what if Dirty cheap 16C Bulldozer Opterons and 8C Nahaelm EX - is there a use for them?

[SaltyDaddy]

Hi
I saw, that Linus again tried to play with 2X 4C Yorkfield platform and that got me thinking.

I know, that you can get AMD Opteron 6276 (16C Bulldozer 2.3GHz) for around 15-20 US bucks, Opteron 6376 (16C Piledriver 2.3GHz) for 20-25 bucks, or from the Intel side, X7550 (8C Nehalem EX 2GHz) for laughable 4 bucks and E7-2850 (10C Westmere EX 2GHz) for around 15-20 buck, if you got good deal.

I played with these platforms long ago, but I dont have any by me now. Does somebody still use them? Even today I use my trusty old dual X5670 for my server and they are good enough. What about this big hi-end grade grandpa's in today's workload in perspective to power/watt and cost of the whole system.

I would love to hear any echo on that!
Thank you for reading

[SenKa]

He messed with those Opterons in this video. As for the Intel side, Nehalem and Westmere have aged very well, and are still very usable (especially the higher end hyper threaded parts). Both lack single core performance, and the modern features for power savings and turbo boost. But for what they are, they are fantastic.

 

Power usage will be rather immense, but performance still scales very well unless you require the newer AVX instruction sets that these chips simply predate.

[5x5]

If you need a super cheap server, sure. 

[mariushm]

OzTalksHW did some videos with opteron a while ago :

 

Yeah, power consumption's a big problem. Other than that, if you ever need a huge amount of ram for something, like 256gb of memory, such an old server could be worth the money.

 

 

 

 

[SaltyDaddy]

24 minutes ago, SenKa said:

He messed with those Opterons in this video.

Oh, I already forgot about that video. Yeah. Too sad, that they havent go for the Piledriver, which have much better IPC. Now they need to do the Nahael/Westmere version