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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

I would consider this advice now outdated.

Yes, it was a great advice in the 2010s -- I had such a Dell, too. It's well documented how IPC only has grown 20-25% from Sandy Bridge to Skylake and then the wait was long, long until a new uarch has emerged in 2021. But towards the end of the decade, Ryzen has disturbed the still waters and the number of cores have, well, risen sharply while keeping a competitive IPC and Intel eventually followed suit. Because of this, the equally long time rule of thumb where most apps don't really use multiple cores well so you don't need them on the desktop is also dead by now.

I wouldn't recommend a Haswell Xeon as this article does today.

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It is really outdated.

In 2017 buying old Xeons bought you pretty good performance for the buck, as Intel sold you quad cores with minor single core and multicore uplifts for a lot of money, while at the same time old Westmere or Sandy Bridge Xeons had a pretty good balance of many cores with decent enough clock speeds / single core performance. Even I/O options did not improve by a lot in those years.

In 2022 buying old Xeons means you get stuff from the era where Intel started heavily deprioritizing single core performance over having a lot of cores in Xeons. 14+ lowly clocked Haswell cores still do well in synthetic benchmarks, but I don't think they're worth it for any real world workstation loads. Low clocked Haswell cores are outperformed by such things as the Alder Lake efficiency cores (easily) and even modern Android phones. The latest Zen cores and the Alder Lake performance cores will be worth at least twice the per core performance of one of those individual Haswell cores. Even if you say compile code all day it's probably not worth buying into a 200W behemoth that runs Firefox slower than the Android phone in your pocket.

This blog was written in 2019 and was probably already not great advice then, but it is legit bad advice now.

Would you say the same about brand new server processors if click speed was prioritised?

Not sure if I understand the question, but yeah it's all about single thread performance. Around 2017 or so, old server processors had decent single core performance and very good multithreaded performance for workstation workloads compared to the desktop hardware of the day.

Nowadays, old server processors have very poor single threaded performance compared to recent desktop grade hardware, and the much larger amount of cores fails to compensate for that in pretty much all workstation loads. Especially considering that you can get a lot of cores in desktop hardware nowadays too. The relative value of desktop hardware vs server hardware has gone up substantially in the past 5 years or so, since Intel started making server chips focused exclusively on the demands of large scale data centers and AMD started normalizing high core counts in desktop chips.

Because cheap second hand server chips are sourced from data centers, that inherently favor high core counts and only baseline single thread performance, I don't see a future where we have cheap server processors ever being a great choice for a workstation again. Quick-ish single thread server chips do exist (e.g. Epyc 72F3), but I think those are too niche to ever see them for a good deal on eBay.

Thanks, I’m more considering a server for desktop use for some non-standard non technical reasons.

I’m certainly a power user and suspect that additional cores may actually benefit me, but there are some very interesting points about clock speed from you and others.

Hey just because it's harder to rationalize nowadays doesn't make it any less fun to do. Especially if you can get a good deal, go for it!

Having a lot of cores are best used when running virtual machines, handling lots of connections, servicing a large database. The average OS is running 1000 threads at any given time which are all being time sliced to share the same say 40 cores. what you make up in single thread clock speed you lose in time waiting between context switching. The place where single-core performance really excels is Javasript and web browsing. But these machines can process a hell of a lot more data if they’re used properly

Yeah I'm not saying that many cores aren't useful for workstation workloads, but nearly everyone still shouldn't buy these for their primary workstation. If you specifically need to run a lot of VMs or run massively parallel computation, most folks still would probably be better off getting a homelab server to run them instead of running them from your workstation directly.

Agreed personally I find a 5 GHz processor much snappier than a computer with 2.5ghz clock speeds. But that’s also part of DDR4 and other improvements between now and then. It’s not like we’re comparing them to essentially 5/6 generation intel core i7 chips

>… where most apps don't really use multiple cores well so you don't need them on the desktop is also dead by now

I wish that was true. Lots of code I deal with bottlenecks on a single thread. Mozilla has abandoned Servo, and we are stuck with browsers poorly parallelizing parsing, painting, execution. Photoshop, aside from a few filters and functions, is also poorly parallelized. Not to mention smaller programs who understandably can’t justify the complexity of multithreading.

I’d trade single tread performance for cores any day.

I don't know if I'm using anything fancy, but Firefox currently is running 20 processes on my computer.

According to pstree:

    3*[Isolated Web Co───28*[{Isolated Web Co}]]
    3*[Isolated Web Co───29*[{Isolated Web Co}]]
    2*[Isolated Web Co───26*[{Isolated Web Co}]]
    Isolated Web Co───27*[{Isolated Web Co}]
    Privileged Cont───25*[{Privileged Cont}]
    RDD Process───2*[{RDD Process}]
    Socket Process───4*[{Socket Process}]
    Utility Process───2*[{Utility Process}]
    2*[Web Content───9*[{Web Content}]]
    Web Content───10*[{Web Content}]
    WebExtensions───28*[{WebExtensions}]
    chrome-gnome-sh───2*[{chrome-gnome-sh}]
    firefox-bin
    129\*[{firefox-bin}]

Those single processes are still mostly single threaded.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a huge leap forward to have a single webpage running in its own process, but there’s ample room for improvement.

That’s what GP is referring to.

And a given OS is running about 1000 threads at the same time. Unless you specifically set all your apps to very high priority / nice numbers, Your thread will still spend a lot of time waiting between context switches even if it does execute faster when it finally gets one of the few cores available

I just ran Speedometer 2.0 on Chrome on macOS:

  Single core: 61.1
  4 cores: 73.7

Speedometer tests a bunch of ToDO MVC apps in many popular frameworks. It's very heavy on DOM manipulation, parsing, painting, etc. It's the hard to parallelize stuff and stuff that's supposed to represent real world usage.

JetStream 2 is easier to multithread since it plays with Web Workers and other tricks, but still, results are depressing:

  Single core: 54.4
  4 cores: 82

Yeah I looked at old Xeon workstations a while back because they were dirt cheap for what seemed like a ton of compute, but they were incomparable to just getting a good Ryzen or something. Newer Xeons might be better but I'm not paying for that.

Ryzen supporting ECC memory really does make the old Xeon argument futile.

Does Ryzen actually support ECC though? I bought a first gen Ryzen and couldn't get ECC ram to boot on it, and the reviews I read periodically of new Ryzen CPUs and mobos seem to indicate that it's still hit and miss.

I'd love for it to be plug and play.

Depending on board support you might get actual error correction or not.

If it doesn't boot, it's very likely that you actually bought registered memory, which is normal in servers, but _not_ supported at all by Ryzen processors, no matter the mainboard.

Not first gen, that one was very picky about ram settings even for the regular sticks. Also motherboard plays a huge role in how well that actually works.

No.

Certain boards (mostly ASRock) will boot with it, but AMD don't support it outside the Pro series, and you won't get full reporting.

I've been down this rabbit hole for a while with NAS builds, and it's simply not worth AMD if you need ECC currently for anything not too high end.

Haswell Xeon is way too outdated in 2022, but there are loads of newer ones. There's a fair inventory of Skylake and Cascade Lake Xeon on ebay, like HP Z4 G4 w/ 32GB and a GPU for ~$750. It's a pretty square deal considering. Since Ice Lake Xeon workstations are so thin on the ground, this is the most recent Xeon you can get second-hand.

The Ryzen story is a joke if you are actually in the market for a workstation, meaning you want ECC that works. The only way to get it is to buy integrated OEM workstations with the TR Pro.

Many retail AM4 motherboards support ECC with retail Ryzen CPUs. At least on Linux it works as expected. ECC UDIMMs can be difficult to find but it shouldn't be necessary to buy a TR Pro for ECC if memory capacity, I/O lanes and the performance of AM4 Ryzen CPUs suffice.

I haven't looked into deeply but I've heard stories from others with Ryzen boxes that ECC features of the RAM are turned off with Ryzen CPUs installed. Supposedly you can see this in Linux w/dmidecode or other tools. I'd appreciate good links if anybody has them.

PS: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lh3m42/demystifying_ry...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of_...

Ryzen APUs (i.e., Socket AM4 CPUs with with integrated AMD graphics) do _not_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ they carry a "Pro" in their name.

Ryzen CPUs without an iGPU _will_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ the mainboard specs specifically tell you that it won't support ECC, or simply omit mentioning ECC UDIMM at all.

Fwiw, I've enjoyed proper ECC on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac with a Ryzen 5 3600 for more than two years now (using GNU/Linux; I am not sure how Windows would fare).

Interesting. Thank you for the info.

ECC is working just fine on my Ryzen-based machine.

    PS C:\> wmic CPU get Name
    Name
    AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor

    PS C:\> wmic Baseboard get Product,Manufacturer
    Manufacturer  Product
    ASRock        B450M Pro4

    PS C:\> wmic MemoryChip get Manufacturer,PartNumber,BankLabel,Capacity,Speed
    BankLabel     Capacity     Manufacturer  PartNumber        Speed
    P0 CHANNEL A  17179869184  Kingston      9965745-002.A00G  2667
    P0 CHANNEL A  17179869184  Kingston      9965745-002.A00G  2667
    P0 CHANNEL B  17179869184  Kingston      9965745-002.A00G  2667
    P0 CHANNEL B  17179869184  Kingston      9965745-002.A00G  2667

    PS C:\> wmic MemPhysical get MemoryErrorCorrection
    MemoryErrorCorrection
    6                       # "6" is Multi-bit ECC

ASRock has universally working implementations. I should not have said "the only way" when I meant "the only reliable way that does not require you to carefully parse thousands of forum comments to figure out which Asus or Gigabyte motherboard does or does not support ECC".

I am in the middle of an Intel Xeon build and I happen to agree.

Searching for a simple answer to question: "does this CPU + chipset + this particular motherboard actually support ECC DRAM" is infuriating.

Thousands of words on the RGB lighting and the overclocking tweaks, silence on ECC support. It's insane.

Went through four rounds of ECC DRAM (that was on the manufacturer's supported config list) on a Gigabyte board, never got it to POST.

I finally gave up on that one. Bought an Asus X99 WS setup, with Xeon and RAM, from a vendor on eBay.

I can fix simple things, but debugging a configuration in this gamer-saturated market is beyond my current skill level. Once I have at least something working end-to-end, I can bootstrap up to a working machine. But the dead stare of failed POST was a tough one.

> Haswell Xeon is way too outdated in 2022

It's outdated if you need a high-performance workstation. As a regular desktop PC, it runs just fine. Would work quite well as a NAS CPU, with ECC support and downclocked to some lower P-state.

However, I don't think these were ever available for $50 as author suggests. It all really depends on the price point. At $50, I would buy 1 right now, just to have as a backup/guest PC in the living room.

Interestingly enough, just picked up a dual xeon silver HP Z6 for roughly that amount of money, seems like they are rolling off warranty and getting disposed of.

It took me an obscene amount of time to get macos catalina running on it, however. The latest firmware and/or quadro k5000 just make it permahang.

Fabulous twist in the second half. Good luck!

On the off-chance someone gets inspired by this, for the HP Z6 the 2.68 firmware + Radeon Rx580 is the magic combo to make MacOs work via opencore.

To add to this: these Xeons are usually power-hungry. If you run them at home during the winter you might save some heating expenses if you do it cleverly. But the summer? Nah, forget it.

This said, there are some Xeons which run on moderate to somewhat litle power. You might get one or two used of them on ebay. I consider to do this for my home server some day.

Yes this machine will run up your electricity bill and your room temperature. The reason they’re so cheap is because all the hardware got thrown out for more efficient less expensive machines

The reason they’re so cheap is because the hardware was originally leased, and the leases ran out.

Yeah, my personal Skylake Xeon (W-2140B) iMac Pro is by no means bad, but it's not amazing either. The company M1 Pro MBP is notably faster in both single-threaded and multithreaded tasks while sipping a fraction of the power. If the iMac Pro weren't mostly silent (which I would guess, most used Xeon workstations are very much not) thanks to an oversized heatsink I would've traded it in for something better already.

More important than the raw performance numbers my computer comes with a three year parts and service warrantee and I can even pay a small premium to cover accidents and spills. I’m basically guaranteed my computer works for three years or they replace it. What happens if my used workstation breaks down two weeks after I buy it? Why should I take that risk?

A used workstation will have failure rates at the bottom of the bathtub curve when you buy it. A new PC is more likely to experience failures.

Solid state components are generally very reliable anyway.

I have an Ice Lake Xeon W. It’s ok, compiles are pretty decent. Chromium takes a long time though, even with 24 cores/48 threads. If you want a lesson in how not to organize your source repo, the chromium project would be it. It’s kind of mind boggling how bloated browsers have become.

It'll be interesting to see how much the Clouding of Everything affects this wave, but with a likely flood of startup failures coming, there may be cheap gently used servers entering the market in the not-too-distant future.

Or not.

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