[hot_gril]

There are already big servers designed for huge single databases, for example the 8-socket Xeon types. Tbh I don't understand exactly why RAM is such a concern, but these machines have TBs of it.

[throwaway2037]

Woah, 8x Xeon CPUs on a single motherboard. That is a new record for me.

I found one here from Supermicro: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X13OEI-CP...

Has anyone see one of these in action? What was the primary use case? Monolithic database server?

[whizzter]

I think a bigger business case is virtual machine hosting, say one of these is maxed out (8 Xeons with 56 cores ie 448 cores and 32tb of memory), say it's divided into a 1000 machines you can run each VM with 40% cpu utilization and 3gb of memory, considering many VM offerings have less RAM (and add a bit of overselling on top of it with regards to CPU) it could probably house over 2000 VM's.

[hot_gril]

You can do that more cheaply with separate machines. The use case for this mega one really is monolothic DB or server.