Intel Xeon E Six-Core Review: E-2186G, E-2176G, E-2146G, and E-2136 Tested

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• A5 - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link

  Smaller/cheaper systems for places that still self-host? Not everyone needs (or has the budget for) a 28-core monster box.
  
  I have to admit I'm not sure why it gets a 21-page AT writeup, but I think their low-end enterprise tests do decent traffic.

• jtd871 - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link

  Ya, and there are still a truly dizzying array of SKUs on display here when only maybe 4 might be justifiable for a 6-core workstation CPU market. Gotta love product segmentation.

• speculatrix - Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - link

  I agree, small businesses (like me) want a small dev server to run VMs, and an eight core (no HT) single socket box could be reasonably cost effective. There's a big jump in pricing to dual socket high core counts.

• notb - Wednesday, November 7, 2018 - link

  These CPUs are primarily designed for workstations and purpose built servers. There is quite a huge market between home PCs and AWS datacenters. :-P
  
  There are multiple scenarios for which these Xeons will be the most cost-effective or even the fastest ECC-enabled CPUs available. Intel can provide a perfect CPU for a particular use case, so they do. :-)

• twtech - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link

  Workstation reliability. Consumer class systems are pretty reliable, but Xeons with ECC even more so.

• Azurael - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link

  So am I reading this correctly: Intel expects people to pay extra for old Coffee Lake chips and buy a more expensive, niche motherboard just to get ECC support when every single AMD Ryzen CPU supports ECC?
  
  That would be laughable if the 'free' market actually worked, but given the fact that Intel commands such control over the system integrators and the PC industry as a whole, SIs aren't even marketing AMD hardware to their business customers (or home users for the most part, for that matter...)

• kpb321 - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link

  Intel has always loved to charge extra where ever they can. ECC, Virtualization and any number of other things over the years so that really isn't a surprise. On the Ryzen side my understanding is that while AMD doesn't disable it in the CPUs most consumer motherboards don't support ECC as it requires some extra memory traces. So while the AMD situation is better you can't just use ECC in any random Ryzen system.

• Azurael - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link

  AFAIK you are correct in that actual VIOS-side support is hit and miss and rrequires motherboard manufacturers to actually implement the watchdog calls to halt the system on a double fault (although ECC does correct single bit faults without any intervention so long as it's working.) but it requires no extra hardware and would be easily implemented by an SI trying to sell a complete Ryzen system to a customer, so that's really no excuse.

• Azurael - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link

  *BIOS-side, obviously (technically wrong anyway but I guess we can consider EFI a type of BIOS if we aren't going by strict definitions.) Stupid on-screen keyboard.

• kpb321 - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link

  Doesn't it also require additional traces on the MB to transmit the ECC info as the memory controller is doing the ECC calculation and checking not the memory module itself?