4 ms·

Come on, these are server chips. No sensible organization is going to be moving chips between vendor boards, at least until they are written off.

thfuran 3y ago
It mostly just cripples the secondary market for used server hardware.
- woleium 3y ago
  I dont see the economics of splitting servers for parts. Aside from pulling drives for shredding, servers are mostly sold as pulled on the aftermarket
  - upon_drumhead 3y ago
    Not every company is willing to end of life perfectly good servers every five years either. Our fleet is mainly Frankensteined secondary servers with a pile of spares for repair.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > I dont see the economics of splitting servers for parts. You can see that economy on ebay. Those parts extend the life of existing boxes by years. I'm typing this on a machine powered by parts from 'split' servers.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    "I don't see" != "Does not exists" Refurb server parts market is more than alive, especially when a 5 year old server CPU is almost as good as a new one, but for $100 instead of $5000.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    however shocking you may find it, typing “epyc cpu” into eBay will nonetheless produce quite a few results. this used to be even bigger in the Xeon days. Being able to drop in a $50 upgrade to x99 and get the 2-3 best chip in socket owns actually. X99 isn't bad if you've got a 18-core chip running at 3.8 ghz all-core (with all-core turbo enhancement), and you can address 256GB of memory in a consumer board with dirt-cheap 32GB RDIMM sticks (they are basically under $20 now) since many X99 boards also support RDIMM (including on consumer cpus). Like let's not cheer literal e-waste here. Secondary users keep hardware out of landfills, a lot of those customers have existing systems they want to upgrade or want to build using whitebox brands like supermicro/asrock rack, the EU absolutely needs to tamp down on this practice. The most silly part is, how does locking it to the brand do anything anyway? If you locked the CPU to the board then sure, that makes sense, but the threat model here is an employee is stealing your CPUs and swapping them out with something cheaper, and this makes them... find another lenovo or dell branded CPU to match it with? and with PSP allowing secure manipulation of non-volatile storage, there is zero reason to make this a permanent fuse, why shouldn't you allow this to also be unlocked when it's time for disposal? like if you want to prevent the "evil maid" attack you would want it to be both more tightly locked to the board and also unlockable so it can be serviced. (even if you don't want to trust non-volatile storage, you can also make "pseudo-non-volatile" out of plain old e-fuses. even number of fuses blown = unlocked, odd = locked. being able to lock and unlock say 128 times is plenty, in practice.) And ironically the e-waste this produces (brand-locked chips) actually makes the cost of these evil-maid swapping attacks even cheaper, because nobody wants them on the secondary market, the cheapest platform-locked naples chips are probably already absolutely worthless because nobody wants naples to begin with, let alone brand-locked naples. it so very obviously is narrowly targeted at making sure the secondary market is a confusing mess that buyers want to avoid. Creating e-waste to sell more chips. Again, the EU really needs to step in, it is noxious, they should even be forced to release a firmware update unlocking existing chips (AMD is the root of trust and can do this). Sadly Intel has also really cracked down on xeon secondary sales as well - starting with broadwell, xeons can't be used in consumer Z97 boards, and they went to the same thing on X299, as well as cracking down on unlocked multipliers on certain skus (1660v3 has it, among others) and all-core turbo enhancement with broadwell-EP. It would be nice if you could drop an epyc into your threadripper board, too, that's basically the modern equivalent of ye olde xeon ebay upgrade. On the other hand, there’s no surprises either - socket compatible cpus are socket compatible, your board may only work with consumer chips but it does work with all of them. And frankly people are also underplaying the fact that AMD does this on consumer socket as well - consumers would benefit from having a bunch of cheap zen2/zen3 chips from old OEM systems in a year or two here, that would push prices down even farther. There is also a general danger that if the systems don’t have any resale value anymore that they will be scrapped entirely instead of resold as either parts or a complete server. If the value of the server is nothing, nobody will bother re-using it. You’ve literally turned working parts into e-waste, nobody wants them anymore and it stops being economically viable to bother for the handful of people who do. Everyone benefits from reduced friction in a market.
    - 127361 3y ago
      This will ruin the AMD brand, if Intel doesn't do such a thing, then people will start going with Intel instead.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        the fact that it probably will not is actually the problem
    - woleium 3y ago
      im fairly sure you will be able to pick up “works with any chip” mobos when the time comes.
  - bbatha 3y ago
    The AMD market allows more splitting since they keep a single socket for a DDR generation. Meaning you can get 2-4 generations of processors onto an older server.
  - xkcd-sucks 3y ago
    regardless of the easily quantified economics it's just another sad little papercut on quality of life in general when e.g. my kid can't go out and trivially assemble boxes out of random dumpstered parts, which was how I got into computing in the first place
    - paulmd 3y ago
      there is an entire hobby for adults putting together random dumpstered parts/whatever they could scrounge up cheap too, google 'homelab' and thank me later ;) (I get your point though, I agree, it's very important for kids, especially in a world of increasingly walled gardens. A ton of the poorer world also makes do with whatever - X79 and X99 poverty builds are a real thing even today, because they're still a viable platform and china has cranked out cheap off-brand boards with resoldered chipsets. good workstation/server boards are <$200, and you can get a decent cpu for $50 or so, and memory for $20 a 32GB stick, it still is a relatively high-value thing for the capabilities it offers, if you need more than a normal consumer system.)

thfuran 3y ago

It mostly just cripples the secondary market for used server hardware.

woleium 3y ago
I dont see the economics of splitting servers for parts. Aside from pulling drives for shredding, servers are mostly sold as pulled on the aftermarket
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  Not every company is willing to end of life perfectly good servers every five years either. Our fleet is mainly Frankensteined secondary servers with a pile of spares for repair.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > I dont see the economics of splitting servers for parts. You can see that economy on ebay. Those parts extend the life of existing boxes by years. I'm typing this on a machine powered by parts from 'split' servers.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  "I don't see" != "Does not exists" Refurb server parts market is more than alive, especially when a 5 year old server CPU is almost as good as a new one, but for $100 instead of $5000.
- paulmd 3y ago
  however shocking you may find it, typing “epyc cpu” into eBay will nonetheless produce quite a few results. this used to be even bigger in the Xeon days. Being able to drop in a $50 upgrade to x99 and get the 2-3 best chip in socket owns actually. X99 isn't bad if you've got a 18-core chip running at 3.8 ghz all-core (with all-core turbo enhancement), and you can address 256GB of memory in a consumer board with dirt-cheap 32GB RDIMM sticks (they are basically under $20 now) since many X99 boards also support RDIMM (including on consumer cpus). Like let's not cheer literal e-waste here. Secondary users keep hardware out of landfills, a lot of those customers have existing systems they want to upgrade or want to build using whitebox brands like supermicro/asrock rack, the EU absolutely needs to tamp down on this practice. The most silly part is, how does locking it to the brand do anything anyway? If you locked the CPU to the board then sure, that makes sense, but the threat model here is an employee is stealing your CPUs and swapping them out with something cheaper, and this makes them... find another lenovo or dell branded CPU to match it with? and with PSP allowing secure manipulation of non-volatile storage, there is zero reason to make this a permanent fuse, why shouldn't you allow this to also be unlocked when it's time for disposal? like if you want to prevent the "evil maid" attack you would want it to be both more tightly locked to the board and also unlockable so it can be serviced. (even if you don't want to trust non-volatile storage, you can also make "pseudo-non-volatile" out of plain old e-fuses. even number of fuses blown = unlocked, odd = locked. being able to lock and unlock say 128 times is plenty, in practice.) And ironically the e-waste this produces (brand-locked chips) actually makes the cost of these evil-maid swapping attacks even cheaper, because nobody wants them on the secondary market, the cheapest platform-locked naples chips are probably already absolutely worthless because nobody wants naples to begin with, let alone brand-locked naples. it so very obviously is narrowly targeted at making sure the secondary market is a confusing mess that buyers want to avoid. Creating e-waste to sell more chips. Again, the EU really needs to step in, it is noxious, they should even be forced to release a firmware update unlocking existing chips (AMD is the root of trust and can do this). Sadly Intel has also really cracked down on xeon secondary sales as well - starting with broadwell, xeons can't be used in consumer Z97 boards, and they went to the same thing on X299, as well as cracking down on unlocked multipliers on certain skus (1660v3 has it, among others) and all-core turbo enhancement with broadwell-EP. It would be nice if you could drop an epyc into your threadripper board, too, that's basically the modern equivalent of ye olde xeon ebay upgrade. On the other hand, there’s no surprises either - socket compatible cpus are socket compatible, your board may only work with consumer chips but it does work with all of them. And frankly people are also underplaying the fact that AMD does this on consumer socket as well - consumers would benefit from having a bunch of cheap zen2/zen3 chips from old OEM systems in a year or two here, that would push prices down even farther. There is also a general danger that if the systems don’t have any resale value anymore that they will be scrapped entirely instead of resold as either parts or a complete server. If the value of the server is nothing, nobody will bother re-using it. You’ve literally turned working parts into e-waste, nobody wants them anymore and it stops being economically viable to bother for the handful of people who do. Everyone benefits from reduced friction in a market.
  - 127361 3y ago
    This will ruin the AMD brand, if Intel doesn't do such a thing, then people will start going with Intel instead.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      the fact that it probably will not is actually the problem
  - woleium 3y ago
    im fairly sure you will be able to pick up “works with any chip” mobos when the time comes.
- bbatha 3y ago
  The AMD market allows more splitting since they keep a single socket for a DDR generation. Meaning you can get 2-4 generations of processors onto an older server.
- xkcd-sucks 3y ago
  regardless of the easily quantified economics it's just another sad little papercut on quality of life in general when e.g. my kid can't go out and trivially assemble boxes out of random dumpstered parts, which was how I got into computing in the first place
  - paulmd 3y ago
    there is an entire hobby for adults putting together random dumpstered parts/whatever they could scrounge up cheap too, google 'homelab' and thank me later ;) (I get your point though, I agree, it's very important for kids, especially in a world of increasingly walled gardens. A ton of the poorer world also makes do with whatever - X79 and X99 poverty builds are a real thing even today, because they're still a viable platform and china has cranked out cheap off-brand boards with resoldered chipsets. good workstation/server boards are <$200, and you can get a decent cpu for $50 or so, and memory for $20 a 32GB stick, it still is a relatively high-value thing for the capabilities it offers, if you need more than a normal consumer system.)