Question on hardware upgrade path....

I asked this once before ~10 years ago and got good answers, so back to 
the well :-)

I have a production machine that is on a Supermicro board with 
integrated BMC/IPMI (important, as I have to be able to get to an actual 
console remotely if it needs to be rebooted and a competent human isn't 
always where it is operating) and currently is a Xeon E-2146G 
processor.  Moderate RAM by modern standards (64Gb); it is mixed compute 
and file service with a Mellanox card in it to get into the 10/40Gb 
network range, plus a LSI 3224 card for SATA/SAS attached stuff.  There 
are also 8 SATA ports on the motherboard itself and most are in-use, 
plus a couple of (Gen3) nVME slots.

I'd like to improve compute performance however energy efficiency when 
idle, which it often is, is important as well.  As it stands right now 
it idles on a "full system" basis with the spinning rust drives spun 
down (which they often are as the OS and high-use stuff is on SSD or 
nVME) at a very low power consumption, but obviously when highly-active 
either for compile or I/O that goes up a bunch which is fine. Losing the 
current very low idle power consumption (on a comparative basis) is not 
a trade I want to make.

Existing server case (4u rack) is where this thing will live.

What I'd LIKE to find is a board with one or more SFP+ (or QSFP) ports 
on it but it appears everyone has decided 10GigE copper is what they're 
including. Its not the same thing because for in-rack and close-in 
interconnect a direct-attach cable runs a LOT cooler on BOTH ends to the 
switch(es) in question, and for longer distance I'd prefer to stuff a 
fiber transceiver in the port rather than do copper anyway as glass (and 
the transceivers) at reasonable speeds have gotten quite-reasonable in 
recent years. I'm ok with sticking with the Mellanox card as the answer 
to that, but a "skinny" slot board runs into trouble because I need the 
SAS card so I need at least two reasonable-lane-count pci slots (and 
would like more in order to retain expansion capacity)

I'm not picky about either AMD or Intel but ECC RAM is necessary as this 
is a ZFS box and data corruption is unacceptable, obviously, thus in the 
Intel world anyway this points at somewhere in the Xeon line.

GPU/AI stuff is irrelevant to this machine's use case.

Upgrade suggestions aimed toward the CPU arena?  This may wind up 
deferred due to RAM shortages and resulting prices right now, but I'm 
exploring it anyway.

Thanks in advance!

-- 
Karl Denninger
[email protected]
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