Why buy a Xeon CPU???

[dave_the_nerd]

You look like King Lear: he believes that because he was abused by his daughters, everyone's troubles must come from their daughters (Act 3, scene 3, search for the line "pelican daughters").

I was not expecting that.

 

[Shephard]

I don't think the reason for Xeons is really that complicated. Think about it this way: when you're running a private server for a couple of friends, a part failing is annoying and costs you $120 to replace (I figure no part of a very basic i3 server costs more than that).

If a large business has their server fail, they are out thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. They still have to pay the employees for showing up, but the employees can't be productive or work. Time is literally money.

For example, if Anandtech's servers crashed, they would lose a considerable amount of money in due to lost ad revenue as people migrate somewhere else for tech news (perhaps permanently).

This money easily exceeds the cost of even several Xeons--all of which are necessary to deliver content to consumers. Anandtech hundred of thousands of people--that requires far more than a home server, which only needs to connect to 1-2 devices at once.

Now, these parts CAN be used for gaming, but there would be no benefit. Gamers don't require the dozens of threads or terabytes of RAM that servers do, and they see no benefit from ECC protection in RAM.

So, in a way, you are right--there is no point FOR YOU or for any gamer to get a Xeon. A 3570K is a much better purchase since games depends more on clockspeed than threads. BUT there are uses for Xeons.

You're basically arguing that "I have never seen a need for Xeons, thus nobody needs them." You look like King Lear: he believes that because he was abused by his daughters, everyone's troubles must come from their daughters (Act 3, scene 3, search for the line "pelican daughters").

I see what you are saying about failing parts. However that is just the CPU?

Intel makes motherboards and I have read some reviews that some are actually pretty poor.

So ok you buy a quality Xeon CPU so hopefully it doesn't fail. What about the motherboard? If the motherboard dies it's over for everything.

 

[Markfw]

I would have to see one in action.

I assume no one here has one then not even the cheap ones.

My son has an E5520 that I gave him. My brother has an X3350 that I gave him, and I have 2 AMD server CPU's, and my next 2 will be Xeon's.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The main reason to buy Xeon is the performance is most likely better, and it's more robust and I would imagine less likely to make any kind of errors during calculations, though even a low end cpu, not sure how common it is... the whole "computers never make errors" thing probably applies at this low level. It also supports ECC ram which is good to have on a server. Probably even a must.

It's not a question of "what if it fails" because ANY part can fail no matter how much you paid for it. If you are a business and you can't afford to go down it's up to you to have proper redundancy. Normally two servers with some kind of fail over. This is one of the nice things of virtualization. Most have this built in.

Otherwise, you buy whatever you can afford that will offer the performance you need. FOr a home server, a core i7 is probably more than fine enough. Though if you are looking at dual cpu and ECC ram then you need Xeon I think.

 

[Sleepingforest]

I see what you are saying about failing parts. However that is just the CPU?

Intel makes motherboards and I have read some reviews that some are actually pretty poor.

So ok you buy a quality Xeon CPU so hopefully it doesn't fail. What about the motherboard? If the motherboard dies it's over for everything.

You are right! Any part may fail--the hard drive, the RAM, and the motherboard are all susceptible to failure. But the enterprise sector (by which I mean, people who need this low level of failure) has special parts for every thing: extra highly engineered hard drives that fail far less than consumer ones (like 100 to 1000 times more stable), ECC RAM, which can notice and self-correct any errors, and server motherboards which are extra stable and secure. And even then, most keep extra parts and backups on hand just in case. You wouldn't want, for example, the bank's hard drives storing your account information to go bad. If the information was lost (and all your savings with it), you'd probably switch banks. Banks know this, so they get the most secure, error-free hard drives available and do constant backups.

These things do not make errors and failure impossible. But they do make it much, much less likely (from 1 in 100,000 chance to less than 1 in a million or 1 in a billion).

 

[Fox5]

.....fox5 fails to get it, too. Different market entirely.

AMD has 2p and 4p server cpu/mobos as well, those are actually used a lot in the server market nowadays.

Xeons serve many purposes, and some of those are artificial market segmentation by Intel.

Yes, a business would never run consumer desktop CPUs for a server. But for a home user thinking about Xeons for a small server, I ask why not AM3+ AMD chips? You get ECC and all virtualization features, and way better performance than you'd get out of a comparably priced Opteron or Xeon. Does a single socket Xeon/Opteron setup offer much more?

Obviously if you want to step up to more sockets or more memory (or reliability features beyond ECC), then you don't really have much choice.

Xeons and Opterons do go through additional certification processes that desktop CPUs don't go through, so I suppose there's less chance of some random design flaw being in your processor.

 

[Sheep221]

The server environment require stacking performance to serve large amount of requests and network traffic. Top end processors and hard disks are the must for a good and stable server. Using motherboards with several sockets greatly increases performance and reduces the operating costs and delay on the other side.
It's something like comparing a premium car(i5-i7) to semi truck(opteron, xeon)

 

[Shephard]

My son has an E5520 that I gave him. My brother has an X3350 that I gave him, and I have 2 AMD server CPU's, and my next 2 will be Xeon's.

what does your son use it for?

 

[bononos]

what does your son use it for?

Possibly for something thats non-trivial. Nobody cares about small glitches on game servers.

 

[lakedude]

Big difference between a home server and a real server in a data center!

My home server is run by completely unremarkable hardware like a dual core Regor CPU and DDR2 RAM. The specs are nothing compared to a gaming rig but all it needs to do is stream one video at a time so that is plenty. The only thing at all special about it is that it has 6 drives in a software ZFS raid. It is a server but it is only serving one client at a time (me). Even a couple extra clients would bog it down.

One of my friends has several servers that he uses for HPC work crunching BOINC projects. Each core gets its own task, the more cores the more work gets done.

Of course there are many types of servers and I know beans about this compared to some around here but common sense tells me I/O is going to be a big deal for a typical server. Never mind the specific apps or OS, servers are going to be dealing with many, many requests for information from many clients. This means moar cores, moar RAM and bigger/faster storage. If you look at a server board it is fundamentally different and is more like an extreme edition than a desktop mother board. The difference is I/O. Moar lanes (40 vs 16) for more communications and double the memory bandwidth. A pointless waste of money for a gaming system but essential for the type of work a server does.

I have run a game server before and the most important thing the quality of the internet connection.

Think of all the extra on board communications as the server's internal internet connection...

 

[huntj]

So what essentially is the difference between a mainstream i5/i7 and a similarly priced Xeon in terms of server and normal home usage?

 

[videogames101]

So what essentially is the difference between a mainstream i5/i7 and a similarly priced Xeon in terms of server and normal home usage?

overclocking is the only difference for my usage, xeons don't

 

[Sleepingforest]

So what essentially is the difference between a mainstream i5/i7 and a similarly priced Xeon in terms of server and normal home usage?

For servers: Xeons have significantly less downtime and failure chance across the server's lifetime. In an enterprise setting, this could be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At home: No real difference since the decreased error/failure chance doesn't matter. Low end Xeons are 4 cores and no HT just like an i5; higher end ones are 4 core/8 threads like an i7. Some really expensive Xeons are 6/12 like the X79 i7s. Xeons don't have an iGPU though, and can't overclock like -K or -X models of the i5/i7s.

 

[svenge]

So what essentially is the difference between a mainstream i5/i7 and a similarly priced Xeon in terms of server and normal home usage?

For home usage, none really. However, you can get the E3-1230v2 for $240, which is $50 cheaper than the similar i7-3770 (non-K) @ $290. Its standard frequency is 100MHz slower than the i7 and lacks on-board graphics, but still has hyper-threading.

It makes for an interesting option for those who want to run stock but still have high performance at a relatively low price.

 

[Markfw]

what does your son use it for?

Autocad and Revit (spelling ??)

 

[crashtech]

overclocking is the only difference for my usage, xeons don't

Partly false, check out the latter part of this thread.

 

[piasabird]

There was an article on Toms Hardware about upcoming XEON improvements coming this year. How about a 15 core XEON with 30 Megs of Cache? Maybe they can sell that for say $3,000 each. If you were compiling and encoding video or animation that might speed it up a bit.

I probably cant afford an XEON for home use so maybe that is irrelevent.

 

[tweakboy]

Good thread, and ya most importantly ECC and more RAM is why to get a xeon. gl

 

[Thomas Kent]

I think some of this thread is missing the point.
An i7 socket 1155 that is say $350 will be basically the same as the Xeon socket 2011 V3 that goes for 400, yes. The Xeon will beat it by a hair but requires a more expensive gaming or workstation mobo (that you would probably buy anyway).
But the thing is, a lot of enterprises update their gear every 2 years and also Intel release new sockets about every two years.
What this means is that are a lot of 2ndhand and also ES samples out there, that still have years of life in them. The Xeon numbering system is rather recondite, so you have to do your research. But the ones you buy that are 'used' for $350 originally sold for $2000, and they will stomp any new chip for that price and still have years of life in them. In use, they will give twice the benchmark, but they will also multitask and multithread enterprise work faster still. For gaming, they will help, but a lot of the hard labor there is done by your GPU and you can't really pick those up at much of a discount.

 

[Denithor]

Nothing wrong with your post, but did you seriously have to necro a 3.5 year old thread?

There are far more current threads posted about exactly what you're saying.

 

[Thomas Kent]

Nothing wrong with your post, but did you seriously have to necro a 3.5 year old thread?

There are far more current threads posted about exactly what you're saying.

Not where Google brought me.