[toast0]

Sure, but it's important to notice that the biggest off the shelf computers keep getting bigger.

Dual socket Epyc is pretty big these days.

If you can fit your job on one box (+ spares, as needed), you can save a whole lot of complexity vs spreading it over several.

It's always worth considering what you can fit on one box with 192-256 cores, 12TB of ram, and whatever storage you can attach to 256 lanes of PCIe 5.0 (minus however many lanes you need for network I/O).

You can probably go bigger with exotic computers, but if you have bottlenecks with the biggest off the shelf computer you can get, you might be better of scaling horizontally, but assuming you aren't growing 4x a year, you should have plenty of notice that you're coming to the end of easy vertical scaling. And sometimes you get lucky and AMD or Intel makes a nicely timed release to get you some more room.

[amy-petrik-214]

exactly, that's what it is as we hit the end of moore's law (which we won't, but we'll hit the end as far as feature size shrinkage)... one of the optimizations they will do is rote trivial process optimization. So if the chip failure rate on the assembly line is 40% they drop it to 10%. Costs will drop accordingly, because there are x-fold more transistors per dollar, thus ensuring moores law.