Violin plays AMD for memory monster

AMD and Violin Memory have ignited a love affair around Hypertransport that should result in what the industry technically refers to as huge DRAM appliances being connected to Opteron-based servers. Violin Memory Inc. had eluded us before today's announcement, which is either the fault of the company's PR staff or our lack of …

[Anonymous Coward]

MS

At last, something that has enough memory to run Vista*

* This fault will be corrected with SP1, when you will require 20TB of RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

well, duh!

Violin Memory? that must be a fiddle,surely?

[M Francis]

Pagefile

Vista will still use the pagefile when running notepad.

[Tim Bates]

Remember....

Remember back to when 10MB of RAM was huge and insane? Heck, I remember thinking a 20MB hard disk was huge.

[Kristin McKechie]

Anyone remember the 386?

I guess we will soon see MS introduce EMM386 for Vista... didn't work then, probably wont work now.....

[Adam White]

Connecting

How does one physically connect a 2RU MAS unit to an Opteron server via HyperTransport?

[Anonymous Coward]

To Connect...

Use a HyperCable of course.

[Andy]

@ Adam White

"How does one physically connect a 2RU MAS unit to an Opteron server via HyperTransport?"

I suspect the answers to that would be, variously, 'one doesn't', 'with a cable' and 'real soon now'. Clearly I couldn't go into a computer shop and build me one of these fellas up but presumably they'll be working on getting the connection right (or 'right enough', as is so often the case with these things) so that the solution is there.

[Sean M]

@ Adam White (physical connection)

http://www.violin-memory.com/products/hostinterfaces.html

"PCI Express interface (4x & 8x interfaces)"

"The Violin 1010 Memory Appliance is connected to a host via the PCI Express interface. This connection requires a Host Interface Board (HIB) and a PCIe Cable"

[N]

but is it enough for Vista?

10Tb? - oooh er, nice, Ill wait until they pop up on E-bay next year,

I once had a 386 with 8Mb of ram and a 40Mb disc - a colossus at the time. That was in the days when Bill Gates declared:

640K ought to be enough for anybody...

clearly a man with great 'vision'

[Matt Bryant]

Memory limits?

Someone refresh my memory (pun unintended, honest!) but what's the memory limits for x86-64? I thought Slowaris x86 was stuck with 4GB of user space even with AMD 64? And I know Intel waffle on about a theoretical memory limit of 5 exebytes for EMT64. Surely it would make more sense today to use it as solid state drives rather than additional RAM you can't actually address, unless you wanted to create a memory sharing cluster like the old Alpha stuff (how many Alpha designers ended up at AMD?)....