1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,760 Whether it's a server or a gaming PC, every computer needs the same basic components. 2 00:00:05,760 --> 00:00:09,800 A central processing unit or CPU, working memory or RAM, 3 00:00:09,800 --> 00:00:12,920 some kind of storage device, a motherboard to connect everything together, 4 00:00:12,920 --> 00:00:18,040 and systems for power and cooling. The difference then is in the configuration 5 00:00:18,040 --> 00:00:22,240 of these components. And three of the big reasons that servers 6 00:00:22,240 --> 00:00:27,400 have different configurations from desktop PCs are that they need to be more power efficient, 7 00:00:27,400 --> 00:00:32,480 more reliable, and more scalable. Servers often live in data centers 8 00:00:32,480 --> 00:00:36,400 with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands 9 00:00:36,400 --> 00:00:39,840 of individual machines. So as you can imagine, 10 00:00:39,840 --> 00:00:46,560 space savings is a major consideration. That's why servers tend to use stacking rack-mountable cases 11 00:00:46,560 --> 00:00:49,760 that have similar general cooling flows as each other 12 00:00:49,760 --> 00:00:54,760 to make deployments more scalable. However, even more than the cost of the space 13 00:00:54,760 --> 00:00:58,000 that they take up, the cost of the power they consume 14 00:00:58,000 --> 00:01:01,640 has been a huge driver of server design in recent years. 15 00:01:01,640 --> 00:01:04,920 And keeping power consumption down is extremely important 16 00:01:04,920 --> 00:01:08,160 unless you want to overwhelm the nuclear plant next door. 17 00:01:08,160 --> 00:01:13,360 Now, one way to help with this is to use a higher quality power supply to reduce waste. 18 00:01:13,360 --> 00:01:16,680 But a better way is to use more efficient components 19 00:01:16,680 --> 00:01:20,400 in the first place so you just don't consume as much power. 20 00:01:20,400 --> 00:01:23,480 Let's start by talking about server CPUs. 21 00:01:23,520 --> 00:01:26,760 Instead of the two to 16 processing cores 22 00:01:26,760 --> 00:01:31,280 that you might find in a gaming CPU, server CPUs commonly have dozens 23 00:01:31,280 --> 00:01:34,320 or even hundreds of processing cores. 24 00:01:34,320 --> 00:01:38,280 Wow! But if you drill down into the spec sheet, 25 00:01:38,280 --> 00:01:43,600 you'll find that these cores are often running at lower clock speeds than you might be used to. 26 00:01:43,600 --> 00:01:48,440 This allows servers to handle a huge volume of simultaneous requests 27 00:01:48,440 --> 00:01:51,720 without consuming any more power than necessary. 28 00:01:51,720 --> 00:01:55,480 They do take a little performance hit in certain tasks, 29 00:01:55,480 --> 00:02:01,600 which is why some specialty data center machines for applications like game servers and high volume trading 30 00:02:01,600 --> 00:02:07,320 can actually use desktop CPUs sometimes. But in general, it's much more important for servers 31 00:02:07,320 --> 00:02:11,320 to have more cores rather than fewer faster ones. 32 00:02:11,320 --> 00:02:15,200 Lower clock speeds also mean that data centers can save money on cooling 33 00:02:15,200 --> 00:02:19,920 since a core that isn't being pushed as hard won't output as much heat. 34 00:02:19,920 --> 00:02:25,080 This idea of maximizing the efficiency or the performance per watt of a server 35 00:02:25,080 --> 00:02:28,720 is so important that we're now even seeing cloud services 36 00:02:28,720 --> 00:02:33,600 design their own chips that are optimized for their own workloads. 37 00:02:33,600 --> 00:02:37,800 Amazon, for example, has their own server CPU called Graviton, 38 00:02:37,800 --> 00:02:42,960 which is designed to be more power efficient than competing chips from Intel and AMD. 39 00:02:42,960 --> 00:02:47,800 But what about the other pieces of our server puzzle, reliability and scalability? 40 00:02:47,800 --> 00:02:52,120 Well, the huge number of CPU cores definitely helps with those goals, 41 00:02:52,120 --> 00:02:55,720 but if you thought that CPUs with over a hundred cores sounded wild, 42 00:02:55,720 --> 00:02:58,840 you ain't seen nothing yet. Did you know that servers can be configured 43 00:02:58,840 --> 00:03:02,840 with as much RAM as you have of SSD storage 44 00:03:02,840 --> 00:03:06,820 in your home PC? Modern servers are frequently configured 45 00:03:06,820 --> 00:03:09,840 with multiple terabytes of memory, 46 00:03:09,840 --> 00:03:15,440 but you'd be amazed how fast that can get eaten up. One technology that uses lots of CPU cores 47 00:03:15,440 --> 00:03:20,420 and RAM is virtualization. Virtualization allows a single server 48 00:03:20,420 --> 00:03:24,160 to be sliced up into multiple virtual servers, 49 00:03:24,160 --> 00:03:28,560 each potentially running a completely different workload or operating system. 50 00:03:28,560 --> 00:03:32,200 It's great for dynamically deploying your computing resources, 51 00:03:32,200 --> 00:03:35,820 helping a data center scale its operations up and down, 52 00:03:35,820 --> 00:03:41,700 depending on how many users need to access it. It also improves both reliability and security 53 00:03:41,700 --> 00:03:45,520 since virtual machines can be more easily managed and deployed. 54 00:03:45,520 --> 00:03:50,700 But for smooth operation, every one of those virtual machines needs, 55 00:03:50,700 --> 00:03:56,300 you guessed it, ample RAM. Another big driver of memory use is caching. 56 00:03:56,300 --> 00:04:01,260 While solid state storage is certainly much faster than older mechanical hard drives, 57 00:04:01,260 --> 00:04:06,940 it still pales in comparison to RAM. So if you were running a content delivery platform, 58 00:04:06,940 --> 00:04:11,420 for example, it might be wise to take the biggest trending content 59 00:04:11,420 --> 00:04:15,380 and load that into a RAM cache to ensure that your users can load it 60 00:04:15,380 --> 00:04:20,900 at lightning fast speeds. Registered dims, load reduced dims, and MCR dims 61 00:04:20,900 --> 00:04:26,380 are examples of technologies that help manufacturers pack more and more memory into servers 62 00:04:26,380 --> 00:04:30,100 to help meet this need. But a copious amount of memory 63 00:04:30,100 --> 00:04:35,940 isn't enough to make a machine server grade. There's also an expectation of superior reliability. 64 00:04:35,940 --> 00:04:40,060 That's where technologies like error correcting or ECC come into play. 65 00:04:40,060 --> 00:04:43,100 ECC allows the server to monitor for data errors 66 00:04:43,100 --> 00:04:47,980 and correct them on the fly. And this same concept can be found in desktops, 67 00:04:47,980 --> 00:04:52,660 but has traditionally been more common in the data center where data integrity is key. 68 00:04:52,660 --> 00:04:56,540 After all, it probably doesn't matter too much if your Minesweeper game crashes, 69 00:04:56,540 --> 00:05:00,380 but it matters a lot if an undetected error in a large data set 70 00:05:00,380 --> 00:05:03,740 bungs up some important scientific research. 71 00:05:03,740 --> 00:05:08,260 Speaking of large data sets, many servers also need huge amounts of storage, 72 00:05:08,260 --> 00:05:13,900 depending on how much data they need to work with. And it's not uncommon to see a one-you server. 73 00:05:13,900 --> 00:05:18,540 That is a server that takes up just one unit of space in a standard rack 74 00:05:18,540 --> 00:05:22,180 with a petabyte or more of high-speed storage these days. 75 00:05:22,180 --> 00:05:26,540 In a lot of cases, these machines are used to provide storage over the network 76 00:05:26,540 --> 00:05:32,700 to other more compute-focused machines that are packed with CPUs or, lately, especially GPUs. 77 00:05:32,700 --> 00:05:35,740 To pack the drives in tighter, they often use drive form factors 78 00:05:35,740 --> 00:05:39,820 that differ from the M.2 drives that might be sitting in your home PC. 79 00:05:39,820 --> 00:05:44,420 One such standard is called EDSFF, and it allows for higher power delivery, 80 00:05:44,420 --> 00:05:49,300 better cooling, and greater capacity, allowing data centers to scale up their operations 81 00:05:49,300 --> 00:05:52,660 easily when they need to. There's that word again, scalability. 82 00:05:52,660 --> 00:05:57,660 Of course, all of this hardware has to connect to a motherboard. And unlike home PC motherboards 83 00:05:57,660 --> 00:06:01,060 that tend to follow standard form factors like ATX, 84 00:06:01,060 --> 00:06:06,740 server boards are often proprietary since it's much more common to buy a fully assembled server 85 00:06:06,740 --> 00:06:10,940 than it is to put one together with DIY off-the-shelf parts. 86 00:06:10,940 --> 00:06:13,980 Now, if you look closely, you'll see some things you recognize, 87 00:06:13,980 --> 00:06:18,620 like memory slots, PCIe expansion slots, and CPU sockets, 88 00:06:18,620 --> 00:06:22,660 but they tend to be a little different or even oddly laid out. 89 00:06:22,660 --> 00:06:27,460 For example, look at this motherboard. It effectively has 20 PCIe slots, 90 00:06:27,460 --> 00:06:31,180 but none of them are in the traditional slot form factor. 91 00:06:31,180 --> 00:06:35,060 So to use them as slots, you would need to plug cables and risers 92 00:06:35,060 --> 00:06:38,860 into these mini cool edge or MCIO connectors. 93 00:06:38,860 --> 00:06:43,420 Pretty neat, right? I think this highlights that even though we've talked about some general differences 94 00:06:43,420 --> 00:06:47,620 between servers and desktops, many servers are as different from each other 95 00:06:47,620 --> 00:06:52,420 as they are from your gaming PC, depending on what they're intended to be used for. 96 00:06:52,420 --> 00:06:56,020 We won't be able to get into all of that, but hopefully you have a little more insight 97 00:06:56,020 --> 00:06:59,540 into why cloud computing giants like Amazon and Google 98 00:06:59,540 --> 00:07:03,460 aren't just running a bunch of gaming PCs networks together in their data centers. 99 00:07:03,460 --> 00:07:06,860 I will say, all of that RGB in one place would look pretty cool. 100 00:07:06,860 --> 00:07:12,180 Thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, maybe check out our other video on DDR5. 101 00:07:12,180 --> 00:07:15,980 I don't know, there's nothing in the script. And don't forget to subscribe to Techquickie.