even cheaper: you can pick up old 12-core, 48-GB-RAM Itanium boxes for the cost of a Chromebook (~$200-300). But they take so much power that you don't end up saving anything over buying a dual-Xeon new, at least if you keep it on. Also, everything is very heavy and a hassle to move.

I love the idea of running entire VMs from ram.

We started doing this when I was working at Cisco for a CI system - rack servers with 768GB of ram and tmpfs as instance storage for Openstack servers. It worked pretty well.

If you have 16GB, which is normal for high-end laptops these days, then you already can.

+1

It would be wrong if you didn't.