Archive for April, 2016

The sad state of silicon

Tuesday, April 26th, 2016

So I wanted to do some Qemu/KVM tests. Turns out all my aging local AMD boards have not yet an IOMMU in the chipset, sigh (though it sounds like the AMD Phenom II cpus would otherwise include one already?).

I wish I could already buy some AMD Zen silicon - just to support them, you know, …

So I looked at Intel for some single socket heavy multi core CPU.

Turns out their situation around Xeon CPUs is totally ridiculous. If you want more than a couple of cores you are left with 3++ years old silicon, look here:
Xeon e3 v5 (Skylake) about up to 8 cores

Xeon e3 v4 (Broadwell) somehow also only up to 8 cores
Only Xeon e3 v3 (Haswell) exist the heavy up to 18 !!!! cores per modul, beasts … :-/
ok, that thing is some 6000 EUR, maybe I do not really want that ;-)
18 cores, 36 threads
and right now at Xeon v5 just 4 cores, 8 threads???
Everyone is talking about how little AMD is delivering - but seriously, what crazy outdated silicon is that at Intel?

If I am going to spent some 1000++ EUR for a CPU, I will definitely not award it toward a 3++ years old chip architecture, … :-/

Mac OS X Disable System Integrity Protection

Tuesday, April 12th, 2016

As Mac OS X requires booting the recovery partition to disable SIP. What does the command:

csrutil disabled

actually do?

Looks like it sets

csr-active-config w%00%00%00

in the nvram.