LGA 3647 was for Skylake and Cascade Lake, and the Xeon Gold 6254 was part of the latter generation. Make no mistake, 18 cores is nothing to shake a stick at, but who’d turn down more? Cascade Lake went up to 56 cores per socket, but those are 400W parts, which is a bit spicy for my taste and I didn’t have access to any. I did, however, have access to Xeon Platinum 8280, so I pulled the 6254 out and slapped the 8280 in. There’s not much of a tradeoff when used in a single-socket board: both parts have the same number of UPI links and the same amount of cache per core; but you take a 400 MHz base frequency hit; TDP increases by 5 W; and core count also increases by 10. In the end, VM/desktop/container performance is roughly the same because 400 MHz is really not all that significant these days, but it feels smoother overall.
It also helps that there was another decommissioned server with larger DIMMs, which allowed me to upgrade to 512GB. The main drawback of this whole thing, though, is that it takes a long time for the machine to boot. That’s the case with proper servers in general, though. I also swapped the Noctua air cooler for an Alphacool 360mm AIO, as it has a huge cold plate that can cover the Xeon’s IHS.
Speaking of long boot times, on Memorial Day I picked up a Gigabyte B650 mainboard, 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, and a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Yes, I’ve upgraded from Zen 3 to Zen 4. According to the reviews, Zen 4 takes a long time to start up due to RAM training or something along those lines, but it actually boots faster than the 5900X did, even with the EXPO profile enabled. I also put a DeepCool Mystique 360 on the CPU, which I’ve taken to calling the “Mistake 360” instead as they’ve been banned from operating in the US. Also, despite connecting to the RGB header on the mainboard, and running a node.js application on Windows to configure the screen, there is no way to configure the thing in Linux — and DeepCool’s support was not willing to provide any manner of assistance.
Not gonna touch the Crowdstrike thing, as it didn’t really impact us at work all that much; also not gonna touch the Intel 13th- and 14th-gen issues since there’s no definitive answer to that question yet.