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AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

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Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#51

Post by dman »

montecarl wrote: post #30
dman wrote: post #14

Ive been really enjoying my dual epyc 64 core workstation. Looking forward to when I can upgrade to 128 cores. :)

Did you build that yourself? Do you know of any good vendors for this type of workstation? I know building it isn't that hard, but typically an employer doesn't want to go that route.

I built it myself but there are multiple vendors selling prebuilt workstations eg https://www.velocitymicro.com/wizard.php?iid=327

PS: I have no affiliation with velocity micro, have never bought from them

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#52

Post by stcredzero »

ip26 wrote: post #46
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #32

Interesting design. The 70mm^2 die is more similar to an embedded chip so I guess that explains how AMD was able to hit 7nm so much earlier than Intel. But reading between the lines, AMD is only showing benchmarks for extremely parallel loads much like they did with ThreadRipper 2. Between the physically separate processing cores and the nature of the marketing benchmarks, I suspect workloads that have high IPC or ex…

You play to the strengths of the part and the interests of the target market. People willing to pay the price premium for ThreadRipper are interested in throughput, not latency.

You play to the strengths of the part and the interests of the target market.

However the strategy to go with gluing smaller dies together also better fits the (long known) pragmatics of manufacturing processes. This allows AMD to hit lower price points and while getting better margins. It also coincides with Intel being hit with "The Thermocline of Truth" where they were too optimistic about overcoming the challenges of larger die sizes.

"The Thermocline of Truth"

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#53

Post by commentor10 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #45
user5994461 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAID 6 with 32 drives. All the things you would not do while the array is rebuilding.

I'm not sure I understand the comment. I've used dual parity RAID systems for over a decade now and they work superbly when rebuilding even during a drive failure. (aka in 'degraded' mode). I typically run them in 22 drive sets because that is how many drives fit on a single NetApp drive shelf.

With 32 drives you should have at least 3 failure tolerances. Might even want to plan some hot spares in there. The idea is to build a large file system that won't die and take your data with it - nor introduce downtime (with a suitable failure tolerance). And of course, have an offsite backup for actually backing up your data.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#54

Post by vondur »

I’ve been wondering lately if the reason for the Mac Pro replacement not coming out until 2019 may be due to Apple switching to the 7nm refresh of the AMD ThreadRipper. That would certainly make for some interesting news.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#55

Post by nv-vn »

twtw wrote: post #20
nv-vn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they were right in that case... I know it's a biased source but I've seen a lot of accurate info there in the past

> But they were right in that case... How do you know?

It was widely reported on afterwards. Look at the bottom of the article, they mention Nvidia's cover-up.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#56

Post by NicoJuicy »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons. That said, this really does look like a pret…

The older you are, the better you execute things. Look at AMD 2 years ago versus now

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#57

Post by kolbe »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #40
walrus01 wrote: post #36

Not particularly related to Rome, but what you can buy right now for a single socket system, AMD is far ahead of Intel for reasonably priced workstations or small servers with a huge amount of I/O. One threadripper CPU has 64 pci express 3.0 lanes. One lane is 985MB/s. Working with a $399 threadripper motherboard that has four x16 physical slots, it can accommodate four Intel x710-4 10GbE four port NICs (each electri…

I looked into it for a server but I wasn't able to find a motherboard with remote management features. I suspect there might never be one so as not to muddy the waters of Epyc's intended market.

That's so frustrating. We ran into the same roadblock.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#59

Post by riskneutral »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons. That said, this really does look like a pret…

That sounds like a very good start with CPUs and memory, but you need to include GPUs and network interconnect and explain what the high speed busses between all those components look like. How do you solve that?

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#60

Post by nightcracker »

rwmj wrote: post #31
jesuslop wrote: post #5

Question, why is DRAM still packed separately?

A different question is why is DRAM still colocated with the CPUs, and not centrally located over a very fast network? There was a company doing this (RNA Networks, founded 2006) which was sold to Dell and then apparently disappeared without trace. It might make more sense now that there are more types of memory-like storage which isn't quite as fast as DDR4, like Optane.

The answer to that is very simple: latency.

There is also an infinitely more tricky issue: security.

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