Bought an Ampere Altra System

Summary

In the hunt for a development machine, I got to the next phase. I did some shopping, and there it is: my own Ampere Altra-based system. Why? As you may have read in my previous post, I used several AArch64 systems for local development. And the latest one, an Apple MacBook Pro, is nice and fast but has some limits — does not support 64k page size. Which I need for my work. Let’s go cheap So I have decided to buy myself an Ampere Altra system. As cheap as possible. AArch64 server parts The only part I needed to buy brand new was a motherboard. And the only “affordable” one was AsrockRack ALTRA8BUD-1L2T, which was a product for data centres (so I was told). Next, a used processor. At first, the idea was to buy a Q64-22 (64 cores, 2.2 GHz clock), but when the seller on eBay was not responding, one of my friends decided to upgrade his Altra systems and offered me a Q80-30 (80 cores, 3.0 GHz clock). The CPU requires cooling. There are not many options for the LGA 4926 socket. I found an Arctic Freezer 4U-M in one of the online stores here in Poland and bought the only one they had. Each computer needs memory, right? So I went with used ones again, as there is a huge market for used server parts. I bought eight sticks of 16GB each; the model is SK-Hynix HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN. It is not present on the official Ampere Altra memory Approved Vendor List. Working fine (after re-seating three sticks): DRAM populated DIMMs: SK0 MC0 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC1 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC2 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC3 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC4 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC5 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC6 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC7 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA...