The domestic hosting provider offers tariffs with a core frequency of up to 5.3 GHz. And this is complete nonsense

Apparently, the guys who were in the fifth or sixth grade compared, who had a higher frequency on the processor, have now grown and become marketers in hosting providers: this is the first time in our memory when hosting offers tariffs with a clock frequency of 5 GHz, and “ the maximum “offer attracts the consumer with a figure of 5.3 GHz.

And the first impression is immediately somewhere on the level: “wow.” However, the frequency of the server processor is higher than our usual 2.8-3.6 (4.0) GHz now does not make any sense, this is obvious for most specialists. But let’s understand in order why an unknown marketer confidently drives our youth injuries.

The article is not intended to defame anyone, but when we saw that they were selling under the guise of ultra-fast solutions, we could not resist. Especially considering that it is not always the technical specialists who make the final decision on the purchase of rental facilities.

The clock speed of the processor was one of the main parameters precisely in the school days of marketers who came up with the idea of ​​selling servers with a clock of 5.0+ GHz. Then the processors were single-core, and, in fact, apart from the bus and the clock frequency of that very core, there was nothing special to measure. The technical process was also plus or minus one for all, so that even here for holivars was not foreseen. In terms of the technical process, they generally argued only about whether we could go below the 32 nm mark (we could, in spite of the defeatists who shouted from the pages of computer magazines, which is nowhere lower).

But this is all lyrics, and you can read about what the core clock frequency affects anywhere on the network, we will not be involved in reprinting this information. Let’s go back to the legendary offer of the hoster and see what kind of processors there are.

Screenshot from the hoster’s official website

As we can see in the image above, under the guise of ultra-fast server solutions, they sell us two game processors and the familiar server Intel Xeon E-2288G. Let’s start with him.

According to the official spec at ark.intel, Intel Xeon E-2288G – Octa-core server processor released in Q2 2019.

Here are its main characteristics with ark, so as not to go far:

As you can see, this is a common, albeit quite powerful, modern server processor of the lower price category with a stock frequency of 3.7 GHz per core. Why the lower price range? Let’s just say the $ 539 MSRP for a server processor is very cheap. Intel’s top 2019-2020 server models cost thousands of dollars, and in some cases tens of thousands. Right there we are dealing with an ordinary hard worker with only 8 cores.

According to the documentation, the maximum turbo frequency of the processor in question is 5.0 GHz, just mentioned by the marketer. The screenshot from the hoster’s website shows that this value is indicated as the maximum clock frequency of the processor core. Whether the processor was chasing by hand through a blunt increase in multipliers, or whether the hoster sells Intel’s turbo frequency technology, which works through a stump deck, we will not know.

But if it was a server processor, then we have the absolute pulp next: game processors disguised as server ones.

It’s not entirely clear what was so gloomy in the life of the person who invented this, but in our case the gaming consumer i9-9900K and Ryzen 9 3900X are sold as server stones.

The i9-9900K specification is like two peas in a pod similar to that of the xeon, except that it is desktop CPU:

We generally get the impression that the Xeon E-2288G, which entered the market six months later, after the 9900K, is its server copy, because the extended specifications on wikichip.org for both are almost completely the same (xeon and i9-9900K).

We think it’s not worth saying that desktop processors should not be used as server ones. Let’s just mention less strict control in chip production, less fault tolerance and a banal factor such as a set of drivers. And the cherry on top will be that even in the 8×5.0 GHz parameter for the i9-9900K, marketers lied to us.

The E-2288G processor can actually run 5.0 GHz per core in turbo mode. But in the case of its almost clone i9-9900K, such a turbo frequency is possible only for CPU-0. And this is true for all Intel desktop processors. In general, any maximum turbo frequency of desktop stones from the “blue” camp is a story about the frequency of the most “successful” core when baking, that is, our CPU-0. For all eight Intel i9-9900K cores maximum simultaneous turbo frequency is 4.7 GHz – according to the frequency of the slowest processor core.

Roughly the same story with the Ryzen 9 3900X is a purely gaming processor, the most powerful AMD in existence today. At the same time, in the “red” camp there is a quite worthy line of EPYC and hybrid AMD Opterons, which are oriented towards business. Why rape with server tasks a creation of engineering thought, which is intended to produce stable 144 FPS in the last battle or cold – we do not know. And if you remember the capriciousness of AMD desktop processors with regard to memory, then everything becomes quite sad.

And if you can turn a blind eye to the fact of selling Intel Xeon with a base clock of 3.7 GHz as a processor with a frequency of 5.0 GHz as a usual marketing trick, but you cannot close your eyes to an attempt to “sell” desktop processors under the guise of server ones.

It’s trite because the production process of server processors is much stricter than desktop ones. They have a completely different level of requirements for fault tolerance, for the safety of the thermal package, and it is commonplace for logic errors. If, during lithography, one of the cores is “worn out”, then the entire server processor is rejected. In the case of the desktop one, let us assume that this kind of backlash can be clearly seen by the difference in turbo frequencies to the core. Well, of course, you need to remember about motherboards and drivers. You will not stick the desktop processor into the server mother, or vice versa, even with the same socket, and if you stick it, then in the future you will catch crits of the “Vietnamese flashback” level and curse the day when got behind the wheel of this clunker decided to “cheat” (although, frankly, this cunning is on the C grade). Gaming equipment is generally not particularly designed to work under constant high load, unlike the “workhorses” in the face of server processors.

It is not clear what the hosting provider’s marketers were guided by. Whoever wants to find them himself, and who is too lazy – you can knock on the author in the LAN and he will share the link.

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