Whether it's a server or a gaming PC, every computer needs the same basic components.
A central processing unit or CPU, working memory or RAM,
some kind of storage device, a motherboard to connect everything together,
and systems for power and cooling. The difference then is in the configuration
of these components. And three of the big reasons that servers
have different configurations from desktop PCs are that they need to be more power efficient,
more reliable, and more scalable. Servers often live in data centers
with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands
of individual machines. So as you can imagine,
space savings is a major consideration. That's why servers tend to use stacking rack-mountable cases
that have similar general cooling flows as each other
to make deployments more scalable. However, even more than the cost of the space
that they take up, the cost of the power they consume
has been a huge driver of server design in recent years.
And keeping power consumption down is extremely important
unless you want to overwhelm the nuclear plant next door.
Now, one way to help with this is to use a higher quality power supply to reduce waste.
But a better way is to use more efficient components
in the first place so you just don't consume as much power.
Let's start by talking about server CPUs.
Instead of the two to 16 processing cores
that you might find in a gaming CPU, server CPUs commonly have dozens
or even hundreds of processing cores.
Wow! But if you drill down into the spec sheet,
you'll find that these cores are often running at lower clock speeds than you might be used to.
This allows servers to handle a huge volume of simultaneous requests
without consuming any more power than necessary.
They do take a little performance hit in certain tasks,
which is why some specialty data center machines for applications like game servers and high volume trading
can actually use desktop CPUs sometimes. But in general, it's much more important for servers
to have more cores rather than fewer faster ones.
Lower clock speeds also mean that data centers can save money on cooling
since a core that isn't being pushed as hard won't output as much heat.
This idea of maximizing the efficiency or the performance per watt of a server
is so important that we're now even seeing cloud services
design their own chips that are optimized for their own workloads.
Amazon, for example, has their own server CPU called Graviton,
which is designed to be more power efficient than competing chips from Intel and AMD.
But what about the other pieces of our server puzzle, reliability and scalability?
Well, the huge number of CPU cores definitely helps with those goals,
but if you thought that CPUs with over a hundred cores sounded wild,
you ain't seen nothing yet. Did you know that servers can be configured
with as much RAM as you have of SSD storage
in your home PC? Modern servers are frequently configured
with multiple terabytes of memory,
but you'd be amazed how fast that can get eaten up. One technology that uses lots of CPU cores
and RAM is virtualization. Virtualization allows a single server
to be sliced up into multiple virtual servers,
each potentially running a completely different workload or operating system.
It's great for dynamically deploying your computing resources,
helping a data center scale its operations up and down,
depending on how many users need to access it. It also improves both reliability and security
since virtual machines can be more easily managed and deployed.
But for smooth operation, every one of those virtual machines needs,
you guessed it, ample RAM. Another big driver of memory use is caching.
While solid state storage is certainly much faster than older mechanical hard drives,
it still pales in comparison to RAM. So if you were running a content delivery platform,
for example, it might be wise to take the biggest trending content
and load that into a RAM cache to ensure that your users can load it
at lightning fast speeds. Registered dims, load reduced dims, and MCR dims
are examples of technologies that help manufacturers pack more and more memory into servers
to help meet this need. But a copious amount of memory
isn't enough to make a machine server grade. There's also an expectation of superior reliability.
That's where technologies like error correcting or ECC come into play.
ECC allows the server to monitor for data errors
and correct them on the fly. And this same concept can be found in desktops,
but has traditionally been more common in the data center where data integrity is key.
After all, it probably doesn't matter too much if your Minesweeper game crashes,
but it matters a lot if an undetected error in a large data set
bungs up some important scientific research.
Speaking of large data sets, many servers also need huge amounts of storage,
depending on how much data they need to work with. And it's not uncommon to see a one-you server.
That is a server that takes up just one unit of space in a standard rack
with a petabyte or more of high-speed storage these days.
In a lot of cases, these machines are used to provide storage over the network
to other more compute-focused machines that are packed with CPUs or, lately, especially GPUs.
To pack the drives in tighter, they often use drive form factors
that differ from the M.2 drives that might be sitting in your home PC.
One such standard is called EDSFF, and it allows for higher power delivery,
better cooling, and greater capacity, allowing data centers to scale up their operations
easily when they need to. There's that word again, scalability.
Of course, all of this hardware has to connect to a motherboard. And unlike home PC motherboards
that tend to follow standard form factors like ATX,
server boards are often proprietary since it's much more common to buy a fully assembled server
than it is to put one together with DIY off-the-shelf parts.
Now, if you look closely, you'll see some things you recognize,
like memory slots, PCIe expansion slots, and CPU sockets,
but they tend to be a little different or even oddly laid out.
For example, look at this motherboard. It effectively has 20 PCIe slots,
but none of them are in the traditional slot form factor.
So to use them as slots, you would need to plug cables and risers
into these mini cool edge or MCIO connectors.
Pretty neat, right? I think this highlights that even though we've talked about some general differences
between servers and desktops, many servers are as different from each other
as they are from your gaming PC, depending on what they're intended to be used for.
We won't be able to get into all of that, but hopefully you have a little more insight
into why cloud computing giants like Amazon and Google
aren't just running a bunch of gaming PCs networks together in their data centers.
I will say, all of that RGB in one place would look pretty cool.
Thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, maybe check out our other video on DDR5.
I don't know, there's nothing in the script. And don't forget to subscribe to Techquickie.