The story began one night about a year or so ago. Around the beginning of the 20th, a number of low-priced Huawei 2285Hv2 and 2288 servers started to appear on the idle fish one after another. The initial snb architecture was a bit old, but it was still more than enough to run a Minecraft je server or nas application.

After some research, it seems that these servers are the product of the earliest ipfs mining. In terms of color, the working environment of these servers is probably not a dust-free and constant temperature ipc server room, but a mine of FIL and other mining bosses. At that time, CHIA had not yet appeared, and the gradual rise of Ethereum had not yet affected the sluggish file coin market. So this batch of lost value servers fell to RMB 200 a piece and was carried home by me.

Back to the story. At that time, after sharing the news of low-priced servers in the group, a experienced enthusiast commented that:

E5 xeons are outmoded. Why not try LGA3647 instead?

So at the beginning of this year, after having free money in hand, we decided to buy the latest LGA3647 server platform at that time.

Introduction

Let’s start with a brief introduction to the platform. Following the last generation E5 v4 platform of LGA2011-3, the new Xeon expandable series released in 2017 was updated to intel’s ancestral architecture – skylake (sp), which supports all modern instruction sets and additional AVX512 while also standing at the same level as the 10th generation Core platforms (fog).

Best of all, the ES models of the 3647 are available for one-tenth to one-twentieth of the official retail price. The low price of several hundred dollars a processor gives the average person the possibility of tossing.

To toss a platform, you first need to understand the general product line and specifications. 3647 products are broadly speaking divided into Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze processors. It sounds like Core’s i3579, but it’s actually more complex; some of the Gold processors have higher main frequencies and multi-core scores than Platinum, and there are confusing models like the 8156 in Platinum.

BIOS and motherboards

This brings us a lot of trouble to explore. While processors come with all sorts of fancy optional features, their requirements for motherboards have also become increasingly demanding. The motherboards that support these odd processors are often odd themselves, being either blade machines and other non-standard specs, or existing only in OEMs. Not to mention the ES non-display version add-on; it’s common knowledge that junkies should know that lighting up ES processors mostly requires early bios or hard changes.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, after all, the harder the CPU to light up the cheaper it tends to be. The official 28-core 8280 still costs more than $10,000 to $20,000, and the 24-core ql2m is only a couple of hundred RMB minimum, isn’t it?

Experienced junkies have their own solutions — it’s just a matter of inserting microcode into the bios, or changing it against a supported motherboard. Change bios technology threshold is very high, especially in the server platform. Common consumer platforms often have a key to brush the bios and other convenient features, even if the direct brush chip can be easily solved with a burn folder.

However, new server platforms like the 3647 are a lot of trouble. Most motherboards do support updating the bios via BMC (BMC can be seen as a small independent system on the motherboard, which boots independently when powered on, is responsible for hardware self-test, provides remote monitoring, etc.), but the actual operation is not very feasible: to log in to BMC and use the functions therein requires the management port to be connected to the Internet, and secondly, requires the correct login password. The IP address and login password are simple to set: just enter the bios settings.

So how do you get into the bios? Congratulations, you have found the key to the problem:

To access the BMC to update the bios, you need to set the IP and password first; to set the BMC ip address and password, you need to access the original bios first; to access the bios you need the system to boot properly; to boot the system properly …… you need to access the BMC to brush the bios.

Things have come to this point there are only two solutions. One is to use a full version of the known support or positive version of the processor to light up, the second is to directly blow down the chip hard brush. It should be noted that most 3647 motherboards have been used 32m or even 64m high-capacity high-speed bios chip, the need for a higher rate of brush to write.

However, cherish the 3647 platform that still allows enthusiasts to mess around with it …… Some time ago when chatting with rd35 he said that the new LGA4189 motherboards, such as Supermicro’s x12 series have been added to the CRC checksum, which will directly refuse to boot if the bios is detected to be wrong. Future enthusiasts who want to DIY only have to modify the hardware.

The following is a list of strange processors and notes (that I have heard of). It is a summary of precious experience.

Processors	Note
F series Xeon. Such as QL2M	OPA network, supported motherboards will have a small metal tail on the slot notch, such as the early models of Supermicro x11 dpi-n. Only such motherboards with the small tail + bios inserted into the microcode will light up.
QL2K	The 26-core, often labeled by merchants as w-3175x es version for sale, in fact the corresponding official model should be 8164 or 8170. according to the seller can only be lit on the ASRock (Rack) motherboard. It is confirmed that it can be overclocked, chh on the players said to match the D8A-2T overclocking bios?
Xeon with P suffix.	It may be good to buy for your collection, but if you only use the CPU part, there seems to be little need to get it. It is said that you need a server such as CSCS/Sugon to boot up.
Jindai(津逮)	It’s basically the original xeon with a security shell added – can light up on a portion of OEM boards like Lenovo servers. More expensive.
7XXX series Xeon phi. there is a difference in the shape.	Although the pin count is also 3647, don’t buy it. Unless you have a bare system for phi and have an enigmatic obsession with single-core quad-threaded hyperthreading.

Try to make work

After a month of hesitation, I finally found two ql2m on Xianyu one day as shown in the picture. .

When the seller saw my order, she repeatedly told me that I had to “have the slot with the tail” to light up the motherboard, so I followed her instructions and bought the dpi-n, and specifically picked the early rev.

By checking the information and asking other sellers, I learned that since Intel’s omnipath stopped its subsequent development, the f-series support was removed. After asking all the Taobao stores, I couldn’t find the corresponding dpin model, and finally bought it from a seller in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen (The largest electronic market in the world).

Then the assembly …… unsurprisingly does not work. The self-test code was stuck in the memory but. After checking the problem is actually very simple, DPIN does support F series processors, but not ES. If you need to use it, you need to insert the microcode. Unfortunately, I don’t have a bios, I can’t access the ipmi, and I don’t have the microcode, so it seems that …… is stranded?

After sending the board back for return, I happened to be going to Shenzhen a few days later, so I took the CPU with me and finally met the legendary seller in Huaqiangbei for technical help. According to him, the CPU only needs to be shielded by adding resistors to the bottom of the CPU to light up smoothly. The principle seems to be to skip a certain detection step by shorting the pull-down.

And then the hard-change guy had (probably) the most self-doubtful day of his technical life.

The general experience of the day was as follows.

• Flashed bios on the board and it didn’t work. Updated the bios for five versions and it didn’t work.
• Add solder resistor to the bottom of the cpu, pawn. The oscilloscope shows that it seems to be moving, but it does not seem to move.
• Since it’s in Huaqiang North, it’s easy to buy CPUs, any CPUs are available, right ……?
• Then I ran through the whole old Huaqiang market and couldn’t find the QL1K I wanted.
• I’m still amazed with my ability to buy the most difficult CPUs in a row, the QL2M + QL2K two legends.
• This time the oscilloscope is not moving at all. Fortunately, the CPU has not been soldered resistors, and can be returned.
• The puzzled boss began to rummage around and pulled out from under the counter from the basic x11 to the deluxe workstation series to the legendary Advantech motherboard (“this thing I generally do not I take out”)
• Well……

So finally did not success. The boss gave me the advice to buy some yang stuff. This time it is two QL1L, after the hard change finally succeeded.

As for the original two QL2M is how to light it …… actually did not light up in the end. Fortunately, the arrival of CHIA (you call the virtual currency mining boom lucky) even let this kind of CPUs rose and even out of stock. The reason for this is that it is said that the p-disk requires multi-channel high-capacity memory and strong multi-core performance. So two CPUs were finally taken away at a price of more than 400.

QL1L has since been successfully worked and tested with Cinebench and other popular score tests. The test video and data are below.

Subsequently if the plan should be installed a whole workstation, however, some things have you know do not need. After having enough of Gigabyte motherboard metaphysical self-test posting one day, finally I could not bear to choose to give up ……

…… Anyway, the graphics cards were out of control (it was the crazy month of May) and DDR4 RECC memory prices doubled. What computer to buy? How about all out of parts, not 998, not 888, as long as 550 yuan RMB, the cost of a memory, you can bring the lovely little girl home……