[dragontamer]

> 20 pi modules likely have much better DDR, SSD, Network bandwidth

20 pi modules of 8GBs is only 160GBs.

Ignoring that: Bigger nodes are better in all practical scenarios. With 768 GBs of RAM, this singular big server can likely keep in-memory a large collection of information (ex: all of English-Wikipedia likely fits inside of that RAM).

20x Rasp. Pi cannot access all of English-Wikipedia in RAM. This means that you can't index, you can't search, you can't analyze the pages. Even if you could: you'd need to have a collaborative external memory model, which is not easy to program.

80-cores with access to all 768GBs can do many, many more things than 20x 4-core Rasp. Pi working on only 32GB at a time.

[Hextinium]

All if the text of English Wikipedia is only ~12 Gb last time I checked a year or so ago. English Wikipedia with pictures is 10+ Tb, but your point stands about memory needed.