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

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111–120 of 208 posts

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

#111
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be interested to see how long it will be before this devastates Intel's business. At the moment, there's literally no reason to buy an Intel desktop or server processor, so how many of the Intel purchases coming from OEMs and big cloud companies are just because of contracts that might let up in a few years?

Well, other than the unbroken history of AMD managing to fail when ahead. Intel is a juggernaut because even if it's not shipping the best, it's always shipping something on time, every time.

> Intel is a juggernaut because even if it's not shipping the best, it's always shipping something on time, every time.

Intel is in their current situation because their 10 nm process is years late, and is still not able to manufacture high-performance parts like server CPUs in any meaningful quantity for a price that the market would bear. They've also had severe shortages over the past year, which has resulted in orders being delayed for weeks or months.

And of course, there's the matter of their products basically being warmed-over refreshes of a nearly 5-year-old architecture (because their new architectures are dependent on 10 nm), which has resulted in comically lopsided performance in AMD's favor, in basically every objective metric that matters.

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

#112
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe because AMD can't keep up with demand for their new CPUs. You're confusing bandwidth and latency. Ryzen 3000 launched a month ago, the 3900x outperformed expectations, so the initial shipments sold out faster than expected. You can't magic up stock out of thin air, so there's an inevitable lag between retailers reporting unusually high demand and AMD being able to deliver sufficient stock. The bandwidth questi…

> TSMC's 7nm process is stable, providing excellent yields and has plenty of available capacity Yields in terms of getting lots of operational dies, sure, but one of the underlying problems here is chip quality. They have lots of chiplets but most of those chiplets are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for the 3900X. In fact, even a lot of the chiplets sold as 3900X are not fast enough to hit the clocks ad…

>a lot of the chiplets sold as 3900X are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for 3900X

Do you have some sort of source for this claim?

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

#113
post #109
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be interested to see how long it will be before this devastates Intel's business. At the moment, there's literally no reason to buy an Intel desktop or server processor, so how many of the Intel purchases coming from OEMs and big cloud companies are just because of contracts that might let up in a few years?

For desktops gaming still drives a huge market segment where 9700k/9900k still have higher performance (esp if you overclock).

Even for gaming, the advantage is marginal though, and it comes with a price increase that is often better put into a better GPU.

Even formerly die-hard intel gaming shops (Linus Tech Tips and similar) are recommending AMD for most gaming rigs nowadays.

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

#115
post #83
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually s…

OSs are not most software and are not designed around the instruction set changing underneath them during normal operation. Why would they be? You can't physically swap out a processor while the system is booted and you can't swap a virtual processor either. It works fine if you shut everything down and reboot the system, but that is often undesirable. The whole point of the feature is that the VM can be migrated aro…

>You can't physically swap out a processor while the system is booted and you can't swap a virtual processor either.

I think you can do that on multisocket systems:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/core-api/cpu_hotplug.h...

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

#116
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be interested to see how long it will be before this devastates Intel's business. At the moment, there's literally no reason to buy an Intel desktop or server processor, so how many of the Intel purchases coming from OEMs and big cloud companies are just because of contracts that might let up in a few years?

Come on, "literally no reason"? Maybe because AMD can't keep up with demand for their new CPUs. I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially inflated ebay prices, the BIOS issues out of the gate are super annoying, and all of these factors are not necessarily technical or performance factors but the fact is that I can get a 9900K right now with mature UEFI firmware on them from reputable motherboard manufac…

The way you avoid both demand issues and BIOS issues is to purchase 2-3 months after launch.

These chips launched on schedule on 7/7, almost exactly one month ago. If you've been exasperatedly waiting for months it's not AMD's fault.

The "literally no reason" part is okay, what you need to do is adjust "at the moment" to "once we're out of the launch window".

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

#117
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve looked at a lot of the benchmarks and the difference was in the ballpark of 1-5%, which isn’t dominating from my perspective... did I miss a few?

Part of it is intel k parts have quite a bit of overclocking headroom while zen 2 has none.

Right. I guess the Ryzen boost clock debacle is also part of it...

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

#118
> Due to bad luck and timing issues we have not been able to test the latest Intel and AMD servers CPU in our most demanding workloads

AT just can't catch a break. Any reviews out there that tested heavy workloads? These are the interesting ones on a CPU like this one.

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

#119
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TSMC's 7nm process is stable, providing excellent yields and has plenty of available capacity Yields in terms of getting lots of operational dies, sure, but one of the underlying problems here is chip quality. They have lots of chiplets but most of those chiplets are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for the 3900X. In fact, even a lot of the chiplets sold as 3900X are not fast enough to hit the clocks ad…

>a lot of the chiplets sold as 3900X are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for 3900X Do you have some sort of source for this claim?

every forum pretty much. If you have been interested in getting one, and following along with the launch this is not a controversial statement. It's not 100% sure its the chips fault though, bios issues are still running rampant nearly 5 weeks later, and each new bios is changing performance significantly. It will take a while before everyone knows exactly where they stand.

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

#120

> OEMs were also reluctant to partner with the company without a proven product. I'm a little puzzled by this; we've been able to buy Ryzen and Epyc stuff from Dell in our university for a while. The biggest problem has been the nvme ssds..

Lenovo is all over Ryzen since Zen+ too.
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