AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

Post by ken47 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

Accujack wrote: post #58

ken47 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best time to buy an EPYC Rome server was 10 years ago. The next best time is today. Edit: Okay, since some people are downvoting my joke, a more serious answer -- if your server farm is running out of space, and you're currently looking at renting additional space to accommodate your growth, EPYC Rome will take up substantially less space for a given level of performance. This is one case where it may make sense…

Physical space is almost never a constraint in data centers. It's power and cooling that are almost always the limit. If AMD's chips offer better performance/watt, that would make them attractive. The capital cost of purchasing a server tends to be a smaller number than the cost of the power to run and cool it over its lifetime. However, what also matters is vendor support. Lots of companies have contracts for pricin…

Post by ken47 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:26 AM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #36

DuskStar wrote: post #2

> For those with little time: at the high end with socketed x86 CPUs, AMD offers you up to 50 to 100% higher performance while offering at a 40% lower price. Unless you go for the low end server CPUs, there is no contest: AMD offers much better performance for a much lower price than Intel, with more memory channels and over 2x the number of PCIe lanes. These are also PCIe 4.0 lanes. What if you want to more than 2 T…

Does price matter though? I would imagine power consumption is a much bigger deal.

Post by zanny » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

aeleos wrote: post #33

> "We designed this part to compete with Ice Lake, expecting to make some headway on single threaded performance. We did not expect to be facing re-warmed Skylake instead. This is going to be one of the highlights of our careers" Looks like AMD expected Intel would actually start to fight back a few years ago when AMD started the Zen and Rome cores, and AMD has been running full steam ahead since then. Meanwhile, in…

Post by adtac » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:46 AM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #57

The thing is you can't even get Ryzen inside a Dell or Lenovo machine - so for businesses it's kind of hard to get onboard with they hype. So intel is going to keep up market share until AMD can get into some prebuilt systems.

Post by ken47 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:48 AM UTC

Accujack wrote: post #66

ken47 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big names like Cray, Google, AWS, and Microsoft are already on board. The next generation of the Zen chipset has already been designed. EPYC Rome is likely being priced s.t. Xeon's would have to be sold at a loss to match $/perf.

"on board" in this case means producing a full line of servers with the AMD chips, not just being interested in them. People can't buy interesting ideas, and businesses aren't going to change system vendors overnight.