Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming scenes

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Summary

I recently came into possession of an old Dell Precision T3610 workstation and promptly installed Proxmox to add it to my Proxmox cluster. After performing some ludicrously silly RAM and storage upgrades (how about 96 GB of DDR3, plus a 13-disk array of 500 GB SSDs?), I decided I wanted to max out the CPU as well. The Precision T3610 shipped with an Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2. According to the linked Intel product page, this CPU uses the FCLGA2011 socket. Easy enough, I thought to myself. Just find the best CPU that supports FCLGA2011, make sure you have the latest BIOS installed, and everything should be all hunky dory. So I did some research and landed on the Xeon E7-8890 v4. It鈥檚 several years newer than the E5-1650 v2, has a whopping 24 cores (and hyperthreading bumps it to 48 logical cores!), and can support having not one, not two, but eight of itself installed in a single motherboard! Most crucially, the Intel product page says it uses the FCLGA2011 socket. When I stumbled across one of these monsters on eBay for just $15, I snapped it up. Cue my massive shock and disappointment when, a few days later, I found myself unable to install the E7-8890 v4 in my T3610. The new CPU, despite being the same physical size as the old CPU, had extra contacts on the bottom and had a different physical keying. What? I thought Intel said this was the same socket! Some amount of research later, I discovered that Intel鈥檚 LGA2011 socket has many variations. One of these variations is also called Socket R (or LGA2011-0). The T3610, and by extension the old E5-1650 v2 CPU, uses Socket R. The newer E7-8890 v4, meanwhile, uses a different variation called Socket R2 (or LGA2011-1). As if this wasn鈥檛 confusing enough, there鈥檚 even a third variation of the LGA2011 socket! I鈥檒l refer you to the Wikipedia page for more info on that. This is obviously not a great naming scheme. Why not use unique numbers for each version of the socket instead of tacking on a suffix? But the real kicker here i...

First seen: 2025-12-19 06:16

Last seen: 2025-12-19 21:18