Yes - and no, I know lots of people including myself who have things like older dual socket Dell R710 as home test hypervisor servers. Also a very tiny percentage of people will bother to ever upgrade the CPUs on them.

For home lab stuff... When people buy a $200 used Dell R610 off ebay with two 8-core CPUs they most likely expect to use it in the exact same CPU configuration. Maybe add RAM. And probably use their own choice of SATA 6Gbps SSD in the drive trays instead of whatever old, possibly unreliable used spinning drives might come with it.

I have a 4U, quad socket Dell R910 with 32 total cores and 256GB of RAM that I got for $350. I'm absolutely not going to go messing around with replacing the CPUs on it with something I've purchased from ebay. When it's too old or slow, or I'm tired of having a 500W electrical load in my garage, I'll replace it with another thing that's come off a 3-4 year lease cycle.

My go-to vendor’s business model is to do that for me. So I say, I want a DL360. I pick processors, ram, disk controllers from their stock. I can even tell them how many caddies I want (looking at you, Dell). And they ship me a build-to-order server from second-hand parts.

So in the future I’ll likely have a smaller bin of CPUs to choose from. If firmware keys get more specific than per-vendor, it could be potentially a very small bin. And small bins typically mean higher costs. The cheapest cpu is typically the biggest bin, not the highest specced.

I have never purchased a used server and aruck with the included CPU’s, they’re either power hungry beasts or bottom-rung SKU’s. All of my 12th gen PowerEdge servers at home run E5-2450L’s (they’re all -EN platforms), for example. The one exception is the R210 II I use as a firewall/router.

By percentage the number of 1U/2U servers sold with ultra power efficient CPUs is fairly low. When people buy those new they will absolutely be going for CPUs that are 85W to 130W TDP per socket, times two sockets.

As a person that's formerly worked for a server manufacturer for a number of years I would say that the mid to upper performance range of the CPU market is 80%+ of the servers by volume. The other 10% is either the very low power models, and the top 10% of the units sold by volume are the very most expensive CPUs available at the time.

If you buy a used 1U Dell R610 with two six-core CPUs and 64GB of RAM, nobody should be surprised that a 120VAC watt meter at the wall shows it idling at 150W power consumption, with cpu load at 0.00... [surprisedpikachu.gif]

I mean, they don’t have to be the ultra-efficient ones - but for my home lab use I want < 100W idle usage and even my R520 can handle that with the 2450L’s (Ivy Bridge-EN could do this without the L suffixed SKU’s, but HCC chips in that family were more expensive when I was buying).

I haven't yet purchased used server gear, but I do a lot of window shopping. Most of the servers come with CPUs, but not all of them, and there's always a lot of loose CPUs for sale. Very occasionally, I've seen new-old-stock server motherboards for sale for not too much.

> I work in a rather budget-constrained lab environment. “Beg, borrow, steal” is the order of the day. Just today I was pricing out pre-loved Gen8 HPs. In 5 years time I could be exactly the hypothetical the article outlines.

Likewise for me. I AM building a $20,000 HPC because simply put, no one will sell us one for anything close to what we can actually afford and when it affects the speed and capability of my research and publications personally, it feels like a waste to leave extra performance on the table.

If I may ask, using what motherboard? The problem of EPYCs being locked to a certain vendor platform should not be a problem for you if you're buying a factory new Supermicro or Tyan or competing board. And a new set of individually purchased EPYC CPUs.