I had a similar chip since 2011 and only recently upgraded. For thread-heavy workloads even one of the fastest E3 Xeons is only like 40-50 % faster (if no special insns like AES can be used).
Safe to say it had superb price/performance (IIRC paid like 150 € for it).
Is there a router/firewall distro or administration tool for OpenBSD that's recommendable (e.g. like pfsense without all the enterprisey bloat, or like securityrouter without the licensing stuff)?
I recently powered an old Acer laptop on that I didn't use for a while. It informed me that "/dev/sda2 has gone 941 days without being checked", after it finished that and booting fully up (a quick affair, even on that machine with no SSD), the i3 status bar further informed me, that the battery still holds a 57 % charge :)
Intel probably intentionally advertises with their weirdo socket names (1156 -> 1155 -> 1150 -> 1151) just to confuse people more. Heck, they probably choose the pin counts in such a strange order just to be more confusing. It's not like they have usable names (Socket H, H2, ...).
> Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame.
The source engine isn't exactly the pinnacle of engine development.
It doesn't really know what to with more than 2ish cores, so you probably get more FPS by using a dual core instead of a quad core, which tend to go farther in terms of overclocking.
Or when Intel HT first appeared. Or when Intel HT reappeared. Or when the first dual core appeared. Every time Windows needed updates to perform properly; Linux also needed patches to adjust scheduling for Zen and also received patches in many other instances.
The bigger E7 scratch the 200 W mark pretty hard and IBM already had POWER chips go beyond 200 W. However, cooling and power density are ... problematic. The same goes for accelerators. Supermicro will happily deliver you a 1U box with four pascals and two Xeon sockets, but there is no datacenter in the world were you can stuff 42 of those in a cabinet. [Which doesn't mean that these don't make sense]
However, high end systems don't lend themselves well to mass-deployment (i.e. scale out).
ARM cores are much weaker, crypto performance without NEON is absymal across the board. Of course, compared to hardware-acceleration software always seems slow; Haswell manages AES-OCB at <1 cpb.
This is not part of AES-NI and has never been released in a mid-range+ server/desktop CPU, only part of some Atom parts (Goldmont). Therefore software support is poor (I think OpenSSL does not support it). It is said to be included in 2018+ Cannonlake, though.
I think Naples is a very exciting development, because:
- 1S/2S is obviously where the pie is. Few servers are 4S.
- 8 DDR4 channels per socket is twice the memory bandwidth of 2011, and still more than LGA-36712312whateverthenumberwas
- First x86 server platform with SHA1/2 acceleration
- 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented
All in all Naples seems like a very interesting platform for throughput-intensive applications. Overall it seems that Sun with it's Niagara-approach (massive number of threads, lots of I/O on-chip) was just a few years too early (and likely a few thousands / system to expensive ;)