Acer’s leading gaming branding, Predator, is all about maximizing performance, particularly around gaming. In the modern era, that now extends into content creation, streaming, video editing, and all the sorts of things that drive the need for high performance. As we’ve seen several times over the years, just throwing more cores at the problem isn’t the solution: bottlenecks appear elsewhere in the system. Despite this, Acer is preparing a mind-boggling solution.
The Acer Predator X is the new dual-Xeon workstation, with ECC memory and multiple graphics cards, announced today at IFA 2018. The premise of the system is for the multi-taskers that do everything: gaming, content creation, streaming, the lot. With this being one of Acer’s flagship products, we expect it to be geared to the hilt: maximum cores, maximum capacity. There-in lies the first rub: if Acer is going all out, this is going to cost something crazy.
This clearly makes zero sense, but at the same time, it’s kind of awesome Acer is doing this. Dual-processor workstations are a bit of an obsession for me, but with dual-processor machines entirely relegated to Xeon systems, they’ve become quite unaffordable. Even though it makes zero sense, I would love for regular Intel Core and AMD Zen processors to support dual processor setups.
Used Xeon workstations and parts (CPUs, ECC RAM, Quadra graphics cards etc are surprisingly cheap. They are often a far better option than a new mid range desktop.
Edited 2018-08-30 04:33 UTC
Old used CPUs are cheaper, however the price quickly rises if you want something comparable.
For example, E5-1650 v3, which is similar to i7-4770, but with 6 cores instead of 4, and 15MB cache instead of 8MB is double the price ($300 vs $150). So if you plan to go that far back, and not need the extra cores / cache, a regular CPU would still be cheaper.
But when compared to “extreme” versions of the same processors, for example, i7-5390K, which is almost the same as the price, you get better performance due to overclocking, AES and new SSE instructions, and also get an embedded GPU as an extra.
Somehow the market corrects itself on the long run. The only big difference I saw in CPU prices are for “ES” (engineering sample) versions of them, which should not technically be on sale on eBay.
Quadro cards are extremely expensive for what they are… if you find a cheap one… it’s because it’s ancient or a very slow model. And they can be amazingly slow… the point of the lower end models is just to provide a certified driver for 2D displays with very very light 3d work.
I don’t agree. If you have a real use case for it, of course. There’s an important point to consider, i.e., a well-built dual Xeon system will probably last very long. I do have a specific example for this. I built a dual Xeon setup in 2011 (12/24 cores, 24Gb ram, 3ware sata raid card) that I still use 24/7 for serious computing tasks. The only things that needed to be changed in 7 years were 2 ram modules, and I dropped in a gtx1080ti for machine learning stuff. That’s it. Still a reliable, and still powerful enough workhorse – that’s the best word to describe it, really. My point is, it might not make much sense for many, but if you can properly use it, it can be a good investment. Although, if I were to get a new one today, I’d still go for building it myself and not buy one from acer, but that’s just my 2c.
It makes zero sense for most of the intended target audience.
Most games don’t even properly utilize all the cores in a single CPU system. There’s no way in hell any of them are going to properly handle a NUMA arrangement.
About the only actual gamers who are really going to benefit from this are those who game in a VM (because they can split the system with the host on one CPU and the VM on the other, pass through a GPU to the VM directly, and just have everything work), but they are few and far between and would likely be better off just building their own system.
The intended subgroup of gamers this is marketed at lack sense or any sort of rationality. It does have disco lighting?
I don’t know what you want to use a 10K cpu in a workstation for but if you are satisfied with an older 4 core cpu E5410 E56XX based cpus and server boards which use DDR3 or FBDIMMs can be found in tons on all auction portals. You can still make a decent gaming/working machine with these without breaking the bank.
They getting phased out of DCs since the price of power, rack space, bandwidth hardly changes over the years for the same storage space you can have a 2-3 times better server. TBH there are so many server boards now on the second hand market that you will have a hard time trying to sell your own.
Acer btw was always a crappy brand for laptops, I would avoid them for other hardware as well.
Behold! The next Apple Mac Pro stolen from HQ, shoved into a crap ACER case. The power of 3.1421579 G5 Mac Pro Supercomputers!
Edited 2018-08-30 09:36 UTC
The existence of dual-socket workstation was a side-effect of Intel’s product segmentation and AMD’s lack of a credible alternative. Single-socket machines with ECC memory were essentially limited to the Xeon E3 which had no more cores than Intel’s desktop offerings and severe limitations on the amount of memory you could put on one. If you needed a large memory pool (>32GB) or more than four cores your only option were Xeon E5s which were dual-socket by design. This doesn’t mean that you had to use two of them – I used dual-socket workstations with only one socket populated in the past – but you still had to pay the premium that Intel’s multi-socket solutions carried. Intel’s HDT CPUs offered more cores in a single socket but didn’t have ECC memory support so they weren’t really an option unless you could cope with the reduction in reliability.
Threadripper’s launch killed that market almost overnight: it offers a large number of cores, ECC support and a large pool of memory in a single socket. Intel had to launch Xeon-W afterwards with similar characteristics essentially removing the non-ECC limitation it had imposed on its HDT offerings. As of now there is no point in a dual-socket workstation anymore.
I’d like to see ECC become standard on *all* systems. It shouldn’t be an enterprise-only feature.