CPU of the Day: The Intel Everest Series

cpushack.com

30 points·segfaultbuserr··5 comments

My understanding is that there was another use case for the “Everest” OEM Xeon processors besides stock traders which was to get maximum performance out of the chip while reducing the core count to pay less to run Oracle database with its per core licensing model.

Kinda sad about the NSA 5.1GHz Broadwell chips, because by now they've surely been decommissioned and destroyed rather than be released back into the wild or donated to the Tech Museum in Mountain View (Broadwell launched in 2014, discontinued 2018).

Above 5GHz non-turbo clock in 2014 is an impressive figure. The stuff I dreamed of in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was obsessed with overclocking T-birds from something like 1.2 to 1.6GHz.

R.I.P.

1.6GHz would make it into a Thunderbird XP2100+ to ca. XP2200+.

I had such a "Donnervogel", slightly undervolted, screaming along rock solid under NetBSD and Gentoo with 1.5GB (3x512MB, also undervolted) NEC Virtual Channel RAM. Running from assorted SCSI via NCR/Symbios Logic(40MB, fast, ultrawide?), pushing pixels via 3DFX Voodoo3 3000 AGP to a 21" Hitachi Superscan Elite 1600x1200@80Hz, and one 16" Portrait 864x1152 + one 17" 1280x960 via a Matrox MGA 400PCI.

One hell of a machine!

Mostly silent, even. Except for the drives.

And it ran rings around the assorted SPARCs, PA-RISCs and MIPSn I had. And mostly anything else in common use at the time, really.

Good times! Sigh :-)

Oh man, yeah, spinning hard drives can be surprisingly loud! Especially the 15k RPM SCSIs and 10k RPM WD Raptors I ran in the 00s.

And then those ####xp naming schemes, to make it equivalent to the Pentium 4 frequency. That was a product mess!

(2018)

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