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Comment by llomlup | Hacker News Reader

Finally, multicore for the masses. A 6C12T based workstation is also a sweet spot for development work.

Multicore has been 'for the masses' for a decade or more by now, even in mobile phones. What is different here than with other chips made by Intel or AMD that makes you say that?

Intel's offerings with more than 4 cores have been segregated into an "enthusiast"/HEDT platform (X99) with more expensive mainboards and the CPUs have been overpriced too.

Ryzen is reasonably priced & has one socket for the 4, 8 and 6 core CPUs.

4 cores still is multicore though.

But ok, I see what you mean: anything with more than 4 cores that is affordable.

Intel's multicore CPUs (hexa-core and octa-core chips) have been available for for Intel's socket B/R systems, which are the HEDT grade. These systems came with a price premium, which isn't exactly the case for R5 and even R7 builds.

Intel has been putting die space into integrated graphics instead of more cores. Higher core machines have been available only at very high prices.

Which has been a bad move in the desktop market. Who want's to pay for integrated graphics when they are just going to put one or more discreet GPUs in their system?

The only reason LGA 1151 has been so successful is that most of the market consists of "gamers" who are convinced that they need higher clock speed and IPC.

AM4 should only be compared to LGA 2011v3, which has a very inflated price.

If anything Intel quad-cores have been regressing in the market over the past few years. The quad-cores have gotten more expensive (in laptops), and Intel has started naming dual-core chips "Core i7", as another trick to charge almost the same prices it charges for quad-cores.

Currently my home 'workstation' is running a x5670@4Ghz, a 6C12T Westmere xeon from 2010, but it still competitive and can be bought for peanuts today (bought mine for 70£). Its base clock is 2.95Ghz, but it easily overclocks to 4Ghz and beyond.

Isn't the issue with these old Intel CPUs not the CPUs but the motherboards, which can retail for 2-300 as their supplies dwindle.

It might be an issue, but I still got mine (a Gigabyte x58A-UD3) for 140£. I was specifically looking for a MB with decent overclocking support and working VT-d, which limits the choice. You can get entry level x58 Intel MBs for much less (overclocking these xeons only requires bumping the BCKL to 200Mhz and maybe bumping the core voltage a bit, nothing fancy). The RAM is also still fairly cheap.

If you care more about core counts than single thread clock you can find used x58 dual socket workstation MBs which also have support for large amounts of server ECC ram which is very cheap.

Yes, it is the motherboard.

Get a second hand workstation on ebay, don't get individual components.

I wonder how much more you pay in electricity costs over a Kaby Lake 7700K for example, which idles much lower and wouldn’t need to overclock.

I'm sure that KL consumes significantly less in practice, especially idle, but for what is worth they are 91W vs 95W TDP.

Anyway, the machine runs an, admittedly overkill, GTX 1070 with a TDP of 150W, so the CPU power usage is the least concern.

Since TDP is not power consumption, the GTX 1070 will most likely consume less power than your CPU because it has much better power saving features.

Also, since CPU's are idle more of the time than under load the savings by using a newer CPU like Kaby Lake or Ryzen could be interesting. There is also the motherboard. Newer boards consume less power because the chips are on a smaller node.

But I guess the money you saved on buying the CPU will outweigh the electricity costs even in countries where electricity is expensive.

> But I guess the money you saved on buying the CPU will outweigh the electricity costs even in countries where electricity is expensive.

Unless he's running 24/7 and paying way too much, yeah, by a large margin. Even these older Xeons weren't that bad at energy saving.

To be honest the machine is turned off most of the time, as I have very little time to play with it.

But the overclock is going to affect actual draw. Not sure by how much... possibly a lot.

R7 1700 is even more of a sweet spot for development though

Especially at 65 watts. That's incredible.

Not 65 watts if you overclock to 4 GHz :D

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