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All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

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Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#81

Post by theandrewbailey »

twoodfin wrote: post #49
theandrewbailey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of processing happens when games load. Once you have sufficient storage bandwidth and latency, load times flatten out. It seems that "sufficient" is SATA; above that, there is little difference in game load times: https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ss...

I wonder if game developers are actually disincentivized from qualitatively improving load times past a certain acceptable threshold, lest their AAA game be perceived as lightweight.

I doubt it. Gamers have been complaining about long load times since almost the dawn of time, and I think one with as little as technically possible could make it a selling point.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#82

Post by redtuesday »

hishnash wrote: post #78
redtuesday wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there was also no word on official/validated ECC support, only that Threadripper will launch this summer. But people hope for something between 999$ (since it is two Ryzen R7) and 1499$ for the 16 core CPU. 999$ would be awesome, but 1499$ sounds much more realistic, maybe even more, since it has a much larger socket, high end platform bonus etc.

> there was also no word on official/validated ECC support I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given. > 999$ (since it is two Ryzen R7) and 1499$ I think it will be more around the 999$ but the motherboard will be quite expensive, it is after all basically a duel CPU main board. Don't expect to pick up a board for under 500$

> I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given.

Yes, Ryzen can use ECC if the motherboard maker supports it, but ECC support is not validated. [0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#83

Post by timthorn »

nicktelford wrote: post #14
xbmcuser wrote: post #6

I was of the opinion that Intel will only face real competition when arm reaches parity with desktop class cpu. Nice to see AMD rise back up again. Hope Intel is not able to strong arm the oems like last time when AMD had design wins but Intel using anti competitive practice stalled its growth till it was able to catch-up and later go ahead.

I doubt we'll be seeing desktop ARM systems any time soon, especially high end workstation or enthusiast systems. The problem is that the ARM64 architecture is completely different from x86-64, which almost every desktop application is compiled for exclusively . Remember when Microsoft launched an ARM Surface? It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as very few applications are compil…

Here's an off the shelf 32 core ARM desktop: https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/arm-desktops.html

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#84

Post by hishnash »

redtuesday wrote: post #27
wiredfool wrote: post #3

64 lanes would be good for something like 4-6 GPUs @ 8 lanes per, and some high speed storage/networking? Anxiously awaiting Intel's "I am not left handed either" response.

Yeah, depending on the configuration it would maybe even be enough for 7 GPU's with 8x PCIe 3.0 (60 of the 64 are feeding PCIe and M.2 slots, 4 go to the chipset). Seems like it will be a nice CPU to use for machine learning. Other sites also report that it will support 2 TByte of RAM like the single socket Naples/Epyc, but LRDIMM and official/validated ECC support was not mentioned in the stream.

Oh, yer will be very nice for Machine learning I can see a lot of people getting this.

Also even though they did not mention it for lower end servers. Servers currently using a single Xeon.

> official/validated ECC support

Given all the other Zen cpus have this i think it will, after all it is just 2 ryzen CPUs with a load of PCI!

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#85

Post by sqeaky »

jrimbault wrote: post #23
adrianN wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Raspberry Pi does almost all things that I would like to do with a computer. I could definitely imagine buying an ARM based computer.

Because we have the sources for most of the software, it can be recompiled. Not true for Windows, especially old closed source software.

Doesn't that make this an argument against closed source, not against ARM?

I agree the issues are related, but if us people in open source can switch in an afternoon and you people in closed sourced land can't ever switch it highlights a problem.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#86

Post by LeifCarrotson »

neolefty wrote: post #13
johansch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long been thinking that it would make sense for e.g. US+EU to fund AMD just in order to get some actual competition going.

But would they have the same incentive to take risks? I hear you -- I want them to do well too, and keep making cool things, but giving them too much help may kill the golden eggs. Or something.

What golden eggs?

We are (or were) rapidly approaching a point where Intel would be the only PC, laptop, and server processor worth considering. If that happened, their only competition would have been themselves, the remnants of AMD, and start-ups who would be behind by hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure.

In that situation, would they be likely to keep developing new processors, making them more efficient and more powerful, investing heavily into R&D, and aggressively pricing their products? Or would they give themselves a bonus, their stockholders dividends, and rest on their laurels while taking in the cash for a product that has become essential to the global economy and really the future of humanity?

Or were you speaking of AMD being the good that is working hard, taking big risks, and laying golden eggs because it is fighting an uphill battle?

If so, consider that risks are risks because they don't always work out. Sometimes they fail. And while that works if you are an angel investor risking a few tens of thousands on dozens of start-ups, where any one success can make up for the loss of all the others, it is not as smart when you have a single company you're risking and success means you just get to keep playing a little longer. And having a handful of processor companies takes more than a few tens of thousands each.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#87

Post by adrianN »

redial wrote: post #60
nicktelford wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt we'll be seeing desktop ARM systems any time soon, especially high end workstation or enthusiast systems. The problem is that the ARM64 architecture is completely different from x86-64, which almost every desktop application is compiled for exclusively . Remember when Microsoft launched an ARM Surface? It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as very few applications are compil…

Isn't the main problem with ARM the lack of a standard hardware architecture that supports of-the-shelf pc components? Every motherboard has it's own size, it's own closed bios supporting only some kinds of memory (if at all, due to on die memory of most soc), which is fine for embedded use but leaves a lot to be desired if you try to use it as a "desktop pc" replacement.

PCs were very dissimilar until the IBM PC ate everybody else. Maybe something similar can happen to ARM.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#88

Post by deelowe »

vbezhenar wrote: post #8
nicktelford wrote: post #5

The huge number of PCIe lanes is pretty exciting to me. For consumers, the limiting factor in PCs these days tends to be I/O. With this, you could have 4 PCIe M2 SSDs (that's a bit under 16Gbps bandwidth, assuming RAID0), and still have 44 lanes (the number in the top-end Intel CPU) to spare for GPUs and other peripherals.

I don't fully understand. So 1 SSD need 1 lane. How many lanes need something like NVisia 1080Ti? What use of the remaining lanes? If I want to build something like 1 CPU/1 GPU/1 SSD configuration without additional peripherals, 62 lanes will be effectively wasted?

These comments baffle me. Doesn't the majority of HN work in the industry? Clearly the driving factor regarding IO at this point is machine learning and networking for cloud applications, not gaming.

Desktop/workstation (e.g. gaming) performance hasn't been driving the industry for easily 5 years now. Intel and AMD both simply use their high performance desktop offerings as proofs for their server solutions, which typically come a few months later.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#89

Post by hishnash »

redtuesday wrote: post #82
hishnash wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was also no word on official/validated ECC support I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given. > 999$ (since it is two Ryzen R7) and 1499$ I think it will be more around the 999$ but the motherboard will be quite expensive, it is after all basically a duel CPU main board. Don't expect to pick up a board for under 500$

> I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given. Yes, Ryzen can use ECC if the motherboard maker supports it, but ECC support is not validated. [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

I think that in the end this will be down the mainboard makers to get validation so possibly will not be validated on non-server style boards. But if there is demand given epic is basicly the same thing just bigger im sure they will do it.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#90

Post by ionised »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #52
floatboth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A GPU can use 16x 3.0 lanes, theoretically. In practice 8 lanes is enough, people have measured performance between 16x and 8x, it's almost the same. SSDs use 4x, if you do buy an NVMe drive that is. (In my country, these things are TWICE as expensive as SATA SSDs lol)

My current “gaming machine” is still using PCIe 1.0 and it doesn't look like it's proving much at all of a bottleneck, because why would it? The game loads most things into memory once and then the rest of the time it's just sending draw calls and maybe geometry updates.

How are you measuring this?
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