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How do you think hot swappable CPUs would work? (burggit.moe)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Let's just say hypothetically this was possible and that the laws of silicon were not a thing, and that there was market demand for it for some asinine reason. As well as every OS process scheduler was made to optionally work with this. How would this work?

Personally, I'd say there would be a smol lower clocked CPU on the board that would kick on and take over if you were to pull the big boy CPU out and swap it while the system is running.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Very interesting take for what I'd consider to be a semi-shitpost. Yeah, more programs are multithreaded compared to years back, but thread safety poses a big challenge still since you don't want functions executing in parallel and one part gets done sooner than the other, causing a plethora of race conditions.

For multi CPU systems, there's NUMA which tries to take advantage of the memory closest to the processor first before going all the way out and fetching the data from a different set of memory all the way across a motherboard. That's why server boards have each set of DIMMs close to each processor. Though this is coming from a hardware layman, so I'm pretty sure I'm not being entirely accurate here. Low level stuff makes my brain hurt sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One of my systems has 2 CPUs if you ever want me to run benchmarks c:

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I played around with a dual CPU system. But it just used too much power and it was way too over powered for my needs. Don't remember if I ran a benchmark on it though..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see. I only have mine because more CPUs==more PCIe slots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oooh. How many PCIe slots do you get and what kind?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

With the motherboard I am using (Supermicro X9DRH-7F) I get 6 8x PCIe slots, and 1 16x PCIe slot for a total of 7 slots. All of these are communicating directly with the CPUs, as opposed to some boards where the slots go through the chipset. There are motherboards with even more, but they are more expensive. I got this because I will need the bandwidth for model parallelism using multiple GPUs.

Also, the least power-hungry CPUs you can get for this board are the Xeon E5-2630L, which each consume 60W under full load.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's my slot layout

Specs of my server: https://burggit.moe/comment/59898

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh nice, you could probably fit a few GPUs in there if your case has room for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'll probably do that when LLM generating becomes less cost prohibitive. Not a gaymur