Tyan's early hardware for Nvidia's shiny new EGX platform is *ta-da* a bargain-basement server

Nvidia revealed EGX earlier this week, its distributed platform for machine learning applications, based on Kubernetes. Now Taiwanese server vendor Tyan has furnished one of the first examples of the kind of hardware that will be used with EGX. The server, called Thunder SX TN76-B7102, is a 2U dual-socket machine equipped with …

[LeahroyNake]

How much RAM!

'24 DDR4 slots'

That's 192 GB with 8GB DIMMS :0

But can it run Quake 2, the new fangled raytraced version at more than 30 fps.. Or Crysis... Runs and hides behind the AMD hypervisor.

[Roxor]

Re: How much RAM!

I have vague memories of someone doing a ray-traced version of Star Trek Voyager Elite Force years ago. That's a Quake 3 engine game, and they certainly had it at playable frame-rates on just the CPU. No fancy hardware, just a regular desktop.

Ah, here we go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbQ47dKHHI8

That was from June of 2008.

An earlier video from the same project in August of 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUsaNfmZ3CU

This one shows it managing around 10fps and the video description listing system specs as an Athlon X2 3800+, which is comparable to what I was using at the time.

At first on seeing the 1.5MRay/s statistic, I thought it was using some adaptive sampling technique, but some quick number crunching says nope. That figure fits tracing every pixel of its 426*350 resolution frame at 10fps, given that early version is stated to lack shadows, and would thus only be tracing camera rays.