WoW: Forever launch used 70,480 CPU cores and 251 terabytes of RAM
Inside the astonishing hardware behind World of Warcraft: Forever. 251TB of RAM and 70K cores kept millions of players online without a hitch.
Blizzard invested heavily to ensure a smooth launch for World of Warcraft: Forever. The game utilized 3,924 virtual machines, each equipped with 18 cores and 64GB of memory. This amounted to a total of 70,480 CPU cores and 251 terabytes of memory. Despite being more advanced than World of Warcraft's infrastructure in 2009, the new system uses 6% fewer CPU cores but offers 2.2 times more memory.
The bottleneck is likely memory capacity and bandwidth, making efficient use of fewer cores possible. The exact hardware is undisclosed, but estimates suggest it could run on eight to ten 42U server racks, a significant improvement compared to the 17-year-old infrastructure. Blizzard's investment in the infrastructure is estimated to be around $15 million for ten 42U server racks with EPYC chips.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
