Those cores are going to be sold to you largely on their memory bandwidth benefits for the top end of the Xeon range.
If you need memory bandwidth, you will gladly pay for them, and look seriously at IBM (something we just did).
If you don't know that you need memory bandwidth, just skip them. Also, I would suggest you check out OVH or Hetzner for a new startup -- it's (sadly) very unlikely that you will need enough servers for long enough to make buying your own a good plan.
> Those cores are going to be
sold to you largely on their
memory bandwidth benefits
for the top end of the Xeon range.
That is, (A) bandwidth,
bytes moved per second or (B)
total permitted memory size,
say, 1/2 TB?
My guess is that memory sizes
of 1/2 TB require registered
memory, that is, a register
in the memory to simplify timing
which can be challenging for such
large memories, but the use of
the register is an intermediate
stop on the way to/from the processor
and its cache(s) so, really, reduces
bytes per second that might be
achieved with, say, the
simpler, consumer 1600 MHz,
DDR3?
Of course, other issues could
include number of electronically
independent channels to/from memory,
address interleaved memory,
etc.?
> look seriously at IBM
I looked at the article;
IBM seems to be trying
to sell hardware (again!).
Okay.
So far my software is all
written for Windows, and
my guess is that Windows (7
Pro or Server)
doesn't run on IBM's Power
processors? And even if
Windows does run, lots of
other software that runs
on Windows and Intel
x86 likely won't run
on IBM Power?
For where you sound like you're at, I wouldn't even worry about it. Usually when we say bandwidth, we mean bytes/second, to and from the caches and main system memory.
But, really, don't worry about it -- for windows, ovh or hetzner, or if your workload varies a lot, azure or AWS are almost certainly what you want; put the time in to product development until it's so successful that you _need_ the tech help to scale.
> Usually when we say bandwidth, we mean bytes/second, to and from the caches and main system memory.
I thought that the registered memory of high end
server processors that could support 100+
GB of main memory were significantly slower
in bandwidth than the DDR3/4 main memory
of consumer processors.
If you need memory bandwidth, you will gladly pay for them, and look seriously at IBM (something we just did).
If you don't know that you need memory bandwidth, just skip them. Also, I would suggest you check out OVH or Hetzner for a new startup -- it's (sadly) very unlikely that you will need enough servers for long enough to make buying your own a good plan.