qupada

Probably best to look at it as a competitor to a Xeon D system, rather than any full-size server.

We use a few of the Dell XR4000 at work (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ipovw/poweredge-xr4510c), as they’re small, low power, and able to be mounted in a 2-post comms rack.

Our CPU of choice there is the Xeon D-2776NT (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/226239/intel-xeon-d2776nt-processor-25m-cache-up-to-3-20-ghz/specifications.html), which features 16 cores @ 2.1GHz, 32 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and is rated 117W.

The ostensibly top of this range 4584PX, also with 16 cores but at double the clock speed, 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and 120W seems like it would be a perfectly fine drop-in replacement for that.

(I will note there is one significant difference that the Xeon does come with a built-in NIC; in this case the 4-port 25Gb “E823-C”, saving you space and PCIe lanes in your system)

As more PCIe 5.0 expansion options land, I’d expect the need for large quantities of PCIe to diminish somewhat. A 100Gb NIC would only require a x4 port, and even a x8 HBA could push more than 15GB/s. Indeed, if you compare the total possible PCIe throughput of those CPUs, 32x 4.0 is ~63GB/s, while 28x 5.0 gets you ~110GB/s.

Unfortunately, we’re now at the mercy of what server designs these wind up in. I have to say though, I fully expect it is going to be smaller designs marketed as “edge” compute, like that Dell system.

Came to post the same. Seems like the most awkward possible way to phrase that.

Your “Disks not included” suggestion, or heck, just “empty” would surely be better.

I too have an oddly specific one of these, which is tartare sauce.

I actively dislike all three of mayonnaise, gherkins, and capers. Mix 'em together though? Brilliant.

I’d be curious to see how much cooling a SAS HBA would get in there. Looking at Broadcom’s 8 external port offerings, the 9300-8e reports 14.5W typical power consumption, 9400-8e 9.5W, and 9500-8e only 6.1W. If you were considering one of these, definitely seems it’d be worth dropping the money on the newest model of HBA.

I’m definitely curious, would only personally need it to be NAS + Plex server for which either of the CPUs they’re offering is a bit overkill, but it’s nice that it fits a decent amount of RAM, and you’re not forced to choose between adding storage or networking.

Single-sided drives can be up to 4TB though, no?

I’m more disturbed that the labelling on the box is in comic freaking sans.

To expand on @doeknius_gloek’s comment, those categories usually directly correlate to a range of DWPD (endurance) figures. I’m most familiar with buying servers from Dell, but other brands are pretty similar.

Usually, the split is something like this:

• Read-intensive (RI): 0.8 - 1.2 DWPD (commonly used for file servers and the likes, where data is relatively static)
• Mixed-use (MU): 3 - 5 DWPD (normal for databases or cache servers, where data is changing relatively frequently)
• Write-intensive (WI): ≥10 DPWD (for massive databases, heavily-used write cache devices like ZFS ZIL/SLOG devices, that sort of thing)

(Consumer SSDs frequently have endurances only in the 0.1 - 0.3 DWPD range for comparison, and I’ve seen as low as 0.05)

You’ll also find these tiers roughly line up with the SSDs that expose different capacities while having the same amount of flash inside; where a consumer drive would be 512GB, an enterprise RI would be 480GB, and a MU/WI only 400GB. Similarly 1TB/960GB/800GB, 2TB/1.92TB/1.6TB, etc.

If you only get a TBW figure, just divide by the capacity and the length of the warranty. For instance a 1.92TB 1DWPD with 5y warranty might list 3.5PBW.

This video about ex-Soviet RTGs of questionable radioactive source choice is quite a good watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT8-b5YEyjo

NASA apparently used RTGs for deep space missions only, while in the same timeframe the Soviets scattered them all across the countryside, then promptly forgot about them.

Agree with all these points about the Nexdock.

We bought a bunch of them at work to be KVM consoles for computers without network out of band management, and at that they excel.

That said, I don’t think I actually knew it had speakers, wasn’t really part of my use case :)

It also makes me wish that USB-C connectors on GPUs hadn’t been such a short-term deal, the one-cable hookup is definitely a great thing.

I’m curious if this $69 watch turns out to be any good:

https://intl.cmf.tech/pages/watch-pro

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23891328/nothing-cmf-buds-pro-watch-charger

Claims more than a week of battery life, and while not offering 100% of the features of a Wear OS device, if you’re used to a Pebble it might be a comparable feature set.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a pcie card that will not function at all unless it receives it’s required lanes

One of the few things that’d be problematic would be the x16 -> quad M.2 cards which use PCIe bifurcation.
Lanes 1-4 from the socket are wired to the first M.2, 5-8 to the 2nd, etc.

It would still work (by some definition of the word), but in the sense that the first M.2 drive would get 1 lane and any others wouldn’t be connected.

(Quad M.2 boards with a “PLX” or other PCIe switch chip would work fine with 1 upstream lane serving all 4 drives)

and the people who do still download, wouldn’t care about doing it while on battery

Very much this; I’ve got a whole army of machines I can SSH into to launch a long-running download, which frequently additionaly cuts out a 2nd step of copying the file to where it needs to be after downloading it (a action which would normally cause additional battery usage on the laptop).

And I thoroughly agree with you; I want the laptop to go to S3 sleep immediately when I shut the lid, and then pull it out of my bag a hours later with only a couple of percent of the battery consumed in the interim.

I’ve definitely forgotten to close mine once or twice, even though my custom (LoRa) integration is just simulating pushing the button on the wall by closing a relay contact and watching for closed status with a reed switch, it means I can do it from anywhere.

It’s a shame that even “cheap” versions are hundreds of dollars, because the perfect absolute position sensor would be a “draw wire displacement sensor” (goes by a few variations on that name).

https://appmeas.co.uk/products/draw-wire-position-sensors/compact-long-range-draw-wire-displacement-sensor-low-cost-mk120/

Basically a spring-loaded spool of wire with a multi-turn position sensor, rolls in and out like a tape measure.

Sony listened to their customers complaints and brought back the headphone jack for the 2nd generation Xperia 1.

Their phones continue to feature some of the best waterproofing (real world performance, and not just the rating they slap on it) in the entire industry.

That has never been a justifiable argument against the headphone jack, despite being an all-too-frequent one.

I’ve always been lambasted for this opinion, but I feel the same way about the charging cable and charger.

I do not want yet another 1 metre (if they’re even that, most likely 3 foot) USB-C cable that barely reaches from the charger on the floor to the bedside table - and largely precludes actually using the phone while in bed - nor particularly the included charger. So many things need to be plugged in these days that single-output chargers are also basically e-waste.

Of course because some business genius had the idea that making the USB cable 0.9 instead of 1.8m saved them $0.06 per unit shipped, we all got lumped with those useless cables.

Now of course there will always be people for whom it’s their first phone (or whatever situation), who do need those accessories. But all that requires is there to be a retail bundle with the now-accessory charger and cable. Preferably that bundle costs the same as the phone with them included does today and you get a token discount for the phone without them, although we all know it would never work that way :(

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Worse still, a lot of “modern” designs don’t even both including that trivial amount of content in the page, so if you’ve got a bad connection you get a page with some of the style and layout loaded, but nothing actually in it.

I’m not really sure how we arrived at this point, it seems like use of lazy-loading universally makes things worse, but it’s becoming more and more common.

I’ve always vaguely assumed it’s just a symptom of people having never tested in anything but their “perfect” local development environment; no low-throughput or high-latency connections, no packet loss, no nothing. When you’re out here in the real world, on a marginal 4G connection - or frankly even just connecting to a server in another country - things get pretty grim.

Somewhere along the way, it feels like someone just decided that pages often not loading at all was more acceptable than looking at a loading progress bar for even a second or two longer (but being largely guaranteed to have the whole page once you get there).