Divergent Sockets and Chipsets - End of an Era

[chinesestunna]

Reading Patrick's article about AMD EPYCs "OEM locked" to signed firmwares made me think about really for the past few generations we seem to really be at the end of "cheap repurposed server gear" esp. in the CPU area.
As Intel has gone Socket 3647 since Skylake and 4677 for Ice Pickle, while HEDT is on socket 2066
AMD while SP3 socket are "mechanically compatible" between TR and EPYCs, they are not interchangable.

This from a personal perspective has been more true for Intel, and I'll miss those LGA 771 pin mods, X79 and X99s running their Xeon counterparts, overclocking and turbo unlocking fun. I've recently finally let my X58 workstation go (upgraded to a $70 X5670 from eBay a few years back) and built a X99 system with E5-2678 v3 turbo unlocked. While many can say "just pick up the corresponding motherboard down the road to match those server chips", it's not the same as a desktop board with overclocking and other fun bells and whistles.

 

[i386]

Reading Patrick's article about AMD EPYCs "OEM locked" to signed firmwares made me think about really for the past few generations we seem to really be at the end of "cheap repurposed server gear" esp. in the CPU area.

I hope that only "big players" like Dell or HPE will use that feature and not Microsoft, Google or other hyperscalers so that there will be enough unlocked cpus...

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

AMD and Intel aren't retarded, of course they want to screw over the used market because it eats in their sales at the end of the day. The day someone gets Epycs or sTRX4 CPUs working on X399 boards will be glorious though.

 

[chinesestunna]

I hope that only "big players" like Dell or HPE will use that feature and not Microsoft, Google or other hyperscalers so that there will be enough unlocked cpus...

I agree, that's what the OCP initiative is about right? "Open"? lol

AMD and Intel aren't retarded, of course they want to screw over the used market because it eats in their sales at the end of the day. The day someone gets Epycs or sTRX4 CPUs working on X399 boards will be glorious though.

It's all about the Benjamins right? Frankly I don't think they "care" too much as I don't believe the 2nd hand market is actually substantial enough to keep their profits from rolling in. However I do think it's more so due to the growing gap (due to specialization) between desktop and server gear.

Remember the first Xeons? Up until Pentium 4s you can run SMP with bog standard Pentiums and Athlons, even Celerons got love with Abit BP6 with "creative" slocket cards. (I feel old now)

 

[Dreece]

The typical homelab will simply become more 'vendor-locked' than before. I don't think any of this will impact the used market outside of creating more 'fan-boy' crowds, which plays right into the hands of vendors, the only downside I see here apart from the obvious is that the CPUs themselves will hold value a lot stronger in the used market, as do most vendor-branded refurbished products.

Reality check:
When was the last time someone actually purchased a brand-new non-oem multi-thousand $$$ server CPU for personal use? probably less than 1% of the enthusiast homelab audience. AMD don't care, neither do Intel. Business as usual.

It will get really interesting when they start locking down monitors and GPUs too.

Remember, this is all being done to make the world a safer place. LMFAO.

The day consumer motherboards shot up into the 1K price-tag arena was the day I knew the old days were well and truly over. Take that news back to the late 90s and maybe just maybe The Amiga may have survived with investment from hungry capitalists, invest for tomorrow, not for today. LOL

 

[chinesestunna]

I think from a lab perspective it's less so of a shift, I was more bemoaning the intersection of cheap server gear in desktop/workstation type of play