sure. single socket boards usualy use same BIOS but hidden second socket settings.
you just ask "will E-Steppings work ?"
ES Xeon Discussion
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you just ask "will E-Steppings work ?"
It is really interesting, but sorry i am afraid that is all too difficult for me to understand.
Can you also modify Bioses if you know these microcodes?
But last week friday night there were a bunch of coincidence offers and discounts that seemed very good which made me decide in a hurry a bit to go for QYFS + Asus W790. But honestly, i am still dreaming of a dual system with E stepping. But no one on the web was writing about experiences with that. And i also do not really have the time to take the risk.
One other consideration is that some people say that ES steppings might have a short life span and bad reliability. To those with long years experience with them. How true is has that been in the past?
Were there particular ES series that started to become unreliable, unstable in time, as i they were aging? My experience with normal hardware is that usually when i buy it new i test it hard with some torture test, and if it survives, it usually survives the rest of my usage. But maybe that does not apply to ES cpus?
One other consideration is that some people say that ES steppings might have a short life span and bad reliability. To those with long years experience with them. How true is has that been in the past?
Were there particular ES series that started to become unreliable, unstable in time, as i they were aging? My experience with normal hardware is that usually when i buy it new i test it hard with some torture test, and if it survives, it usually survives the rest of my usage. But maybe that does not apply to ES cpus?
If you're afraid of that, you have to buy retail processors, but then you only have 3 years of peace.
even a brand new processor can die in the first 3 month.
ES we can buy are made for engineers to build motherboards and write drivers, with a unstable ES this can be go to very hard work thought.
but indeed some series of ES got issues after some months, remember the BUG in the intel C2000 series ? was not ES....
forgot one thing: some sellers of ES provide warranty.
if you looking at long lifespan do not buy (worn out) used prod.units(retail) cheap at ebay.
and instead of QYFS for $400 you better go with retail Platinum 8470, its about $12000 usd.
of course there is a risk using ES, but some have no other chance
Main problem with ES is that I think changelog (list of bugs) fixed in each stepping was distributed under NDA to customers who were designing their systems. Each stepping means that something was fixed in between, but what exactly and how important that is - you probably won't know (unless some one accidentally publishes changelog for the stepping or will tell you in private what to expect).
It can be reliability problem, it can be short life span, or it can be reduced performance or it can be something in a case which you'll never use in your system and you won't even notice a difference between D0 and E5 for your particular workload.
Then question is if you want to risk that or not.
I myself think that for homelab/test setup that is acceptable risk (as there is no other way to get enough cores, etc for that amount of money, and in worst case you'll have a downtime of that setup, so what if it doesn't cost you reputation and revenue?). If I'd be a startup that need HW for something - probably I'll consider the risks of getting ES system (especially on early stages). If I'd be a serious company - I'd probably wouldn't go for buying ES now.
You can tell that probably later steppings should have more bugs fixed and if you'll have something it probably will be a performance issues under some conditions and not stability problems, just based on a common sense, as it was said above - ES2 and later were used by devs to develop motherboards, drivers, etc. so they should be stable enough for that under most common conditions otherwise their job would've been a nightmare (but that is common sense, not experience).
The choice is always yours. But you just have to be aware that there are risks involved here.
I agree. This should not be used in production. You could even have wrong results! (this has happened in the past with Intel). But for a personal HP desktop - it's worth the risk. The fact that Gigabyte and others (and they most likely know the bugs) maintain the CPU IDs in their BIOS probably means it's stable enough to be kept there. For a small shop that is trying to get ahead, perhaps hedge your bets and compete with deep deep pockets with a mix of production grade CPUs and ES for dev/test. I would also mix different models of ES.
I might be wrong, but there were talks that Intel shipped some CPUs to early adopters and then found bug or series of bugs that resulted in redesign, but that didn't affect those adopter's workloads.
Probably that means that those adopters still use D0 CPUs in production because bugs that were found are just irrelevant to them and Intel is not forced to support it until customer moves away to something newer.
But I might be just wrong, vaguely remember reading that in news year-ish ago.
intels redesign improved the die count of a wafer. some bugs kept in, but most can resolved by microcode, unfortunaly stepping D0 is not supported by intel since 19.04.2022
i doubt that. is more likely: intel thought ok ! we are ready, this is PRD stepping, we launch soon.
i mean, the cores in SPR are not new, Golden Cove is old stuff. if you don't need the accelerators and complex stuff you can save money.
apropos money, one thing should not be hidden.
another reason for the redesign is the much too high IDLE power consumption of the ES prior to the E-Steppings.
but if you need a "Workstation" and not a "Sleepstation" you will be fine too.
apropos money, one thing should not be hidden.
another reason for the redesign is the much too high IDLE power consumption of the ES prior to the E-Steppings.
but if you need a "Workstation" and not a "Sleepstation" you will be fine too.
Agree, it's old stuff,
SPR are the same (plus some server extra features hardly of any use for home/desktop customers)
as 12th gen Core processors, e.g. i7-12700 - which on e-bay go at around $160 with 8 P-cores, therefore $20 per core, those do have higher frequencies so if we adjust price for lower frequency then justifiable home-user 48-core xeon cost would be around $960 (proper production units, not ES junk)..
just released "new" Xeons Emerald rapids are like 13th gen desktops (P-cores) e.g. i7-13700
The difference of Xeons having much lower frequencies is major drawback for home-user applications expecting higher performance (home software more skewed towards core performance than to multiprocessing).
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(TDP 125W / 8 cores) * 48 cores = 750Watts, we have only 350W.
efficiency gets bad on higher clocks.
and 100 from the 350Watts is for uncore and so on, not for cores alone.
EDIT: if you want 5ghz in SPR you have to rise the uncore voltage, not a good idea with so many transistors compared to desktop SKUs
ES cpu's with warranty are you joking? i did not come across that any where, and would happy to hear where that would be possible.
Of course i understand that there must be some risk to cover the difference between 12000 usd or 400 usd.
One quantitative approach for risk is risk=(probability of failure)*(cost of failure).
the cost are clear, so i was interested in experience with probability of failure. But even anekdotal statistics seem hard to get. But i understand it depends on to many things, per stepping, workload, and as other sayd maybe some issues are not relevant, for some workloads. Pitty that those change logs are not public. But OK, so we need to try and find out.
That would seem like good news, right? maybe not so many issues.
Unfortunately intel does not have a linear pricing scheme, it seems rather exponential, or maybe worse than exponential, i don't know if there is a name for that.
On the other hand QYFY 270W TDP CBR23 44K but 14900K TDP 125W but max Power is 253W and CBR23 also around 40K. And for some workloads that do not scale very well fewer cpu’s with higher clocks can be beneficial. But yes in general high clocks decrease energy efficiency. And the ‘normal’ 13xxx and 14xxx and also the standard consumer AMD,s regularly seem to have issues with high memory configs (above 128gb). Not to mention they have only 20-24 PCIe lanes or so.
Even though the risks are unknown, i try to tell myself that i had many rational reasons to go to the ES road again.
Compared to $10k plus for retail - buying another as spare is worth it.
Strongly agree. And i am still a bit worried about that. Trying to make a Taobao account to see more, but google translate does not do the Chinese captcha, and i need to many tries to pass it.
I get what you mean, but it is really only true if you would know the probability of failure or at least an upper bound of it.
If the other one also fails after a week, and the next and the next. you can't make a good investment on these, no matter how many one would buy, as a back up. It's a bandit problem (finding out what slot machine gives the best returns). If i would have the money to buy a spare, and if i would be rational i would probably by one of another type of cpu compatible with the motherboard. Reconsidering that i should have probably bought a Motherboard, that had the better compatibility with later steppings. But i got a good deal Asus W790-ACE for 500 Euro.
Even though, we only have very small sample statistics available on the web and here about this topic, it seems that reliability is not such a big issue in practice as it is in theory. Because almost nobody is complaining, and like with reviews usually people with negative experiences are more likely to post reviews than, people with positive experiences. So my heuristic is to calculate with an cpu failure probability of 10% per year for these ES, it still makes it worth while, for my purposes. Calculating everything else with a pessimistic 2% per year. Also buying the real deal official intel cpu of $10K is not possible for me, also because loses its value very strongly, in 3 years its maybe worth $500 or so. Changing perspective 180 degrees, why are all these QYXX being sold, instead of used for cheap cloud services, probably because the sellers can get or do something better for the money, maybe E steppings? Or if something else, anyway i probably do not have access to it.