EU Dell/Gigabyte MT70-HD0 (Cavium ThunderX CN8890)

[hmartin]

Edit: These are the former Online.net/Scaleway ARM64 instances. I would avoid

(Pro-tip for equipment decommissioning, remove your DC labels before sending to resellers)

Not sure if this is a great deal, but it's certainly an obscure deal. This is the first time I've seen a Cavium ThunderX system sold used for a (somewhat) reasonable sum:

DELL H8DNF BOARD GIGABYTE MT70-HD0 + 2X CPU CAVIUM THUNDERX CN8890 POWER LEFT | eBay

Les meilleures offres pour DELL H8DNF BOARD GIGABYTE MT70-HD0 + 2X CPU CAVIUM THUNDERX CN8890 POWER LEFT sont sur eBay ✓ Comparez les prix et les spécificités des produits neufs et d'occasion ✓ Pleins d'articles en livraison gratuite!

www.ebay.fr

 

[NablaSquaredG]

Funny that the seller mentions an "X11SSE-F" in the description, lol

 

[RTM]

Edit: These are the former Online.net/Scaleway ARM64 instances. I would avoid

I was going to ask you why you suggest avoiding them, but a quick search suggests that they experienced stability issues with the platform, I assume that is why?

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/g11uuj

Scaleway disarms its ARM64 cloud, cites unreliable hardware as the reason

So why not just buy new servers? That’s where this gets curly

www.theregister.com

 

[hmartin]

Scaleway is a previous employer and I have first hand experience with these servers.

They are full of firmware bugs and would frequently kernel panic. Support from Dell is non-existent (e.g. check the service tag, it returns no results) and Gigabyte isn't much better. I see they have released a firmware in 2019, so maybe they fixed some of the show stopping bugs, but I wouldn't gamble 450€ on it.

The seller is located 1km from DC5:

 

[anything1233]

Apart from the platform stability issues, non-existent support and the necessity to somehow build your own chassis and power delivery (without the docs available) — are these Cavium CN8890 any good at all? They’re ThunderX version 1, not 2 - manufactured @ 28nm, with idle consumption of ~140W! As for the performance, they’re as or less fast than some Xeon D parts and slower than Xeon E5-269* v3 and even some v1 in multi core tests, while the single core performance is even worse. See the STH review on them. They’re ARM, which is cool and such, but, dunno — they seem to be neither efficient as Xeon D, nor powerful enough as at least v4 at that price — what could be the use case?

 

[hmartin]

Funny that the seller mentions an "X11SSE-F" in the description, lol

Because they copy-pasta'd from this auction: Supermicro X11SSE-F Socket H4 LGA 1151 Intel BLADE motherboard + COOLER | eBay

They’re ARM, which is cool and such

Only this, otherwise it makes no sense.

 

[anything1233]

Does anyone know where to get a ThunderX2-compatible motherboard?

 

[dgp]

For what it's worth:

- I bought one of these for some fun.
- I haven't got it booted yet as I'm waiting on DIMMs for it.
- If there were firmware bugs then the people that had these things didn't help themselves as they never updated the BMC firmware or the firmware for the ThunderX side.
- Gigabyte's quality control is a bit lacking. I removed the CPU heat sinks to redo the paste and found a solder splat across a bunch of passives. If you buy one of these you want to strip it down and take some IPA and a brush over it.
- If you buy one of these and want to know how to modify a cheap server psu to power it, how to flash the BMC to remove the existing password etc I'm putting notes here: GitHub - fifteenhex/crappy96corearmserverexperiments: Place holder