Live data from Hacker News

7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

techquila.co.in

81–90 of 160 posts

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, the built-in drivers only cover the "Kepler" architecture, as that was the last one that Apple used in a Mac. The 3rd party Nvidia drivers which support more modern GPUs are only offered up to macOS 10.13 High Sierra. The technical background for this is that Metal and OpenGL acceleration requires the GPU driver bundle to be loaded into a process's address space. (effectively a dynamic library) With 10.14, A…

Someone on reddit suspect apple’s stance against Nvidia in this driver signing carnage is because they are not happy with Nvidia about cards in MacBook Pro

As a driver developer, I've been on the receiving end of stuff breaking due to changes in macOS many a time. Based on my experience, I find it much more likely that Apple simply does not care about this problem/does not consider it a problem. By that I mean they are not willing to assign developer resources to the situation because from their point of view it is not a supported configuration, plain and simple. The fact that it ever worked is largely accidental as far as they are concerned.

One of their highest priorities at the moment appears to be to remove any 3rd party code running in the context of Apple processes. For examples, you don't need to look far: kext -> DriverKit/System Extension transition, hardened runtime, etc. The Nvidia driver breaking is just a consequence of that increasing lockdown. The simplest solution would be to allow nvidia's code to run in the context of core system and user processes again (kernel, WindowServer, just about any GUI app) which presumably is not palatable to them or they wouldn't have made the change in the first place. The alternative would be to farm this type of driver out into a sandboxed user process. (Nowadays this means DriverKit.) Aside from potential performance issues, this would be a lot of work, so it's probably never going to happen unless literally millions of end users start complaining.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#83
post #46

Note that the 1P variant costs only $4,955, or under $80 per core. The consumer chips cost roughly $50/core, making this the flattest ramp I can personally remember.

That is the brilliance of Chiplet strategy. Those 74nm 7nm Die are extremely cost effective. ( For reference they are even smaller than the SoC used in iPhone ) The 14nm I/O die ( 400mm2 ) seems to be most expensive part. I wonder what cost improvement could be done in that area. And Note: That 5K CPU has 256 MB of L3 Cache. May be I could Run the OS not in RAM, but in Cache.

Note that Intel has also announced that they're going to use chiplets w/ 3D stacking for newer designs, starting in 2019. So this isn't something that's exclusive to AMD.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(As someone who buys Apple since 25+ years) Apple pricing has never been cost driven, but value and brand driven.

> but value and brand driven What value?

Economic value = maximum amount a customer is willing to pay for something. It does not matter why. Usually economic value is little higher than market value.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#85

I do have an AMD Hackintosh, I don't see any reason you wouldn't be able to use these as a dev Hackintosh machine. It's gorgeously fast with my Ryzen 2700x, eats compilation time like no one's business and it's stable. And it's something around 1/4th the price of the same horsepower from native Intel Macs. I can't imagine the cost delta of a EPYC Rome Hackintosh to its Intel counterpart. It's not like I cheaped out e…

How was it getting things working on your AMD hackintosh? I’m very, very tempted to switch to AMD when the new Ryzen chips land but obviously want to be able to run macOS.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there’s no match for Photoshop for serious image editing.

Affinity Photo isn't a match for Photoshop, but it's remarkably close at a fraction of the cost. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

Indeed. I was pretty well versed in Photoshop but switched to Affinity some years ago and I'm genuinely very, very happy with Affinity Photo. I wouldn't switch back even if Photoshop was free.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#87
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the brilliance of Chiplet strategy. Those 74nm 7nm Die are extremely cost effective. ( For reference they are even smaller than the SoC used in iPhone ) The 14nm I/O die ( 400mm2 ) seems to be most expensive part. I wonder what cost improvement could be done in that area. And Note: That 5K CPU has 256 MB of L3 Cache. May be I could Run the OS not in RAM, but in Cache.

Note that Intel has also announced that they're going to use chiplets w/ 3D stacking for newer designs, starting in 2019. So this isn't something that's exclusive to AMD.

But AMD is again the innovator, just like with amd64, real dual-core, on-die memory controllers, hypertransport-style bus, on-die pcie controller, on-die gpu and so on.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#88

I do have an AMD Hackintosh, I don't see any reason you wouldn't be able to use these as a dev Hackintosh machine. It's gorgeously fast with my Ryzen 2700x, eats compilation time like no one's business and it's stable. And it's something around 1/4th the price of the same horsepower from native Intel Macs. I can't imagine the cost delta of a EPYC Rome Hackintosh to its Intel counterpart. It's not like I cheaped out e…

How was it getting things working on your AMD hackintosh? I’m very, very tempted to switch to AMD when the new Ryzen chips land but obviously want to be able to run macOS.

I think a lot of people are installing a really thin distro and setting up KVM that passes through the main IOMMU groups to the the VM.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#89
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Adobe's way of getting you hooked. It was the same for me at my college. It took me a long time to port my muscle memory to Sketch. If I had an advice to give to my college self, I would advise not even starting with Adobe: if you're a designer and use their tools, the tools you need to make money with isn't even available for sale, you can only rent. So you might end up in a place where Adobe jacks up the pri…

FWIW that’s exactly why Microsoft office and windows is so prolific, it’s what people know from school so it’s not even a conversation on switching. Even if Microsoft is gauging companies with licenses.

And exactly why Google responded with chromebooks and free gsuite for education.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was it getting things working on your AMD hackintosh? I’m very, very tempted to switch to AMD when the new Ryzen chips land but obviously want to be able to run macOS.

I think a lot of people are installing a really thin distro and setting up KVM that passes through the main IOMMU groups to the the VM.

For which there is a project on GitHub (OSX-KVM) which does all the hard work for you.
Post reply on HN