On 17 Mar 2011, Daniel James outgrape:

In article , Nix wrote:
... which is thousands of times more than any current motherboard
supports.

Not so. My current server ...

Oops, sorry! I thought I had remembered to qualify that remark to
exclude server boards.

True. Desktops are much more limited (my current one has 12Gb and
it turns out not to supply enough power to run that much RAM at
its rated top speed... a sign of untrodden snow.)

... has a motherboard which, fully populated, supports 384Gb

With what size RAM DIMMs? Can you actually achieve that capacity, today,
at any price? If you have 24 slots (which is not impossible) 24x16GB
DIMMs would do it ... and only cost £10k-£15k.

I have no idea I'm fairly sure you couldn't when I bought it, back in
2009, but I suppose the point of this sort of machine is to be crazy
extensible and somewhat futureproofed.

If I change "thousands" to "hundreds" my point still stands -- 256TB is
enough addressing space for today's PCs.

True. I was being pedantic

[Tb RAM]
I suspect boxes like that will be running several CPUs in separate
address spaces, and so aren't strictly relevant to this discussion ...
but I'd be interested to see the spec of such a machine.

SGI-as-was sold quite a lot of them, many very very multiprocessor
indeed: that's why the Linux kernel is known to scale to thousands of
CPUs.

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