[sf-lug] sf-lug site & hardware ... pretty old -- (not!) a decade or more? ...

[Michael Paoli]

Yes, likely one physical CPU, 4 cores.  I (and many others!) don't find
/proc/cpuinfo to be super easy to interpret as to exactly what's
*physically* present (along with some other details) - e.g. how many
physical CPUs - but it's quite easy to use to "merely" count up how
many cores.  There are some pretty good references to be found (e.g.
with wee bit 'o Web search) that give excellent information on exactly
how to interpret the output of /proc/cpuinfo.

And circa 2007 CPU sounds likely quite right - I believe that then quite
new hardware was donated to Jim/SF-LUG in 2008 from Silicon Mechanics -
so 2007 CPU would sound quite consistent with that.

Also, when I did earlier have a look inside the case, 1 physical CPU
seems likely - I seem to recall one quite massive heat sink - not
multiple matching heat sinks - so almost certainly one single physical
CPU (with one friggin' ginormous heat sink all to itself - and a pretty
flat one for 1U form factor).

Ah ... [GM]Hz.  I remember ye olde original IBM PC.  If I recall
correctly, 4.77 MHz 8086.  We've gone up roughly a factor of 1,000 now,
on CPU - and that's just looking at base CPU clock frequency (which, in
and of itself, isn't a great measure of CPU speed/performance).  CPUs
have also changed mightily in terms of number of bits / bandwidth,
instruction sets, multiple cores, threading, prefetch, speculative
execution, caching (both on and off CPU), but let's not also forget,
main memory bandwidth/bottlenecks, interleaving, etc.  That's just some
wee bits I can think of off-the-top-of-my-head, and certainly nothing
I'm specifically expert at, so probably much of relevance I didn't also
mention, and may not have recalled those example bits all that
accurately (or even quite correctly).

Been a few years now since I last purchased spinning hard drive(s), but
I remember bit after that last such purchase I'd made, thinking what the
same storage capacity would look like on pallet(s) were it composed
entirely of multiple units of the the first hard drive I ever bought (a
factor of 10,000 increase in storage for drive of coincidentally same
physical size) ... not to mention power for 10,000 of those old hard
drives compared to one (at least then) modern hard drive.

$ unix-v7

PDP-11 simulator V3.8-1
Disabling XQ
@boot
New Boot, known devices are hp ht rk rl rp tm vt
: rl(0,0)rl2unix
mem = 177856
# time sh -c 'n=1; while test "$n" -le 1000; do n=`expr "$n" + 1`; done'

real       12.0
user        1.3
sys         9.4
#

...

$ time sh -c 'n=1; while test "$n" -le 1000; do n=`expr "$n" + 1`; done'

real    0m0.865s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m0.084s
$ echo $BASH_VERSION; lsb_release -d; uname -m
4.3.30(1)-release
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 (jessie)
x86_64
$

Hmmm, not sure what caused the real to be that (comparatively) high, but
if we look at sys, we see about 112x faster compared to days of old.

Ah, but I digress.  ;-)


> From: "Rick Moen" <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] sf-lug site & hardware ... pretty old --  
> (not!) a decade or	more? (& Partimus.org?)
> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2015 03:19:19 -0800

> I wrote:
>
>> I remember those.  All the the 2.13 MHz Intel CPUs seemed to run pretty
>> hot.                                ^^^ GHz, even.

> From: "Rick Moen" <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] sf-lug site & hardware ... pretty old --  
> (not!) a decade or	more? (& Partimus.org?)
> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2015 03:17:01 -0800

> Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):
>
>> looks like some kind of quad Xeon 2.13 GHz - CPU
>
> One physical CPU, quad core, right?
>
>> model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X3210  @ 2.13GHz
>
> Pretty much has to be a single physical CPU.  Four of those suckers
> would burn a 1U motherboard right up.
>
> 'Prestonia' CPU familiy, 'Kentsfield series'.  Circa 2007, hence eight
> years old.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors#.22Prestonia.22_.28130_nm.29
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor) Uses Socket
> LGA 775, TDP (thermal design power) is about 100W.
>
> I remember those.  All the the 2.13 MHz Intel CPUs seemed to run pretty
> hot.  I remember my firm had some motherboards where the CPU had
> literally scorched the board.