I had a similar chip since 2011 and only recently upgraded. For thread-heavy workloads even one of the fastest E3 Xeons is only like 40-50 % faster (if no special insns like AES can be used).
Safe to say it had superb price/performance (IIRC paid like 150 € for it).
Is there a router/firewall distro or administration tool for OpenBSD that's recommendable (e.g. like pfsense without all the enterprisey bloat, or like securityrouter without the licensing stuff)?
TrueOS is making rapid improvements to their sysadm tool (client/server system for managing TrueOS machines), iirc (from a recent BSD Now episode) there's work going into improving the firewall management interface. This isn't really a recommendation to switch to TrueOS, but it is a recommendation to keep an eye on their progress.
[edit] D'oh, for some reason I read "like pfsense" but missed "for openbsd."
For what it's worth, PF is a lot easier to work with than iptables. The configuration files involved (namely: pf.conf) are easy to read/write and well-documented.
I recently powered an old Acer laptop on that I didn't use for a while. It informed me that "/dev/sda2 has gone 941 days without being checked", after it finished that and booting fully up (a quick affair, even on that machine with no SSD), the i3 status bar further informed me, that the battery still holds a 57 % charge :)
Intel probably intentionally advertises with their weirdo socket names (1156 -> 1155 -> 1150 -> 1151) just to confuse people more. Heck, they probably choose the pin counts in such a strange order just to be more confusing. It's not like they have usable names (Socket H, H2, ...).
Yes, but none of this thread is about this specific platform and its merits, it's about the different strategies for supporting multiple platforms, and where Microsoft through the choices they made failed to realise their own full potential on non-x86 platforms while other organisations managed to fully support them.
Sometimes I wonder if IA-64 was just an exercise in killing of Alpha and HP-PA...
Anyway, x64 succeeded because instead of producing something no one asked for, and poorly (IA-64), AMD went to Microsoft, found out what they wanted from a 64-bit chip, and built that.
If Intel had transitioned their processor line to IA64, without AMD to defy their roadmap, do you really believe consumer desktops would magically start using other vendor processors?
> AMD went to Microsoft, found out what they wanted from a 64-bit chip, and built that.
Because they still had the cross-license deal with Intel that allowed them to legally build x86 clones.
> Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame.
The source engine isn't exactly the pinnacle of engine development.
It doesn't really know what to with more than 2ish cores, so you probably get more FPS by using a dual core instead of a quad core, which tend to go farther in terms of overclocking.
