They also had RAM drives you could buy. The point then as now is that increasing the "high performance" working set space of a program, increases the amount of transactional data that can be "in flight" during an operation, and that increases the overall size of the data set you can work with.
I've been waiting for these boards to come down in price for about 4 years now. I started talking with Intel about them early on (we used their XM-25 SSDs because it was a price point for flash that was "enough" better than spinning rust that it made sense) and they insisted on trying to sell us the same flash chips on a PCIe card for 10x the dollars, I (and many others apparently) refused to pay that. Sure if you have a 'cost is no object' data base or something but for a large internet working set where revenue differences are measured in cents per thousand transactions? Not so much. I know one company that went so far as to design and build their own PCIe Flash card. I have heard it did great stuff for them.
[1] LIM - Lotus-Intel-Microsoft spec for extended memory on IBM PC compatible machines.
They also had RAM drives you could buy. The point then as now is that increasing the "high performance" working set space of a program, increases the amount of transactional data that can be "in flight" during an operation, and that increases the overall size of the data set you can work with.
I've been waiting for these boards to come down in price for about 4 years now. I started talking with Intel about them early on (we used their XM-25 SSDs because it was a price point for flash that was "enough" better than spinning rust that it made sense) and they insisted on trying to sell us the same flash chips on a PCIe card for 10x the dollars, I (and many others apparently) refused to pay that. Sure if you have a 'cost is no object' data base or something but for a large internet working set where revenue differences are measured in cents per thousand transactions? Not so much. I know one company that went so far as to design and build their own PCIe Flash card. I have heard it did great stuff for them.
[1] LIM - Lotus-Intel-Microsoft spec for extended memory on IBM PC compatible machines.