FAQ Friday

And it is. There’s a single CPU socket in here. This is our AMD Milan based sled, older generation, and we’ve got one CPU socket in here.

People may be accustomed to buying a two socket system or even a four socket system. Why did you decide to have a single CPU socket? That’s a very deliberate engineering choice. A single socket system is much simpler than a dual socket or a quad socket system. It is cheaper to make. It can be made faster. And more power efficient.

If you look at what is the difference between a single socket system and a dual socket system, how does it cause anything other than problems? It is only for those applications that need a core count that exceeds the cores found in a single socket.

With the end of Dennard scaling around 2006, 2007, all of the bounty of Moore’s law has been going into improving the number of cores in the socket. Even on this older gen, we have 64 cores, 128 threads in this single socket. That’s a lot of parallelism in the single socket and the juice of going to dual socket is just nowhere near worth the squeeze.

So we are very deliberately a single socket system. Pretty much always gonna see single socket systems from Oxide. If you want more compute, you add more sleds. Thanks and see you next time.