I just now noticed you have a pinup of an Intel Xeon chip on your wall. Two questions: 1) how are you such a nerd, and 2) why the Xeon in particular?
oh that is one of my pieces of memorabilia from when we did the ISC2019 Student Cluster Competition. Which I suppose answers 1), I actively seek out Nerd Experience Points.
As for 2), While we were setting up our compute cluster, we also set up all our booth decorations which included some mylar balloons spelling out "CHPC", a cheap RGB light string we had way back in selection rounds, and a South African Flag.
The actually real official corporate booths had these little fancy poster board signs from Intel showing off that they were using various grades of Xeon processors. As it so happened, our cluster had a dozen 8180 Xeon Platinum processors in it, and so of course we knew we had to have one.
So, we went off, found the Intel table, and asked them if we could pretty please have one for our cluster. They ended up giving us two, and I brought this one home once we were done.
Those 8180's were ten thousand dollars a piece, 28-core monsters, and we almost didn't get them: we actually had to get our supervisors to ask Intel to lend them to us, since our usual sponsors cut our budget and only gave us 18-core Gold tier processors. Bah, only Gold? A meager 3500 dollars each? Ridiculous. We were also totally right in asking for them, in the end we only won by two percentage points, there's no way we would have won on those Golds.
Other memorabilia I have from that competition includes the Geeko plush that the OpenSUSE reps gave us. He hangs from my desk light and serves as a pincushion these days.
