Pssst! Wanna rent a cheap, off-the-books, third-gen Xeon Scalable? No SLA attached? We know a cloud that can help

Microsoft has started a preview of Intel’s third-generation Xeon Scalable processors in its Azure cloud. Unusually, Microsoft has named the exact silicon powering the preview: the Xeon Platinum 8370C from the Ice Lake family. That device isn’t listed among Intel’s product list, so we only have Microsoft’s scanty specs to go …

[Peter-Waterman1]

Scale out, not up

Unpopular opinion? Scaling up is expensive, inflexible, prone to failure and hard to manage. The need for bigger and faster machines is limited in my opinion given that in today's world, we can successfully scale-out databases, file systems, and compute

[G40]

“based on party numbers”?

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

Localization tells the story

Only available in East, bin selected processors...this is a FinTech play. Interesting hardware specs have been known to happen in the world of algo-trading.

And scale up makes perfect sense if your data is a single stream - like a stock ticker. Ive seen systems that could run 1 core much, much faster than anything visible on Intels webpage. They came in special system builds not generally advertised and long, long series of instructions about how long they could be run and how much cooling needed to be delivered. One server might be 10x the price of something that appeared to be similar on paper if not for the bin selected processor...and pay for itself within a few days of being deployed. After that, it's just power bills and profit.