CONNECT WITH US
Tech

Tech

WoW: Forever launch used 70,480 CPU cores and 251 terabytes of RAM

Tom's Hardware logo

Published on

Add as a preferred source on Google
WoW: Forever launch used 70,480 CPU cores and 251 terabytes of RAM

Blizzard pulled out all the stops to ensure World of Warcraft: Forever survived a chaotic launch night. What was the company's secret weapon? Splurging an absurd amount of money on infrastructure made up of 3,924 virtual machines with 70,480 CPU cores and a whopping 251,136 GB, or 251 TB, of memory.

Praised by media and players as one of the smoothest launches in Blizzard's history, World of Warcraft: Forever requires significant computing firepower. 3,924 virtual machines work out to 18 cores and 64GB of memory per instance. Or, the company could be using a mixture of 16-core and 32-core nodes with slightly less memory.

To put the infrastructure's scale in consumer terms, we are looking at about 8,810 mainstream processors, or 7,848 high-end gaming systems with 32GB of memory each. In any event, the hardware is greatly improved compared to what World of Warcraft used to run on back in 2009.

*Slaps Roof of WoW: Forever*This baby is running on:3,924 Virtual Machines251,136 GB of Memory70,480 CPU Cores https://t.co/P9PdRBzke7November 5, 2026

In 2009, Blizzard said it used 10 data centers worldwide to host World of Warcraft. 5 TB of memory. 2X more memory. Modern processors are leagues faster than chips from 17 years ago. By today's standards, the bottleneck is memory capacity and bandwidth, which is why the infrastructure can run on fewer cores but has more than double the memory to compensate.



Source link
Related Topics:Tech

Disclaimer

We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We TheMorningPulse.fyi want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It's possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.