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For desktop your options are: — FX 8350 (Piledriver) from AMD with no PSP: very cheap, no flashing necessary, but not the best performance. Single core perform
by deno 9y ago
For desktop your options are:
— FX 8350 (Piledriver) from AMD with no PSP: very cheap, no flashing necessary, but not the best performance. Single core performance much worse than even Pentium G4620[1].
— Some Intel processors and a Raspberry Pi: much better performance but you have to ME_Clean the firmware, hence the Pi.
— POWER9 processor for amazing performance and completely open & free firmware all around: the CPU is $400 but you get $400 worth of performance, PCIe 4.0 etc., however the only mainboard you can get right now costs $2000, and it’s not x86, so you’d need to run your Windows VMs (if you need) on a seperate box.
Personally I recommend used IvyBridge-EP or Haswell Xeon E5 system, make sure it takes ECC DDR3 Reg ram and you can pick up lots of very cheap DDR3 ECC memory to go along with it.
Performance is pretty good, on par with mid level Ryzen[1], and it’s recent enough to have all the hardware extensions anyone cares about.
[1] http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-FX-8350-vs-Intel-Pentium-G4620/1489vs3895 http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-FX-8350-vs-Intel-Pe...
[2] http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-1650-v2-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-1600/m7574vs3919 http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-1650-v2-v...
EDIT: Post before wrongly stated that you need pre-Skylake chip. Skylake/Kabylake µarch is also an option now, however some restrictions apply. I don’t think it’s very good value though, at least until Coffeelake is compatible.
- jabl 9y ago> Personally I recommend IvyBridge-EP or Haswell Xeon E5 Err, the ME has been present on every Intel system since 2006 or so. The only thing that changed with Skylake is that the ME runs on an x86 core, on previous processors the ME ran on some RISC microcontroller.
- deno 9y agoThat’s not the only thing, but yeah I suppose you can get Skylake/Kabylake now with the HAP workaround.
- ChickeNES 9y agoNot just any RISC, but ARC, a descendant of the SNES's Super-FX chip
- m45t3r 9y agoI think OP meant to say that you can disable ME in those CPUs, since they are pre-Skylale silicon.
- mschuster91 9y ago> — Some Intel processors and a Raspberry Pi: much better performance but you have to ME_Clean the firmware, hence the Pi. The Pi also has a binary blob requirement and a Trustzone implementation (which is however open to tinkering).
- deno 9y agoIt’s just inexpensive flasher for the firmware.
- carussell 9y agoThe PocketBeagle is competitive on price (<$25), and the chip has a complete 5000+ page, no-NDA datasheet/programming manual freely available from TI.
- ramshorns 9y agoBeagleBone Black might be another option for flashing the firmware.
- mosselman 9y agoThanks for the options you mentioned! Are there tutorials do do this?: Some Intel processors and a Raspberry Pi: much better performance but you have to ME_Clean the firmware, hence the Pi.