On Jan 30, 2011, at 8:39 AM, Leen Besselink wrote: > On 01/25/2011 11:06 PM, Owen DeLong wrote: >> >> >>> "640k ought to be enough for anyone." >>> >> If IPv4 is like 640k, then, IPv6 is like having >> 47,223,664,828,696,452,136,959 >> terabytes of RAM. I'd argue that while 640k was short sighted, I think it is >> unlikely we will see machines with much more than a terabyte of RAM >> in the lifetime of IPv6. >> > I would be very careful with such predictions. How about 2 TB of RAM ?: > Yes... I left a word out of my sentence... I think it is unlikely we will see COMMON machines with much more than a terabyte of RAM in the lifetime of IPv6.
Sure, there will be the rare monster super-special-purpose thing with more RAM capacity than there is storage in many large disk farms, but, for common general purpose machines, I think it's safe to say that 47,223,664,828,696,452,136,959 terabytes ought to be enough for anyone given that even at the best of Moore's law common desktops will take 9 or more years to get to 1 Terabyte of RAM. > "...IBM can cram 1 TB of memory into a 4U chassis or 2 TB in an > eight-socket box in two 4U chassis..." > > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/01/ibm_xeon_7500_servers/page2.html > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/01/ibm_xeon_7500_servers/ > > I don't know who will use it or how much they will need to pay for it or > even when they will be available, > but they are talking about it (in this case at the last CEBIT in March). > > People are building some very big systems for example with lots and lots > of virtual machines. > > Yes... My intent, like the 640k quote, was aimed at the common desktop machine and primarily to show that since 1 TB is an inconceivably large memory footprint for any normal user today, it's going to be a long long time before 47,223,664,828,696,452,136,959 TB comes up short for anyone's needs. Owen
