R810 and R815 are not variations on a theme
The PowerEdge R815 is not an Intel box. The way Dell names servers is 0 on the end=Intel, 5 on the end=AMD. The R815 is a 4 socket Opteron box
Maybe what Intel really needs to do with its future Xeon processors is stop jacking up the core count so high and start putting more memory controllers on the chips and more memory channels in each socket. Maybe Intel should get back into the memory business. When server maker Dell launched its two-socket and four-socket …
Memory has come a long way in the past five years and I expect it will go a lot further in the next. Same process tech as processors and GPUs have benefited from is being applied to RAM.
It would be very nice indeed and from many points of view if RAM were clocked at CPU frequencies... no more L1/L2/L3 cache... imagine the simplifications for software design!
Actually TPM if you work out the cost per GB on the 8GB and 16GB sticks you'll find they are the same price/GB. So actually youd have to be mad to buy the 8GB, (assuming you need the count) seeing as you would need more 8GB which means power consumption going up and decrease in performance due to filling the DIMM's!! Might as well skip the 8 and go straight to 16!
They are the same price, but the new memory architecture with Nehalem-EX benefits from fully populated DIMM's. With that said, the Dell solution is MUCH more dense than IBM's if you simply calculate 8 R910's x 512GB's of RAM, you can get 4TB's of RAM in a 10U chassis. The HP solution on the other hand maxes out at 2.48TB's of RAM.
Advantage Dell...
The R815 is an AMD Server, not Intel. The 5 at the end of the name indicates AMD (0's indicate Intel).
Re: "So instead of having a two-socket box that tops out at 256 GB, this one can expand up to the same 512 GB maximum of the M910 blade and the two other true four-socket Nehalem-EX boxes announced by Dell, the R815 and R910."