Advice needed for ITX Build

[Ericloewe]

Ironically, thus has me more excited than the Xeon scalable series.

It's like the entire Xeon E5 16xx market was completely ignored by both Intel and AMD and that frustrates me.

They talk about maximum capacity of 20gbps (in tight circumstances) which I read as it can *just* do 20gbps, downhill hill, with the wind behind it.

I understood it more as "it'll do 2x 10GbE without trouble and can manage more with jumbo frames.

 

[diskdiddler]

I looked up the prices for the 8 core SuperMicro one, looked like 430 Euro which isn't ideal TBH, especially since import duties to my country (no retailer would sell it) will make it more like 500 Euro equiv.

We'll see, my only real concern is Plex server and transcoding. I dived deep into all this 6 months back and came to the conclusion that it's not as multi-threaded as it needs to be for some codecs, there's a few small file types which are single core demanding only, which would render your Plex server useless, be it Denverton 2 core or Denverton 20 core, sadly.

I wonder if Asrock will do one again, it's normally cheaper from them.

 

[diskdiddler]

Nah, that thing is going to make a Xeon E5 system look cheap. The CPU we're interested in is the C3758. 8 cores, all 20 lanes, "medium" Quickassist... It's only lacking turbo, but to get turbo with the full 20 ports would require a much more expensive part.

I just went over the list on Ark, and I would guess the C3858 is probably going to be a pretty beastly bang for the buck processor.

I saw some wildly odd things on that page, huge variances in speicifcations.
Max pci-e lanes, the max temp of the cpu, the quickassist tech being there or not, sata ports, etc

very, very odd

 

[Ericloewe]

ServeTheHome has a nice summary of the available models:
https://www.servethehome.com/wp-con...000-Denverton-Launch-SKU-List-3-Formatted.jpg

 

[Stux]

I just went over the list on Ark, and I would guess the C3858 is probably going to be a pretty beastly bang for the buck processor.

I saw some wildly odd things on that page, huge variances in speicifcations.
Max pci-e lanes, the max temp of the cpu, the quickassist tech being there or not, sata ports, etc

very, very odd

Another thing to be aware of is these processors don't have all the AVX modes and that would impact plex i suspect. But as a replacement for the c2750 it looks good (say the 4 core)

 

[diskdiddler]

Another thing to be aware of is these processors don't have all the AVX modes and that would impact plex i suspect. But as a replacement for the c2750 it looks good (say the 4 core)

So quickassist won't help with Plex but AVX will (I couldn't see AVX on the page for the 3858, did other Denvertons have it?)

 

[Ericloewe]

The instruction set should be identical for all and roughly comparable to Haswell.

 

[diskdiddler]

The instruction set should be identical for all and roughly comparable to Haswell.

I would normally agree that it should be identical for all, but i've never seen such crazy variations in an intel CPU before.

Variety of ram speeds supported, variety of max CPU temps, Quick assist yes / no / medium (!?!?!) - all in the same family. Very strange.

 

[Stux]

The instruction set should be identical for all and roughly comparable to Haswell.

No, from what I see, no AVX, AVX2 (Haswell New Instructions) (or AVX512, but they're skylake anyway)

So, SSE/SSE2/SSSE3/SSE4.1 and SSE4.2, all 128 bit vector instructions, but not the AVX 256 bit vectors.

Makes a lot of sense, putting a 256bit vector unit in an Atom turns it into a very big processor.

Essentially, the impact would be to cripple video transcoding by no more than 50%, and probably a lot less, with video transcoding, its quite possible the dual-channel memory would bottleneck the CPU too, if it did have AVX.

Mr Moderator: would it be a good idea to split out this Denverton talk into another thread? (Post #7 onwards, except #11)

 

[Stux]

Well, this looks ideal.

https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-ma10-st0-intel-atom-c3958-released/

16 drives. 8x PCIe, dual gbe, dual 10gbe (sfp+), IPMI, 4 DDR4 ECC rdimm/undimm slots (128GB?), 16 cores, and even has 32GB of embedded flash for the boot drive! And mini ITX.

16 atom cores seems to be more powerful than 16 Xeon d threads....

Was looking at Gigabytes page on that board. They mention that 2 of the MiniSAS lanes are shared with the PCIe x8... I wonder how that works. No manual yet.

 

[Ericloewe]

No AVX at all is unexpected to me, but I guess it's redundant for the desired workloads with the dedicated QuickAssist unit.

 

[diskdiddler]

So hopefully someone here buys one of these, installs FreeNAS 11 and benches it transcoding some 1080p or even 4k plex media. I imagine you'd want one of the higher end models.

I just want a "future proof" NAS when I upgrade, so I'm really thinking 12 Core Denverton or 6+ core Xeon D
However I'd like to keep under 45w and under $650 US (board and CPU)
and ITX
and cool running
and ....

 

[Stux]

The benefit to the denvertons is not having to burn the pci slot to go beyond 6 drives.

 

[diskdiddler]

Stux, I saw you post the screenshot using the denverton back in August, did you have pre release hardware? Do you still have the thing?

 

[Stux]

Stux, I saw you post the screenshot using the denverton back in August, did you have pre release hardware? Do you still have the thing?

I think it was from a review in servethehome or anandtech.

 

[diskdiddler]

Oh, well that answers that! Thanks.