Intel Xeon Gold 6254

The Intel Xeon Gold 6254 is a Cascade Lake-SP processor for socket LGA3647, used in HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers. It has 18 physical cores and 36 threads, starts at a 3.1 GHz base clock and boosts to 4.0 GHz under light load. It carries 24.75 MB of L3 cache and a 200 W thermal design power. The Skylake architecture at higher clocks, with DDR4-2933 support and hardware mitigation for several speculative-execution vulnerabilities. The most sensible second-hand generation for a production server today. Two things to check before ordering. First, in a dual-socket configuration both sockets must hold the identical model — a server with two different SKUs will not post. Second, anything above 135 W needs the high-performance heatsink and fan kit; with the standard heatsink the server throttles itself and you never get the performance you paid for. Every processor is booted and tested on the same server generation before it ships.