I miss the ~X99 era of HEDT where the price to go from the consumer Z77 class stuff in the article to the "workstation" class was very minimal. The low end "Xeo

I miss the ~X99 era of HEDT where the price to go from the consumer Z77 class stuff in the article to the "workstation" class was very minimal. The low end "Xeon" processors were had all with the consumer Haswell models had, including single core performance and relative price equivalence, but you got 4 memory channels, the ability to drive massive amounts of memory, ECC support, and 40 PCIe lanes from the CPU. Nowadays if you want to buy HEDT you either get a very fast version of the consumer part which is still extremely lane limited (limiting the usefulness of features like bifurcation), still has 2 memory channels, has the same memory capacity limits as that 10 year old X99 platform, and may or may not have usable ECC support (depending on the particular board and/or platform chipset options for that year) OR you can spend way more to get a CPU which is worse performing unless you need 32+ cores (and the even higher cost associated with that) but at least the platform has all that original HEDT capability. The 1st generation of Threadripper was a bit like that too, albeit AMDs CPUs weren't the top performers of the day when that came out and they've since gone up accordingly.