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I want to put together a new system based on a Sandy Bridge 2600K CPU with the maximum possible memory of 32 Gb. The P67 MoB is specified to take 4 x 8GB non ECC RAM, but such 8GB RAM modules do not appear to be available yet, can anyone tell me what is the projected date for these to be on the market? One or two vendors are selling 8GB ECC RAM modules, would these work?

BrianLR wrote:

I want to put together a new system based on a Sandy Bridge 2600K CPU with the maximum possible memory of 32 Gb. The P67 MoB is specified to take 4 x 8GB non ECC RAM, but such 8GB RAM modules do not appear to be available yet, can anyone tell me what is the projected date for these to be on the market? One or two vendors are selling 8GB ECC RAM modules, would these work?

Not that I advise against having a lot of memory, but I think we can all agree 32GB just might possibly be overkill for a desktop system. 16GB is a no go?

e: I hope this isn't an AFD joke.

I think there is something weird with ECC and run of the mill Intel CPU's. I think you have to pay extra or something to get the ability to properly use it? I'm not sure, maybe someone else with more knowledge on the subject can clarify.

StuG wrote:

I think there is something weird with ECC and run of the mill Intel CPU's. I think you have to pay extra or something to get the ability to properly use it? I'm not sure, maybe someone else with more knowledge on the subject can clarify.

The 2600K doesn't even support ECC memory. You'll have to wait for SNB Xeons.

DancinJack wrote:

The 2600K doesn't even support ECC memory. You'll have to wait for SNB Xeons.

Does this mean that the 8GB ECC modules he is attempting to use would not work at all? Or would just all the benefit of ECC be thrown out the window?

If the modules are unbuffered, they will probably work but the ECC capability will be disabled. If they are registered/buffered, then no they probably will not work at all.

Intel insists on segmenting their product line into "consumer" and "server", never the twain shall meet...

An application that actually needs and will use 32GiB of physical memory might be better deployed on a server platform anyway.

The system I am planning to build is for processing and editing multi-Gigapixel images using such applications as AutoPano Giga and Photoshop CS5, so the more RAM the better. While a system based on dual Zeon processors would be nice, the cost would be in the region of $5000 at least, so my intention is the put together a system for around $2500, based on either the Intel iCore 7 2600K or perhaps 970, although X58 boards are limited to 24GB the X58 boards are better suited for add-on RAID controllers.

Bearing in mind Moore's Law, in two or three years a 32GB RAM systems will not be unusual and seeing as how the P67 board is designed to take 32GB there must be an expectation the 8GB chips are on the way, so any suggestions as to where I can find out about that or better still when they are due would be welcome.

If you're looking at supporting insane amounts of RAM without selling your firstborn, have you considered an AMD Opteron based solution?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813182240
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819105266

8 DIMM sockets, so you can get to 32GB even with current 4GB unregistered DIMMs; it'll also take registered DIMMs for a maximum of 64GB today, and up to 128GB in the future (once 16GB registered DIMMs become available).

Probably quite a bit cheaper than equivalent Xeon gear...

Downside is the PCIe x16 slot runs at only x8; but since this isn't a gaming rig, that shouldn't be an issue.

Alternatively, I believe at least some of the forthcoming X79 motherboards will support 8 DIMM sockets (since the Sandy Bridge E CPUs offer four channels of memory, that's just two sockets per channel). But you'll have to wait for that to be released, and of course it will be more expensive than a P67-based system, but that is offset somewhat by the RAM, since 8 x 4GB is bound to be significantly cheaper than 4 bleeding-edge 8GB chips. Nevertheless, if you're trying to build something that will meet your needs with room to grow, that may well be the way to go (you should be able to move to 8x8GB chips if that every becomes economical and necessary, and you may even have a shot at switching to an Ivy Bridge processor... though I wouldn't count on it)

And actually, Moore's Law or not, I don't think 32GB will be all that common in a couple of years. Most consumers are more than satisfied with 4GB, and even a lot of workstations don't have needs that approach that much. Desktop OEMs are likely to be more interested in finding ways to offer the same amount of memory in cheaper ways (single 4GB chip in a single channel). And in three years, a lot of consumers will probably be using less than 4GB of RAM on their primary computing device, because their primary (and in many cases only) computing device will be their smartphone (and ARM hasn't even figured out 64bit yet).

UberGerbil wrote:

And actually, Moore's Law or not, I don't think 32GB will be all that common in a couple of years.

I'm kinda torn on this one... I think we basically stalled at 4GB for several years, waiting for the world to finally get on the 64-bit bandwagon. Now that we've (mostly) graduated to 64-bit now, I expect developers to start taking advantage of 8GB+ of RAM. OTOH, it is hard to imagine mainstream apps really needing that much, so maybe it'll remain a niche thing for a while yet.

I've certainly found 8GB to be useful, but I probably fall somewhere slightly beyond "power user" on the spectrum (I tend to use VMs for various things, and VMs eat RAM like there's no tomorrow).

just brew it! wrote:

If you're looking at supporting insane amounts of RAM without selling your firstborn, have you considered an AMD Opteron based solution?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813182240
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819105266

8 DIMM sockets, so you can get to 32GB even with current 4GB unregistered DIMMs; it'll also take registered DIMMs for a maximum of 64GB today, and up to 128GB in the future (once 16GB registered DIMMs become available).

Probably quite a bit cheaper than equivalent Xeon gear...

Downside is the PCIe x16 slot runs at only x8; but since this isn't a gaming rig, that shouldn't be an issue.

Great suggestion and with a dual socket board there are more PCIe options. I had looked at benchmark sites for Gigapixel work and Premiere Pro and also examples from many projects and almost all are using Intel Xeon or iCore 7 CPUs and so I also overlooked the AMD Opteron.

It looks like I can put together a system with Two 8 core 6128 and 32 GB RAM within the kind of budget I had in mind, here is a quick outline, further suggestions, or modifactions would be welcome:

1 x ASUS KGPE-D16 Dual Socket G34 AMD SR5690 SSI EEB 3.61 Dual 8/12 Core AMD Opteron 6000 series Server Motherboard
2 x AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz Socket G34 115W 8-Core Server Processor
2 x G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9Q-16GBRL
2 x A-DATA S599 AS599S-64GM-C 2.5" 64GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
2 x Western Digital VelociRaptor WD4500HLHX 450GB 10000 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
1 x SPARKLE SXX4602048D5SNM GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Will you really need the GTX460 for anything? Seems like more to the budget than it would need to be.

StuG wrote:

Will you really need the GTX460 for anything? Seems like more to the budget than it would need to be.

Absolutely, AutoPano Giga and Premiere Pro CS5 both use GPU acceleration, I might even go to a 560Ti card !

just brew it! wrote:

If you're looking at supporting insane amounts of RAM without selling your firstborn, have you considered an AMD Opteron based solution?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813182240
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819105266

8 DIMM sockets, so you can get to 32GB even with current 4GB unregistered DIMMs; it'll also take registered DIMMs for a maximum of 64GB today, and up to 128GB in the future (once 16GB registered DIMMs become available).

Probably quite a bit cheaper than equivalent Xeon gear...

Downside is the PCIe x16 slot runs at only x8; but since this isn't a gaming rig, that shouldn't be an issue.

While Opternon vs Zeon benchmarks may look promising, see http://www.elnexus.com/articles/Opteron-Xeon-Benchmarks-2010.aspx it looks like AMD did not fully implement SSE4.1, which is a new set of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/schema-validation-with-intel-streaming-simd-extensions-4-intel-sse4/ designed to improve the performance of various applications, such as video encoders, image processing, 3D games, and string/text processing.

This has an impact on the performance in some cases for example Adobe software like Premiere Pro, see http://forums.adobe.com/message/3391887#3391887. That is reinforced in the above benchmarking artilce that ends with " My final word (at least, for now), on this is: if you're in academic computing, and have full control over your software, the AMD Opteron will be sure-to-please. If you're reliant on third-party software, especially on the Windows platform, Intel is likely to be the safer bet."

I should have called this Forum Topic 'When will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops' in honor of George Carlin!

I have receieved an answer to my original question When will 8Gb modules be availble for P67/H67 Boards ? A Kingston rep says that the 8GB unbuffered modules won’t be out until Q3/Q4 this year, and when they do appear they will be very expensive!

BrianLR wrote:

I have receieved an answer to my original question When will 8Gb modules be availble for P67/H67 Boards ? A Kingston rep says that the 8GB unbuffered modules won’t be out until Q3/Q4 this year, and when they do appear they will be very expensive!

Sounds about right to me, just based on my own intuition. It's about time for 8GB modules to appear given how long 4GB modules have been available and how cheap they've become in my opinion.

BrianLR wrote:

A Kingston rep says that the 8GB unbuffered modules won’t be out until Q3/Q4 this year, and when they do appear they will be very expensive!

Yes they will. Just as 4GB were for DDR2, and 2GB were for DDR, and 1GB were for SDR. The last, most capacious models for each technology always demand bleeding-edge prices. Eventually they may drift down to more reasonable prices, if a successor tech doesn't appear to move the whole ladder up a rung. That's why several people in this thread were suggesting options that offered more slots, rather than planning on cramming the maximum into each slot.

just brew it! wrote:

I'm kinda torn on this one... I think we basically stalled at 4GB for several years, waiting for the world to finally get on the 64-bit bandwagon. Now that we've (mostly) graduated to 64-bit now, I expect developers to start taking advantage of 8GB+ of RAM. OTOH, it is hard to imagine mainstream apps really needing that much, so maybe it'll remain a niche thing for a while yet.

Of course as you're well aware we were actually stalled at an effective ~3GB under 32bit, so just the switch to 64GB has liberated an additional 33% on many machines. But the reality is that app developers are looking at virtual memory, not physical memory, so that barrier wasn't a hard constraint; this isn't exactly analogous to the old 1MB (aka 640K) ceiling that really did stall progress for several years. And you're right, very few apps have that voracious an appetite for memory; the few that do are either already available in 64bit versions or were large address aware when running as 32bit apps in a 64bit system. And how many of them are there? Unless you're in the media content business (the Adobe suite, 3D rendering, etc) they're mostly server apps. Even games, that long-time driver of hardware progress, can't get there, hampered as they are by both GPU bottlenecks and their own console cross-platform requirements.

I've certainly found 8GB to be useful, but I probably fall somewhere slightly beyond "power user" on the spectrum (I tend to use VMs for various things, and VMs eat RAM like there's no tomorrow).

Yeah, I agree, and I can even push past what was comfortable on a 32bit machine using just browsers -- but that's because I often have 8+ browser windows open, each with 20,30, or 50+ tabs (and some browsers seem to want to hang onto memory for every rotated ad or AJAX update, so they just keep eating memory over time -- I've seen one stupid Reuters page climb into the hundreds of MB when left open overnight). Since most desktop users were living comfortably in 3GB it'll be a while before they feel the need for 8GB; in fact I expect a lot of consumer OEM systems will stick with a single 4GB RAM stick in a single channel of memory, as the Zecate systems are already doing, simply as a way of keeping costs down. Meanwhile the increasing affordability of SSDs may mute the demand for more RAM: it's a lot less obvious you've blown past what fits when you've got flash acting as the backing store for the page file.

But you're right that VMs are huge consumers of RAM, and I expect that's how we're going to see OSes find a use for all that RAM and give us a reason to buy more: sandboxing taken to the logical extreme.

it looks like AMD did not fully implement SSE4.1

They implemented the far inferior SSE4a instead. You will have to wait for Bulldozer.

BrianLR wrote:

A Kingston rep says that the 8GB unbuffered modules won’t be out until Q3/Q4 this year, and when they do appear they will be very expensive!

Kingston now has them listed on their website: http://www.valueram.com/datasheets/default.asp

In the Intel Validated section, just scroll down to the 16GB section. During a quick snoop around Newegg, I didn't see any listing, but the price directly from Kingston seemed reasonable to me. (expensive, but not very expensive) If my memory serves me right I spent about that for my first 8GB kit. When I first heard "very expensive" I was thinking $600-$800.

joe

BrianLR wrote:

While Opternon vs Zeon benchmarks may look promising, see http://www.elnexus.com/articles/Opteron-Xeon-Benchmarks-2010.aspx it looks like AMD did not fully implement SSE4.1,

From your link: "The 6100-series CPUs have a single memory controller that sits in between the two CPU dies within each package."

That's not how it works at all. There are two dies and they are simply connected with HyperTransport (1 16 bit, HT 3.1/3.0 lane). Both have a dual channel memory controller. NUMA-aware distros of Linux will allocate memory from the local NUMA pool only, not from remote nodes. Each Magny-Cours is two NUMA nodes.


Not that it matters much when talking about SSE, but I figured I'd point it out.

Now - in dual and quad socket configurations AMD CPUs beat the crap out of Intel CPUs for memory bandwidth thanks to their cache coherency magic implemented in the newest CPUs. If you're going to be running memory-intensive programs it's entirely likely that the AMD setup would outperform the Intel setup even with their inferior number crunching capabilities.


EDIT: Wow, just realized how old this post is. Oh well.