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I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a
by rpcope1 7mo ago
I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.
- loeg 7mo agoI've had zero issues with AMD's consumer tier of non-WX Threadripper and Ryzen models, FWIW.
- thousand_nights 7mo agooverblown? billions of users use consumer tier hardware just fine. i have servers at home with years of uptime without any ECC memory
- conception 7mo agoBut how much bit rot? You’ll never know.
- Maxion 7mo agoIf I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware. I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.
- loeg 7mo agoEventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage. > I much prefer cheaper hardware. The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.
- zadikian 7mo ago12% for the DIMMs only, but with Intel you need Xeon and its accompanying motherboard for it. Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered. Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost, yeah I would pay 12% more for ECC. But I'm with the other guy on not valuing it a ton. I have backups which are needed regardless of bitrot, and even if those don't help, losing a photo isn't a huge deal for me.
- loeg 7mo ago> Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered. That was me. It isn't "officially" supported by AMD, but it should work. You can enable EDAC monitoring in Linux and observe detected correction events happening. > Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost That's the argument, yeah.
- zadikian 7mo agoI'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.
- throwaway85825 7mo agoVery few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.
- rafaelmn 7mo ago> Very few applications scale with cores You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.
- VorpalWay 7mo agoCompilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ... (Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.) I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.
- rafaelmn 7mo agoBut those tools aren't really compute bound anyway - you're not buying a workstation to do them, you're getting a consumer laptop or a tablet.
- zadikian 7mo agoThere were several years where used cheese grater Mac Pros could be bought and upgraded for very cheap, and were still not too outdated. I only replaced my MacPro4,1 when the M1 mini came out, mainly cause of wattage.
- deepsun 7mo agoI hate my workstation desktop I assembled 15 years. It just doesn't break! I have no excuses to buy a new one (except for video card).