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AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

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31–40 of 169 posts

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#31
post #8

I think Naples is a very exciting development, because: - 1S/2S is obviously where the pie is. Few servers are 4S. - 8 DDR4 channels per socket is twice the memory bandwidth of 2011, and still more than LGA-36712312whateverthenumberwas - First x86 server platform with SHA1/2 acceleration - 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented All in all Naples seems like a very interesting platform for throughput-intensive…

Intel doesn't have SHA2 acceleration? ARMv8 has had it for like 2-3 years now... And AMD should dump SHA1 acceleration in the next generation.

ARM cores are much weaker, crypto performance without NEON is absymal across the board. Of course, compared to hardware-acceleration software always seems slow; Haswell manages AES-OCB at <1 cpb.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#33
post #8

I think Naples is a very exciting development, because: - 1S/2S is obviously where the pie is. Few servers are 4S. - 8 DDR4 channels per socket is twice the memory bandwidth of 2011, and still more than LGA-36712312whateverthenumberwas - First x86 server platform with SHA1/2 acceleration - 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented All in all Naples seems like a very interesting platform for throughput-intensive…

Intel doesn't have SHA2 acceleration? ARMv8 has had it for like 2-3 years now... And AMD should dump SHA1 acceleration in the next generation.

>And AMD should dump SHA1 acceleration in the next generation.

The cost to have that on silicon is probably close to zero. If you think SHA1 is just going to magically disappear because you want it to, well, you'll be in for a SHA1 sized surprise. Our grandkids will still have SHA1 acceleration.

>ARMv8 has had it for like 2-3 years now...

Because ARM cores don't remotely have the CPU heft an Intel x86/64 chip has, so ARM needs all this acceleration because its typically used in very low power mobile scenarios. On top of that, Intel claims AES-NI can be used to accelerate SHA1.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/improving-the-perf...

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#34
post #21

How well does, say, Postgres scale on such hardware? Is anything more that 8 cores overkill or can we assume good linear increases in queries per second...

Depends on your queries. I am looking at a server right now that uses 80% of 32 cores with Postgres 9.6. It's doing lots of upserts and small selects. Averages 76k transactions per second. I think it could easily take advantage of a 64 core system. The main scalability issue I have with Postgres is its horrible layout of data pages on disk. You can't order rows to be layed out on disk according to primary key. You ca…

I think I saw a proposal recently for something that would cover this use case. IIRC it was for an index organized table that stores the entire contents in a btree (so it would naturally be stored in primary key order).

I don't think there's been any work on it yet though.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#35
post #10

In previous threads there was discussion about Intel processors, specifically Skylake (which is a desktop processor), being superior for server workloads involving vectorization. How will Naples fare on this front?

Outside of specialized workloads, not a lot of software is vectorized. Maybe your database server can take advantage, but your application server will probably not benefit one bit.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#36
post #23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming? More like consumer market, Ryzen 7 is definitely not suited for gamers, advertising it as such was IMO mistake. Nevertheless Naples can be big innovation in server segment. Also what with ECC? Ryzen can support it or not?

"Ryzen 7 is definitely not suited for gamers" The underperformance in gaming was tracked down to software issues according to AMD. Namely: - bugs in the Windows process scheduler (scheduling 2 threads on same core, and moving threads across CPU complexes which loses all L3 cache data since each CCX has its own cache) - buggy BIOS accidentally disabling Boost or the High Performance mode (feature that lets the process…

"Hardcore" is different from "hardware enthusiast".

Hardcore is that guy who plays Call of Duty 24x7 on his Xbox 360 and mediocre 720p television. You can't deny the determination or enthusiasm. Hardware's irrelevant.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#37
post #10

In previous threads there was discussion about Intel processors, specifically Skylake (which is a desktop processor), being superior for server workloads involving vectorization. How will Naples fare on this front?

Badly, but it doesn't matter because it's still just a tiny portion of the market.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hope this isn't niagra again: it needs to have decent clock speeds as IPC is still worth something today. But yes, I totally agree, this is an exciting chip.

Naples is based on Ryzen which, if you look at early benchmarks, is beating the competition on all fronts except gaming (suspectedly due to software optimisation and motherboard issues).

yes but four modules of ryzen to make this beastly naples chip isn't going to be clocked at the same frequencies. the top end intel chips have TDPs of 165W but 4 ryzen chips at 3.6ghz have a tdp of 65w a piece and you're not going to see a 260W server chip if you want to sell into the datacenter.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#39
post #32

If they have a much better performance/$ than Intel, which they likely will have, it sounds like a good opportunity for AWS to significantly undercut Microsoft and Google (which recently bragged about purchasing expensive Skylake-E chips).

There's opportunity cost to consider. Google has Skylake-E now which is not even available at retail yet.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#40

The important thing here, from my perspective, is how NUMA-ish a single socket configuration will be. According to the article, a single package is actually made up of 4 dies, each with its own memory (and presumably cache hierarchy, etc). While trivially parallelizable workloads (like HPC benchmarks) scale quite well regardless of system topology, not all workloads do so. And teaching kernel schedulers about 2 level…

Intel's largest CPUs are already explicitly NUMA on a single socket. They call it Cluster On Die: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/10401/03%20-%20Architectura...
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