On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 03:07:55PM -0500, Jeff Muizelaar wrote:
On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Sophana "Soap" Aik <s...@mozilla.com> wrote:
Hi All,
I'm in the middle of getting another evaluation machine with a 10-core
W-Series Xeon Processor (that is similar to the 7900X in terms of clock
speed and performance) but with ECC memory support.
I'm trying to make sure this is a "one size fits all" machine as much as
possible.
What's the advantage of having a "one size fits all" machine? I
imagine there's quite a range of uses and preferences for these
machines. e.g some people are going to be spending more time waiting
for a single core and so would prefer a smaller core count and higher
clock, other people want a machine that's as wide as possible. Some
people would value performance over correctness and so would likely
not want ECC. etc. I've heard a number of horror stories of people
ending up with hardware that's not well suited to their tasks just
because that was the only hardware on the list.
High core count Xeons will divert power from idle cores to increase the
clock speed of saturated cores during mostly single-threaded workloads.
The advantage of a one-size-fits-all machine is that it means more of us
have the same hardware configuration, which means fewer of us running
into independent issues, more of us being able to share software
configurations that work well, easier purchasing and stocking of
upgrades and accessories, ... I own a personal high-end Xeon
workstation, and if every developer at the company had to go through the
same teething and configuration troubles that I did while breaking it
in, we would not be in a good place.
And I don't really want to get into the weeds on ECC again, but the
performance of load-reduced ECC is quite good, and the additional cost
of ECC is very low compared to the cost of developer time over the two
years that they're expected to use it.
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