I’m currently running a Xeon E3-1231v3. It’s getting long in the tooth, supports only 32GB RAM, and has only 16 PCIe lanes. I’ve been butting up against the platform limitations for a couple of years now, and I’m ready to upgrade. I’ve been running this system for ~10yrs now.

I’m hoping to future proof the next system to also last 8-10 years (where reasonable, considering advancements in tech and improvements in efficiency), but I’m hitting a wall finding CPU candidates.

In a perfect world, I’d like an Intel with iGPU for QuickSync (HWaccel for Frigate/Immich/Jellyfin), AND I would like the 40+ PCIe lanes that the Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs offer.

With only my minimum required PCIe devices I’ve surpassed the 20 lanes available on desktop CPU’s with an iGPU:

  • Dual m.2 for Proxmox ZFS mirror (guest storage) - in addition to boot drive (8 lanes)
  • LSI HBA (8 lanes)
  • Dual SFP+ NIC (8 lanes)

Future proofing:

High priority

  • Dedicated GPU (16 lanes)

Low priority

  • Additional dual m.2 expansion (8 lanes)
  • USB expansions for simplified device passthrough (Coral TPU, Zigbee/Zwave for Home Aassistant, etc) (4 lanes per card) - this assumes the motherboard comes with at least 4-ports
  • Coral TPU PCIe (4 lanes?)

Is there anything that fulfills both requirements? Am I being unreasonable or overthinking it? Is there a solution that adds GPU hardware acceleration to the Xeon Silver line without significantly increasing power draw?

Thanks!

  • thumdinger@lemmy.worldOP
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    3 days ago

    Thanks. This is a pretty compelling option. I hadn’t looked at the entry level arc, but when it comes to encode/decode it seems all the tiers are similar. 30W is okay, and it’s not a hard limit or anything, just nice to keep bills down!