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I would consider this advice now outdated. Yes, it was a great advice in the 2010s -- I had such a Dell, too. It's well documented how IPC only has grown 20-25
by chx 4y ago
I would consider this advice now outdated.
Yes, it was a great advice in the 2010s -- I had such a Dell, too. It's well documented how IPC only has grown 20-25% from Sandy Bridge to Skylake and then the wait was long, long until a new uarch has emerged in 2021. But towards the end of the decade, Ryzen has disturbed the still waters and the number of cores have, well, risen sharply while keeping a competitive IPC and Intel eventually followed suit. Because of this, the equally long time rule of thumb where most apps don't really use multiple cores well so you don't need them on the desktop is also dead by now.
I wouldn't recommend a Haswell Xeon as this article does today.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIt'll be interesting to see how much the Clouding of Everything affects this wave, but with a likely flood of startup failures coming, there may be cheap gently used servers entering the market in the not-too-distant future. Or not.
- mise_en_place 4y agoI have an Ice Lake Xeon W. It’s ok, compiles are pretty decent. Chromium takes a long time though, even with 24 cores/48 threads. If you want a lesson in how not to organize your source repo, the chromium project would be it. It’s kind of mind boggling how bloated browsers have become.
- TimPC 4y agoMore important than the raw performance numbers my computer comes with a three year parts and service warrantee and I can even pay a small premium to cover accidents and spills. I’m basically guaranteed my computer works for three years or they replace it. What happens if my used workstation breaks down two weeks after I buy it? Why should I take that risk?
- kube-system 4y agoA used workstation will have failure rates at the bottom of the bathtub curve when you buy it. A new PC is more likely to experience failures. Solid state components are generally very reliable anyway.
- jeffbee 4y agoHaswell Xeon is way too outdated in 2022, but there are loads of newer ones. There's a fair inventory of Skylake and Cascade Lake Xeon on ebay, like HP Z4 G4 w/ 32GB and a GPU for ~$750. It's a pretty square deal considering. Since Ice Lake Xeon workstations are so thin on the ground, this is the most recent Xeon you can get second-hand. The Ryzen story is a joke if you are actually in the market for a workstation, meaning you want ECC that works. The only way to get it is to buy integrated OEM workstations with the TR Pro.
- juergbi 4y agoMany retail AM4 motherboards support ECC with retail Ryzen CPUs. At least on Linux it works as expected. ECC UDIMMs can be difficult to find but it shouldn't be necessary to buy a TR Pro for ECC if memory capacity, I/O lanes and the performance of AM4 Ryzen CPUs suffice.
- oso2k 4y agoI haven't looked into deeply but I've heard stories from others with Ryzen boxes that ECC features of the RAM are turned off with Ryzen CPUs installed. Supposedly you can see this in Linux w/dmidecode or other tools. I'd appreciate good links if anybody has them. PS: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lh3m42/demystifying_ryzen_ecc_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lh3m42/demystifying_ry... https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of_ecc_memory_on_ryzen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of_...
- c0l0 4y agoRyzen APUs (i.e., Socket AM4 CPUs with with integrated AMD graphics) do _not_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ they carry a "Pro" in their name. Ryzen CPUs without an iGPU _will_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ the mainboard specs specifically tell you that it won't support ECC, or simply omit mentioning ECC UDIMM at all. Fwiw, I've enjoyed proper ECC on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac with a Ryzen 5 3600 for more than two years now (using GNU/Linux; I am not sure how Windows would fare).
- the_only_law 4y agoYeah I looked at old Xeon workstations a while back because they were dirt cheap for what seemed like a ton of compute, but they were incomparable to just getting a good Ryzen or something. Newer Xeons might be better but I'm not paying for that.
- johnebgd 4y agoRyzen supporting ECC memory really does make the old Xeon argument futile.
- Teever 4y agoDoes Ryzen actually support ECC though? I bought a first gen Ryzen and couldn't get ECC ram to boot on it, and the reviews I read periodically of new Ryzen CPUs and mobos seem to indicate that it's still hit and miss. I'd love for it to be plug and play.
- tpolzer 4y agoDepending on board support you might get actual error correction or not. If it doesn't boot, it's very likely that you actually bought registered memory, which is normal in servers, but _not_ supported at all by Ryzen processors, no matter the mainboard.
- type0 4y agoNot first gen, that one was very picky about ram settings even for the regular sticks. Also motherboard plays a huge role in how well that actually works.
- Handytinge 4y agoNo. Certain boards (mostly ASRock) will boot with it, but AMD don't support it outside the Pro series, and you won't get full reporting. I've been down this rabbit hole for a while with NAS builds, and it's simply not worth AMD if you need ECC currently for anything not too high end.
- DCKing 4y agoIt is really outdated. In 2017 buying old Xeons bought you pretty good performance for the buck, as Intel sold you quad cores with minor single core and multicore uplifts for a lot of money, while at the same time old Westmere or Sandy Bridge Xeons had a pretty good balance of many cores with decent enough clock speeds / single core performance. Even I/O options did not improve by a lot in those years. In 2022 buying old Xeons means you get stuff from the era where Intel started heavily deprioritizing single core performance over having a lot of cores in Xeons. 14+ lowly clocked Haswell cores still do well in synthetic benchmarks, but I don't think they're worth it for any real world workstation loads. Low clocked Haswell cores are outperformed by such things as the Alder Lake efficiency cores (easily) and even modern Android phones. The latest Zen cores and the Alder Lake performance cores will be worth at least twice the per core performance of one of those individual Haswell cores. Even if you say compile code all day it's probably not worth buying into a 200W behemoth that runs Firefox slower than the Android phone in your pocket. This blog was written in 2019 and was probably already not great advice then, but it is legit bad advice now.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoWould you say the same about brand new server processors if click speed was prioritised?
- DCKing 4y agoNot sure if I understand the question, but yeah it's all about single thread performance. Around 2017 or so, old server processors had decent single core performance and very good multithreaded performance for workstation workloads compared to the desktop hardware of the day. Nowadays, old server processors have very poor single threaded performance compared to recent desktop grade hardware, and the much larger amount of cores fails to compensate for that in pretty much all workstation loads. Especially considering that you can get a lot of cores in desktop hardware nowadays too. The relative value of desktop hardware vs server hardware has gone up substantially in the past 5 years or so, since Intel started making server chips focused exclusively on the demands of large scale data centers and AMD started normalizing high core counts in desktop chips. Because cheap second hand server chips are sourced from data centers, that inherently favor high core counts and only baseline single thread performance, I don't see a future where we have cheap server processors ever being a great choice for a workstation again. Quick-ish single thread server chips do exist (e.g. Epyc 72F3), but I think those are too niche to ever see them for a good deal on eBay.
- tambourine_man 4y ago>… where most apps don't really use multiple cores well so you don't need them on the desktop is also dead by now I wish that was true. Lots of code I deal with bottlenecks on a single thread. Mozilla has abandoned Servo, and we are stuck with browsers poorly parallelizing parsing, painting, execution. Photoshop, aside from a few filters and functions, is also poorly parallelized. Not to mention smaller programs who understandably can’t justify the complexity of multithreading. I’d trade single tread performance for cores any day.
- mgbmtl 4y agoI don't know if I'm using anything fancy, but Firefox currently is running 20 processes on my computer. According to pstree: 3*[Isolated Web Co───28*[{Isolated Web Co}]] 3*[Isolated Web Co───29*[{Isolated Web Co}]] 2*[Isolated Web Co───26*[{Isolated Web Co}]] Isolated Web Co───27*[{Isolated Web Co}] Privileged Cont───25*[{Privileged Cont}] RDD Process───2*[{RDD Process}] Socket Process───4*[{Socket Process}] Utility Process───2*[{Utility Process}] 2*[Web Content───9*[{Web Content}]] Web Content───10*[{Web Content}] WebExtensions───28*[{WebExtensions}] chrome-gnome-sh───2*[{chrome-gnome-sh}] firefox-bin 129\*[{firefox-bin}]
- znpy 4y agoThose single processes are still mostly single threaded. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a huge leap forward to have a single webpage running in its own process, but there’s ample room for improvement. That’s what GP is referring to.
- water8 4y agoAnd a given OS is running about 1000 threads at the same time. Unless you specifically set all your apps to very high priority / nice numbers, Your thread will still spend a lot of time waiting between context switches even if it does execute faster when it finally gets one of the few cores available
- tambourine_man 4y ago
- kitsunesoba 4y agoYeah, my personal Skylake Xeon (W-2140B) iMac Pro is by no means bad, but it's not amazing either. The company M1 Pro MBP is notably faster in both single-threaded and multithreaded tasks while sipping a fraction of the power. If the iMac Pro weren't mostly silent (which I would guess, most used Xeon workstations are very much not) thanks to an oversized heatsink I would've traded it in for something better already.
- _nalply 4y agoTo add to this: these Xeons are usually power-hungry. If you run them at home during the winter you might save some heating expenses if you do it cleverly. But the summer? Nah, forget it. This said, there are some Xeons which run on moderate to somewhat litle power. You might get one or two used of them on ebay. I consider to do this for my home server some day.
- water8 4y agoYes this machine will run up your electricity bill and your room temperature. The reason they’re so cheap is because all the hardware got thrown out for more efficient less expensive machines
- erichocean 4y agoThe reason they’re so cheap is because the hardware was originally leased, and the leases ran out.