The E5-2670 itself does not support more than 384GB, so a dual E5-2670 will be stuck at 768GB. My stupid generator would need a bit more than 924 GB.Rein Halbersma wrote:I can't reproduce a 1K dual E5-2670 with 1 Tb of RAM. The two 2670s are under $200 each, but where do you get such cheap RAM? Note that the E5-2670 is limited to DDR3-1600 RAM, for which goes for $760 per 64 Gb (2 x 32 Gb) at Newegg. That's $6K for "only" 0.5 Tb and total build costs near $8K. Or are you willing to buy used sticks? Also, the SuperMicro X9D series of motherboards do not support more than 0.5 Tb anyway.For under 1K you can buy dual E5-2670 with 1TB of RAM. 3 such machines are much faster and better choice for generating 7-men than 44 cores E5-2699-v4 machine with 1.5TB or RAM.
P.S. Is is only 88 threads, but 44 real cores. You know E5-2xxx in Xeon marking comes from dual, meaning you can put only 2 of those on a board.
768GB will mean 24 x 32 GB sticks. Cheap mainboards with 24 slots are probably not easy to find and cheap 32 GB DDR3 sticks even less so. Ebay does not know about RAM modules with more than 8 GB.
32GB DDR4 sticks are cheaper than DDR3 sticks, which might be sufficient reason to forget about the older hardware generations when it comes to generating 7-piece TBs.
Unfortunately the price of 32GB DDR4 sticks has been increasing considerably over the last months. And of course to get to 1 TB 32GB will not suffice, you'll need 16 x 64GB DDR4 LRDIMMs, which seem to go for about € 700 and 16 x € 700 = € 11,200. Still, about 25K would seem to suffice for a system with dual E5-2699v4s, 1 TB RAM and some big HDDs.
But then... who is going to use those tablebases? Having them on HDD is only a bit more useful than probing the Lomonosov tables online. You need the WDL tables on SSD for them to be really useful (and ideally you should have a few hundred GB for caching them in RAM). The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB SSD costs about € 1,350. Two of them are probably not yet sufficient, but about € 3,000 seems to be a realistic cost for storing the 7-piece WDL tables. And then there's the problem of downloading / distributing 10-20 TB of data.