Why Intel Created The C232 And C236 Workstation Chipsets

[bit_user]

Meanwhile AMD supports ECC on all of their chipsets (at least they used to). My Phenom II + AM3+ chipset are both fully capable of ECC.

Same here. I used a Phenom II + 890 FX chipset. It was awesome for cheap server builds (6x SATA 3), back in its time.

I wish I could have went intel for my cheep ZFS build but I cant without going server board + xeon.

Not so. Check out i3's. Tons of people are using them for home servers, because they support ECC for less $$ than a Xeon. I used a i3-4370 in my latest server, but you still have to pair it with a pricey server/workstation board. In the case of my AMD server, I was able to use a less expensive, semi-consumer board (but many consumer boards lacked support for ECC).

Just search by ECC support & socket on http://ark.intel.com

 

[bit_user]

I know a lot of people that went for H87/97 over cheaper B85 because the B boards don't have RAID.

For SATA 3, software RAID is fast enough. I ditched H/W RAID, long ago, and haven't looked back.

We use it at work, but those are enterprise-grade controllers that have battery backup, among other things. And they're in larger systems than you could build with these chipsets.

 

[bit_user]

More than a disaster actually. With the news that Skylake and xeons based on skylake will only work on windows 10 after 18 months, I'm sure that many businesses will stay away. If Intel didn't have a monopoly, that would be money flying out the window.

whaaa? I duno where that info came from. Why would M$ restrict intel chips? they wouldn't...

Not only would they, they did.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-processor-support-policy,31024.html

What it said was

Microsoft will stop supplying updates related to Skylake to these operating systems on July 17, 2017.

It will still work. They're just not going to keep supporting these old OSes. You might not like that policy, but it's hard to argue that they're being unreasonable.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Not only would they, they did.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-processor-support-policy,31024.html

To me it sounds like Window 7 computers are not going to just stop working on Skylake based systems in 18 months... They are not going to optimize/update drivers any further. Will this drive Windows 7/Skylake systems to be more problematic? Maybe. Force PC gamers to adopt Windows 10 to support new hardware.

Wonder if they are making a similar plan for Windows 2008(R2)

To me it seems they want the "old and busted" to run like old and busted to motivate adoption of Windows 10. I am guessing this may be partially in response to the dismal adoption rate of Windows 8/8.1 and how embedded the XP to Windows 7 users had become.

Just my option/observation and unfortunately I did not stay at a Holiday Inn either.

Correct, Windows 7/8 will continue to work with Skylake after that time period, they just won't receive any more updates that deal with Skylake at all from Microsoft. Probably not a big deal, after 2 years Skylake likely won't have any major software updates coming. The bigger problem is that anything after Skylake and the new processors coming from AMD soon won't have support from Microsoft with anything except Windows 10. AMD and Intel might work in a fix, but it might force users to upgrade.

There likely will be a similarly designated server OS, as Microsoft's exact wording was that support would be limited to the "latest platform", but they haven't given exact details on that yet.

@bit_user: You got the nice server. 😛 I'm using what is really more of a NAS for my home server. It has a dual-core Bay-Trail Atom chip in it with a decent clock speed and 6 GB of DDR3. It came with 2 GB, but that empty SO-DIMM slot was driving me crazy so I bought some memory for it. It's a WD product, so it has about 3x4 TB RED drives in a RAID 5 config, and it can run a few services like auto-backups and a light web server platform but nothing to fancy. It doesn't support ECC either.

 

[bit_user]

@bit_user: You got the nice server.

Thanks! The CPU would be overkill, but it's running a SSD RAID-5 and 10 GigE, so I got the fastest i3 to minimize the chance of the processor being a bottleneck.

... SO-DIMM slot ... It doesn't support ECC either.

SO-DIMM is a red flag for no ECC support. I'm pretty sure it even lacks the connectors for ECC, but I could be wrong.

I also have a Raspberry Pi for serving media (music, mostly). It's alright, but I'm looking to upgrade (the Pine A64 is looking interesting...). Also waiting to see if ODROID comes out with anything 64-bit.

BTW, make sure to scrub your RAID!

 

[IInuyasha74]

I don't think the Atom slows me down too much, but I feel like it does at times when multiple people are hitting it. I use it mostly just as a media server and when everyone is hitting it all at once it can sort of stall for a second. This one has dual-NICs both of them are 1 Gbit. Would probably help if I connected both, but my switch is full so I could only plug in one.

The Pine A64 sounds amazing going by its specs, I really hope it comes out and has decent software support, because its performance added with its price will blow Raspberry Pi out of the water.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

A media server sounds like a cool idea actually. If I was to run a Linux media server, could I somehow have a file hierarchy on the Linux server appear on my desktop? Like a C drive, but perhaps called my L drive, but having the data stored on the other computer over LAN?

 

[IInuyasha74]

Yes, fairly easily. Just have two drives or two partitions is probably best. Have the OS on one, then the other just for storing stuff. Then setup the drive as a networked drive and you will have access to it all over LAN.

Warning though, if you are using 802.11b/g it is probably going to be too slow for a lot of stuff. Streaming 1080p movies over 802.11g isn't a lot of fun. Lots of mini pauses if there is the slightest hiccup.

 

[sylentz199]

Gentlemen?,

An informative and useful description.

Of course, the features and design are interesting, but the performance in real-world system is key. I've been watching results of the Skylake Xeon E3 v5's on Passmark of which there are now 41 systems tested.

This is a still-small sample, but results are interesting. The use seems heavily workstation oriented as 27 of the 41 systems are using Quadros and 24 of those are Quadro M's ,meaning E3-v5 are popular in laptops- Dell Precision M7710. 7510. Thanks to M.2, the highest rated E3-v5 is a laptop (Precision 7710 / E3-1535M v5m /Quadro 5000M / Samsung. SM951 NVMe ). The disk score is the highest I've ever seen in a laptop: = 13622. Also, I don't think I've ever seen a laptop as the highest rated (= 5516) system by CPU search. For comparison my main system is the highest rated HP z420 at 5046 with a E5-1660 v2 (6-core @ 3.7/4.0, CPU=13989) / Quadro K4200 / Intel 730 480GB (disk= 4555). Skylake Xeon does seems to represent a leap ahead for laptops with M.2 at least.

The CPU scores are interesting. the top Passmark CPU score is 10652 from an E3-1275 v5 on a Supermicro X11SSZ0F and that score was achieved using the integrated HD P530 which scored 2D=629 and 3D=1090. the same system was tested with a GTX 970 and the CPU score was reduced a bit to 10517 (2D=802 and 3D = 9217). The memory score was identical at 2690 suggesting that using system RAM for video is not upsetting either the processing nor the RAM effectiveness.

However, when comparing results of the E3-1275 v5 (3.6/4.0) to the Haswell v3 (3.5 /3.9), the top v3 CPU score of 11293 is also using Intel IG: P4700. On an ASUS Z87-WS MB and Plextor PX256M3. the 2D=1066 (excellent) and 3D= 791 (about Quadro K600). ASUS Z87 hold the top 7 spots for CPU performance, but the CPU scores for the slight lower clock speed v3 seem at a glance stronger than for v5. This may be that ASUS WS motherboards (and some Supermicro) extract more from Xeon CPU's than Dell and HP. Anecdotally, this is another suggestion that Intel IG is very efficient, and continues to be better than you'd think it is, (and M.2 is a winner) but not a clear indication that Skylake is walking away from Haswell noticeably- so far. Early days.

I'm looking for forward to the new Broadwell Xeon E5 v4's. There have been a few engineering samples creeping about already. How about this: the- E5-2602 v4 is a 4-core @ 5.1Ghz and the E5-2699 v4 is a 22-core / 44-thread at 2.2 /3.6GHz ? I should dearly love to have a 44-core / 88- thread, 1TB DDR4-2400 workstation to watch cat videos on YouTube- and then do my own oceanic and atmospheric models.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

Shoot I just picked up some dual E5-2698 v3 server blades...only 792GB of RAM

 

[RedJaron]

I know a lot of people that went for H87/97 over cheaper B85 because the B boards don't have RAID.

For SATA 3, software RAID is fast enough. I ditched H/W RAID, long ago, and haven't looked back.

That's going to be up to the end user. Some people want the hardware level support or don't want the software performance hit. I try to avoid blanket statements because it's very easy to find exceptions to them.

But I agree with you that people are freaking out about the Win 10 CPU support decision for absolutely no reason. They're acting as though MS is going to retroactively disable existing CPU support or that they won't even be able to boot old Windows on new hardware. Neither is true.

 

[bit_user]

A media server sounds like a cool idea actually. If I was to run a Linux media server, could I somehow have a file hierarchy on the Linux server appear on my desktop? Like a C drive, but perhaps called my L drive, but having the data stored on the other computer over LAN?

Get a Raspberry Pi v2 (or similar) and try it out. That way, if you encounter too many problems or find it unsatisfactory, you haven't sunk too much $$ into it. Of course, if you have an old PC to use for the project, that would be even cheaper.

The Linux service for sharing network drives to Windows clients is called Samba. You can find plenty of articles on it. The underlying config file can be pretty hairy, but I think most distros provide a GUI for setting up shares.