- The technical experts (including Intel engineers) will say something like "it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models'
- Intel's technical docs will say "if CPUID leaf 0x3aa asserts bit 63 then the CPU is affected". (There is no database for this you can only find it out by actually booting one up).
- The spec sheet for the hardware calls it a "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA"
Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them. They also have different names for the same shit depending on whether it's a consumer or server chip.
Meanwhile, AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year but is off-by-one with regard to the "Zen" brand version.
Usually I just ask the LLM and accept that it's wrong 20% of the time.
I’m doing some OS work at the moment and running into this. I’m really surprised there’s no caniuse.com for cpu features. I’m planning on requiring support for all the features that have been in every cpu that shipped in the last 10+ years. But it’s basically impossible to figure that out. Especially across Intel and amd. Can I assume apic? Iommu stuff? Is acpi 2 actually available on all CPUs or do I need to have to have support for the old version as well? It’s very annoying.
Windows has specific platform requirements they spell out for each version - those are generally your best bet on x86. ARM devs have it way worse so I guess we shouldn’t complain.
If you were willing to accept only the relatively high power variants it’d be easier.
For anyone not familiar with caniuse, its indispensable for modern web development. Say you want to put images on a web page. You've heard of webp. Can you use it?
At a glance you see the answer. 95% of global web users use a web browser with webp support. Its available in all the major browsers, and has been for several years. You can query basically any browser feature like this to see its support status.
Even the absolute most basic features that have been well supported for 30 years, like the HTML "div" element, cap out at 96%. Change the drop-down from "all users" to "all tracked" and you'll get a more representative answer.
Coincidentally, if anyone knows how to figure out which Intel CPUs actually support 5-level paging / the CPUID flag known as la57, please tell me.
Aha, but which digit? Sure, that's easy for server, HEDT and desktop (it's the first one) but if you look at their line of laptop chips then it all breaks down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors
It doesn't have the CPUID but it's a pretty good mapping of model numbers to code names and on top of that has the rest of the specs.
But you're correct that for anything buried in the guts of CPUID, your life is pain. And Intel's product branding has been a disaster for years.
Intel removed most things older than SB late 2024 (a few xeons remain but afaik anything consumer was wiped with no warning). It’s virtually guaranteed that Intel will remove more stuff in the future.
Under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen#Mobile_6 Ryzen 7000 series you could get zen2, zen3, zen3+, zen4
Same with Intel.
STOP USING CODENAMES. USE NUMBERS!
Android have done this right: when they used codenames they did them in alphabetical order, and at version 10 they just stopped being clever and went to numbers.
Android also sucks for developers because they have the public facing numbers and then API versions which are different and not always scaling linearly (sometimes there is something like "Android 8.1" or "Android 12L" with a newer API), and as developers you always deal with the API numbers (you specify minimum API version, not the minimum "OS version" your code runs in your code), and have to map that back to version numbers the users and managers know to present it to them when you're upping the minimum requirements...
Finding the latest release and codename is indeed a research task. I use Wikipedia[1] for that, but I feel like this should be more readily available from the system itself. Perhaps it is, and I just don't know how?
I want a version number that I can compare to other versions, to be able to easily see which one is newer or older, to know what I can or should install.
I don't want to figure out and remember your product's clever nicknames.
"Products formerly Blizzard Creek"
WTF does that even mean?
It's fraud, plain and simple.
But if you want any deep and complex technical info out of them, like oh maybe how to configure it to fit UK/EU regulatory domain RF rules? Haha no chance.
We ended up hiring a guy fluent in Hebrew just to talk to their support guys.
Super nice kit, but I guess no-one was prepared to pay for an interface layer between the developers and the outside world.
- sSpec S0ABC = "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 version 5 grade 6 getConfig(HT=off, NX=off, ECC=on, VT-x=off, VT-d=on)=4X Stepping B0
- "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 -> V3 of Socket FCBGA12345 -> chipset "Pleiades Mounds"
- CPUID leaf 0x3aa = Model specific feature set checks for "Blizzard Creek" and "Windy Bluff(aka Blizzard Creek V2)"
- asserts bit 63 = that buggy VT-d circuit is not off
- "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA" = marketing name to confuse specifically you(but also IA-36-667 = (S0ABC|S9DFG|S9QWE|QA45P))
NVidia has these, very different GPUs:
Quadro 6000, Quadro RTX 6000, RTX A6000, RTX 6000 Ada, RTX 6000 Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Max-Q Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Server Edition
It would be like having Quadro 6000 and 6050 be completely different generation
Lest anyone think AMD is any better the Radeon 200 series came in everything from terascale 2 (4 years old at that point) to GCN3.
The gpu manufacturers have also engaged in incredible amounts of rebadging to pad their ranges, some cores first released on the GeForce 8000 series got rebadged all the way until the 300 series.
Oh and there's also RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell which is Blackwell from 2025...
LGA2011-0 and LGA2011-1 are very unalike, from the memory controller to vast pin rearrangement.
So not only they call two different sockets almost the same per the post, but they also call essentially the same sockets differently to artificially segment the market.
> There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, off-by-one errors.
> There’s two hard problems in computer science: We only have one joke and it's not funny.
"There is 10 kinds of people, those who can read binary and those who can't."
Personally I prefer the cache invalidation one.
All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets. LGA to indicate it's land grid array (CPU has flat "lands" on it, pins are on the motherboard), 2011 because it has 2011 pins. FC because it's flip chip packaging.
That's an industry-wide standard across all IC manufacturing - Intel doesn't really get to take credit for it.
The next motherboard (should RAM ever cease being the tulip du jour) will not be an ASRock, for that and other reasons.
For the love of everything though, just increment the model number.
In addition to all of the slightly different sockets there was ddr3, ddr3 low voltage, the server/ecc counterparts, and then ddr4 came out but it was so expensive (almost more expensive than 4/5 is now compared to what it should be) that there were goofy boards that had DDR3 & DDR4 slots.
By the way it is _never_ worth attempting to use or upgrade anything from this era. Throw it in the fucking dumpster (at the e waste recycling center). The onboard sata controllers are rife with data corruption bugs and the caps from around then have a terrible reputation. Anything that has made it this long without popping is most likely to have done so from sitting around powered off. They will also silently drop PCI-E lanes even at standard BCLK under certain utilization patterns that cause too much of a vdrop.
This is part of why Intel went damn-near scorched earth on the motherboard partners that released boards which broke the contractual agreement and allowed you to increase the multipliers on non-K processors. The lack of validation under these conditions contributed to the aformentioned issues.
Wasn't this the other way around, allowing you to increase multipliers on K processors on the lower end chipsets? Or was both possible at some point? I remember getting baited into buying an H87 board that could overclock a 4670K until a bios update removed the functionality completely.
With Intel's confusing socket naming, you can buy a CPU that doesn't fit the socket.
With USB, the physical connection is very clearly the first part of the name. You cannot get it wrong. Yeah, the names aren't the most logical or consistent, but USB C or A or Micro USB all mean specific things and are clearly visibly different. The worst possible scenario is that the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal. But it will always work.
The actual names for each data transfer level are an absolute mess.
1.x has Low Speed and Full Speed 2.0 added High Speed 3.0 is SuperSpeed (yes no space this time) 3.1 renamed 3.0 to 3.1 Gen 1 and added SuperSpeedPlus 3.2 bumped the 3.1 version numbers again and renamed all the SuperSpeeds to SuperSpeed USB xxGbps And finally they renamed them again removing the SuperSpeed and making them just USB xxGbps
USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't"
While not disagreeing, I'd ask for a proof it's not a marketing department's fun. Just to be sure.
Engineers love consistency. Marketing is on the opposite side of this spectra.
Engineers don't make names that are nice for marketing team.
But they absolutely do make consistent ones. The engineer wouldn't name it superspeed, the engineer would encode the speed in the name
Not at all. If you want to charge your phone, it might "always work", but if you want to use your monitor with USB hub and pass power to your MacBook, you're gonna have a hard time.
I don't know what "always work" means here but I feel like I've had USB cables that transmit zero data because they're only for power, as well as ones that don't charge the device at all when the device expects more power than it can provide. The only thing I haven't seen is cables that transmit zero data on some devices but nonzero data on others.
You can maybe blame USB consortium for creating a hard spec, but usually it's just people saving $0.0001 on the BOM by omitting a resistor.
How polite. It can be useless, not "not optimal". Especially since usb-c can burn you on a combination of power and speed, not only speed.
I can't find a USB-C PD adapter for a laptop that uses less than 100W. As a result, I can't charge a 65W laptop from a 65W port because the adapter doesn't even work unless the port is at least 100W.
It does not always work.
It seems totally random, and you cannot rely on watts anymore.
So a 100 watt GAN charger might be able to deliver only 65 watts from it's main "laptop" port, but it has two other ports that can do 25 and 10 watts each. Still 100 watts in total, but your laptop will never get it's 100 watts.
Not every brand is as transparent about this, sometimes it's only visible in product marketing images instead of real specs. Real shady.
That might not necessarily be the right conclusion. My understanding is: almost all USB-C power cables you will enounter day to day support a max current of at most 3A (the most that a cable can signal support for without an emarker). That means that, technically, the highest power USB-PD profile they support is 60W (3A at 20V), and the charger should detect that and not offer the 65W profile, which requires 3.25A.
Maybe some chargers ignore that and offer it anyway, since 3.25A isn't that much more than 3A. For ones that don't and degrade to offering 60W, if a laptop strictly wants 65W, it won't charge off of them.
So it's worth acquiring a cable that specifically supports 5A to try, which is needed for every profile above 60W (and such a cable should support all profiles up to the 240W one, which is 5A*48V).
(I might be mistaken about some of that, it's just what I cobbled together while trying to figure out what chargers work with my extremely-picky-about-power lenovo x1e)
And wow, I'll keep away from Dell, thanks.
The ones I use most are 20W and 40W, just stuff I ordered from AliExpress (Baseus brand I think).
Email them, address is in the guidelines.
on the other side AMD with legendary AM4