5 ms·

Used Intel Xeon processor can be a great value... however, no enterprise is going to buy old engineering sample processors for their data centers.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
paulmd 9y ago
Yep, that was just me bragging about my ultra-dirt-cheap video encoding build. I'm not implying in any way that that would be scalable for a datacenter. Although in a lot of ways it does appear to be more stable than Ryzen given its memory problems. Especially regarding ECC. I trust a relatively mature platform like Haswell-E much more than something like Ryzen where even basic memory functionality is touchy and ECC is entirely unvalidated. Given a budget build I know which I'd trust. I was more aiming at TDP figures there. Although I realize anecdotes are not super reliable data, I put the Xeon box together over the weekend and I was literally just looking at the power data last night to see how it was doing. I was worried about cooling at first, before I knew the TDP numbers it would hit. It's on a Hyper T4 and it didn't break 40C during an overnight x264 encode so I'm pretty happy with that.
- mtanski 9y ago
  I think you're being a bit unfair here. 1. A lot of Intel consumer platforms (which Ryzen is) had early issues with DDR4 on Z170; there's lots of forum posts about that. 2. AMD said it was not going to be validating ECC for consumer processors. 3. Haswell-E you're referencing officially only supports up to DDR4 2133Mhz memory. Depending on your configuration Ryzen officially supports more (2666, 4000) 4. You're comparing a $1200 chip to $500 chip at retail. 5. You're comparing the TDP on processor running at 1 to 1.5GHz more. 6. ES samples tend to run at lower clock speed then official final processors with hopefully lower temperature as well. This just isn't remotely an apples to apples comparison. I'm curious what the comparison will look like once there's HPED AM4 chips. On the flip side I personally would not trust a ES chip personally. The chips are know to contain unfixed errata addressed in further versions of the silicone and a lot of motherboard do not contain microcode updates for those.
  - happycube 9y ago
    It depends on the stepping of the ES chip - in the case of the 2650v3 there's an M0 stepping... and an M1 which is the same die as the production version.
    - paulmd 9y ago
      It does appear to be the M0 stepping based on the eBay auction. I don't suppose you have any place you can pull errata for stepping M0 so I can know what buttons not to push here? In CPU-Z I am getting something different from the seller's published CPU-Z screenshot - it's showing stepping "R2" ("retail"?) - however the name string is also still showing as "ES". I've attached a dump from CPU-Z that shows CPUID 0x0 and 0x1 values. From the processor value (0x000306F2) and the Intel data I could dig up - it would appear that this is actually the SR1Y1 stepping. Which is apparently the M1 stepping. Possibly actually a QS rather than ES. https://pastebin.com/2YnishGK https://pastebin.com/2YnishGK https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/xeon-e5-v3-spec-update.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... Not holding out hope overall given that it was sold as the M0 stepping but I guess you never know, maybe I got lucky. There was no pic on the eBay auction, and I would have to pull the cooler back off to check what's printed on the processor itself.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

paulmd 9y ago

Yep, that was just me bragging about my ultra-dirt-cheap video encoding build. I'm not implying in any way that that would be scalable for a datacenter. Although in a lot of ways it does appear to be more stable than Ryzen given its memory problems. Especially regarding ECC. I trust a relatively mature platform like Haswell-E much more than something like Ryzen where even basic memory functionality is touchy and ECC is entirely unvalidated. Given a budget build I know which I'd trust. I was more aiming at TDP figures there. Although I realize anecdotes are not super reliable data, I put the Xeon box together over the weekend and I was literally just looking at the power data last night to see how it was doing. I was worried about cooling at first, before I knew the TDP numbers it would hit. It's on a Hyper T4 and it didn't break 40C during an overnight x264 encode so I'm pretty happy with that.

mtanski 9y ago
I think you're being a bit unfair here. 1. A lot of Intel consumer platforms (which Ryzen is) had early issues with DDR4 on Z170; there's lots of forum posts about that. 2. AMD said it was not going to be validating ECC for consumer processors. 3. Haswell-E you're referencing officially only supports up to DDR4 2133Mhz memory. Depending on your configuration Ryzen officially supports more (2666, 4000) 4. You're comparing a $1200 chip to $500 chip at retail. 5. You're comparing the TDP on processor running at 1 to 1.5GHz more. 6. ES samples tend to run at lower clock speed then official final processors with hopefully lower temperature as well. This just isn't remotely an apples to apples comparison. I'm curious what the comparison will look like once there's HPED AM4 chips. On the flip side I personally would not trust a ES chip personally. The chips are know to contain unfixed errata addressed in further versions of the silicone and a lot of motherboard do not contain microcode updates for those.
- happycube 9y ago
  It depends on the stepping of the ES chip - in the case of the 2650v3 there's an M0 stepping... and an M1 which is the same die as the production version.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    It does appear to be the M0 stepping based on the eBay auction. I don't suppose you have any place you can pull errata for stepping M0 so I can know what buttons not to push here? In CPU-Z I am getting something different from the seller's published CPU-Z screenshot - it's showing stepping "R2" ("retail"?) - however the name string is also still showing as "ES". I've attached a dump from CPU-Z that shows CPUID 0x0 and 0x1 values. From the processor value (0x000306F2) and the Intel data I could dig up - it would appear that this is actually the SR1Y1 stepping. Which is apparently the M1 stepping. Possibly actually a QS rather than ES. https://pastebin.com/2YnishGK https://pastebin.com/2YnishGK https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/xeon-e5-v3-spec-update.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... Not holding out hope overall given that it was sold as the M0 stepping but I guess you never know, maybe I got lucky. There was no pic on the eBay auction, and I would have to pull the cooler back off to check what's printed on the processor itself.