Purpose of low end SKUs

[mstoebich]

I've been thinking about this for a while now:
There are these E5-2603 (and their newer v2-4 predecessors) low end CPUs all over ebay for (sometimes) single digit prices. They aren't fast, nor do they pack any special features other than being cheap (even new they where dirt cheap compared to more powerful CPUs). On the other hand these are dual socket CPUs for higher end servers that support a ton of RAM and PCIe lanes.

I'm curious what type of usage scenario these are designed for?

 

[zack$]

Storage

 

[Spartacus]

Back in the day when you used physical servers for individual purposes instead of virtualized workloads.
Secondly those cpus are used for developer work stations for reliability and 24/7 use where you wouldn't need as many cores potentially.

 

[i386]

Buy full systems from vendor X with all the memory and storage you need and low end cpus, buy better cpus for cheap separately from vendor Y?

 

[mstoebich]

Storage

Interesting Point. But isn't faster (large 15k SAS arrays/SSD/NVME) storage to some degree limited by CPU speed? These are low core count and low Frequency CPUs so there isn't much room for overhead. So is it mainly aimed at "slower" storage units and faster ones need faster CPUs?

Or is the load on cpus not an issue because of Hardware offloading (RAID controllers, RDMA on NICs etc.)

Back in the day when you used physical servers for individual purposes instead of virtualized workloads.

But "back in the day" should be the 2000s and not 2020? I mean this type of CPU still exists in the form of Intel's Bronze line of xeon CPUs.

Secondly those cpus are used for developer work stations for reliability and 24/7 use where you wouldn't need as many cores potentially.

I haven't thought about that. There are probably a lot of workloads that aren't all that compute intensive, but need tons of RAM.

Buy full systems from vendor X with all the memory and storage you need and low end cpus, buy better cpus for cheap separately from vendor Y?

Also a valid point, but i my question was more aiming at what market intel is trying to serve with these types of processors.