AMD Opteron

Can relate, a while ago (around 2016) we bought 7 second-hand dual opteron 8439 (12 cores! no ht) desktops with 64GiB of ram in them, added pcie nvme adapter, for about ~850 EUR (including 21% vat) a piece. We have been using those systems since then and they are really amazing performers (linux and bsd, many java apps, jetbrains IDEs, etc). This is totally because of how efficient and minimal modern Linux and BSD distros can be, by the way - even with modern desktop environment like Gnome 43! Only downside is the powerdraw. They idle at 180 watts, s3 sleep is still 150 watts and on BSD idle is 240 watts! This wasn't too much of a problem before the whole energy crisis thing, because electricity was quite cheap (around 0.19cts per kwh). But with prices touching 0.80cts pet kwh, it becomes untenable quickly. We currently Wake-on-LAN these boxes only when we need them and they auto turn off after 1 hour of idle.

Same here. I've been in the chip design industry since 1997. Everything was Sun and I was right out of college and convinced my manager to let me use a Linux/x86 machine and I used the savings to buy a large 21" monitor that would run at 2048x1536 resolution and use it as an X terminal to the Suns. Everyone else loved it and did the same. Around 2000 we started getting some EDA software released on Linux. I remember getting some Linux kernel patches and recompiling the kernel to change the user / kernel split from 2GB / 2GB to 3.5GB user / 0.5GB kernel. But we still needed the 64-bit Suns for some jobs that needed over 4GB RAM. Itanium was really expensive and slow and then AMD released the 64-bit Opteron in 2003. We bought them immediately and never bought another Sun. My high school in 1992 got a bunch of old Sun3 and first gen Sun4 systems. I absolutely loved them. My dream then was to have my own Sun workstation but they were way too expensive. My other dream was to go to college and then get a job at Sun. I heard about Linux in 1993 and got my Unix system at home. I did work on some Sun UltraSPARC III companion chipsets but Sun couldn't compete on the price to performance ratio with Linux/x86

Yes, I had the same experience while using various Sun computers between 1995 and 2005. During all that decade the Sun computers were reliable, but excessively slow. Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.

For this reason for my first truly made-from-scratch home NAS I went AMD64 with ECC UDIMMs. It was some very basic Athlon64, but it COULD do ECC. Since then I moved to Opterons and Xeons but I still remember that choice.

This would usually be a tangent, but it's quite apropos to the main topic. My workstation is the last amd64 hardware without ME/PSP. It's a few generations old - dual Opteron 6380's with 112G of RAM. I couldn't get it to train with 8 sticks of RAM, but it's solid and reliable with 7. Last time I stuck a Kill-a-watt on it, I think it draws around 140W at idle. An alternative to it would be something like the Raptor Talos. https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html https://www.coreboot.org/Board:asus/kgpe-d16 It's got 5 usable PCIe slots (including the physically-flipped "PIKE" one), I think a total of 40 PCIe lanes from both sockets that I believe you could theoretically split out with the maximum amount of bifurcation, since the BIOS is Free Software. My new Ryzen build is for a personal server that resides at a lower trust level, and targets around 30W draw. B550 motherboards generally have around 28 PCIe lanes going to expansion slots (20 from the proc, 8 from the chipset). The best you can do for number of slots is to bifurcate the main "graphics" x16 into 3 x4 slots (maybe 4 with a non-APU) using a "VROC" card, but the BIOS has to support that (Gigabyte and Asus seem to generally, but check manual). I believe X570 motherboards have a few more PCIe lanes coming from the chipset. If you really need more PCIe lanes , I hear Threadripper/EPYC is the way to go. But I don't have any personal experience. If you just need more PCIe slots , you can find PCIe x1 -> fou…