EPYC hampered by Memory cost.

Grimlaking

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I'm looking at putting together 4 3 server clusters for some smallish VmWare clusters in the near future. My boss wanted a server quote so I gave him 2. 1 for Intel 24 core based CPU solution and 1 for EPYC 24 core based solution. It looked good until memory. The damn ram for the AMD solution was 1000 dollars PER 32 gig stick!!! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME! That makes the AMD server cost 10k more per box than the Intel solution. I can't justify that. (ESXi hosts with 784 gig of ram each.)

AMD you really need to get in the ring and help drive down these memory costs for your enterprise customers.
 
The vendor is trying to rob you. You should get 3rd party ram. Some vendors try to push you to buy their branded ram, as its the highest margin part of the build. Change your BOM to the minumum the vendor will let you spec, and get a separate quote on ram and install it yourself. As an example, HPE will mark up the exact same module you will buy elsewhere by 3x, and just puts a HPE sticker on it. Get a quote from CDW or DCW, I just was looking at quotes for 64gb ddr4 ecc modules at around 800.
 
Most EPYC rack mounts are more like $450 - $500 per 32G stick... at least from what I've seen. Beware of the "big boys" and their RAM pricing.
 
get dual socket 32 core machines (7301 so you still get the full 64meg of l3, these are not to expensive), and use the doubled number of memory channels to enable use of 16gig dimms. I bought 2 of these type of machine with 256gig of memory each for work, along with 10gig nics, 2x 800gig pm1725a drives, a 120x2 m2 boss card, 24drive nvme backplane, mandated 5 year warrenty, each server was only $12,500,(note we had academic pricing).
 
Someone is screwing someone to inflate the AMD quote's RAM prices.

Either your vendor is screwing you over, or Intel is screwing the vendor, or maybe both... ;)
 
That's interesting. I wonder why the price disparity on ram. There are other nuances as well. The build site only allows one of each type of fiber channel card for the Amd cards but multiple on the Intel site. And with our relationship with Dell we need that 4 hour onsite for our systems. Hence the need to use one vendor. That is interesting though.
 
That's interesting. I wonder why the price disparity on ram. There are other nuances as well. The build site only allows one of each type of fiber channel card for the Amd cards but multiple on the Intel site. And with our relationship with Dell we need that 4 hour onsite for our systems. Hence the need to use one vendor. That is interesting though.

Looks like that right there is your ram price discrepancy. It isn't the best idea to buy your additional parts from your server vendor if you can help it.
 
Looks like that right there is your ram price discrepancy. It isn't the best idea to buy your additional parts from your server vendor if you can help it.

I got that and if this was for personal use or non critical systems I would be more likely to buy the . 75 tb of ram from another vendor.
 
On some of the dell chassis, if you don't pick the nvme drive expansion a h740(2gig cache) raid card is required. unless you need that pick a chassis or chassis config that doesn't bundle that. its adds 2k'ish to the price.
 
Ohh and dells online configurator sucks, I would highly advise calling them and getting a salesmen to create an actual quote for you. Their salesdroids often can beat the website pricing.
 
Oh well yea beating website pricing is a given. Just dont have days for our sales account rep to get back to us. I may ask for a quote though just for giggles.
 
Most EPYC rack mounts are more like $450 - $500 per 32G stick... at least from what I've seen. Beware of the "big boys" and their RAM pricing.

https://memory.net/?s=32gb+ecc+ddr4&post_type=product 314 you mean. Paired with the Supermicro 8048B-TR4FT server you can shockingly cheaply put together a 3TB server. Even the slowest and cheapest Broadwell Xeon E7 CPUs support this -- and if the same amount of money moves the database from disk to RAM, the performance will skyrocket. To quote Gary Bernhardt:


To be more on topic, is there an EPYC server with a, well, epic number of DIMM slots? I usually only see 32 which is somewhat modest -- although by now the 64GB ECC sticks came down to be only ~10% more expensive than the 32GB ones per gigabyte so it's not so dire.
 
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Yea high data density chips cost a lot of real world chips. But I'd love to have the stability of completely loading into ram. But honestly as attractive as that is for perofrmance one good power glitch and by by database hope you had a living copy on disk.
 
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