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

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

#131

Post by tempguy9999 »

pdpi wrote: post #124
jacquesm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums are not reputable sources unless it is insiders leaking info that can be verified through other means.

They might not be definitive sources, but they can definitely be the canary that triggers an investigation by somebody more authoritative. As it stands, this mine has some dead canaries.

claim:

> ...but one of the underlying problems here is chip quality

supposed justification:

> ...every forum pretty much

That's hearsay not actual justification. And intel has a reputation for dirty play.

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

#132

Post by leetcrew »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #92
leetcrew wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a very slight advantage of Intel CPUs in non-GPU constrained games (which means more or less 1080p only...). Very slight. Price/performance falls on Ryzen 3 so hard it's foolish to get an Intel for sure. it's not a huge advantage, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it foolish to buy intel at this point. if your only serious workload is gaming, intel seems like the obvious choice to me. you can ac…

We are talking a few percentage fps, at 1080p, where you are going from 200 fps to 220 fps. To call that a "significant" performance lead is silly.

if you think a 10% fps gain is silly, why buy a high-end cpu for gaming at all?

also the "only at 1080p" meme is not really true for some esports titles. counterstrike is so cpu bound that it really doesn't matter what resolution you play at.

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

#133

Post by Hikikomori »

paulmd wrote: post #75
jdietrich wrote: post #53

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…

Not reaching advertised boost clocks seem to be related to newer AGESA releases from AMD to motherboard vendors, so I wouldn't blame it on chip quality just yet. These contain bugfixes (RdRand for example) and other changes, but has impacted boost clocks. People running AGESA 1.0.0.2 report reaching boost clocks easily (sustained in single-core tests), while I and others running later releases have issues.

New architecture, new chipset, bound to have some release issues. Intel is on its second or third refresh of their Skylake architecture from 2015, all ironed out.

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

#135

Post by Nokinside »

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…

Xeon has been making 50–70% profit margin depending on the Xeon type. Intel's profit margins will take a hit when they are forced to cut prices. It's unlikely that AMD has enough manufacturing capacity to fill all demand, so Intel will still make profit.

History:

AMD had similar upper hand against Intel with their Athlon processor 20 years ago. Intel's transition to the 180 nm process was delayed and AMD's K7 Athlon was superior microarchitecture. Intel's response was to lower profit margins until AMD was in the ropes again.

This time AMD has better change, but don't count out Intel. AMD's success depends on their profit margins when competing against Intel. If Intel force AMD's profits close to zero, it can spoil AMD's technical win.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/profit-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/profit-mar...

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

#136

Post by onli »

Nokinside wrote: post #135
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…

Xeon has been making 50–70% profit margin depending on the Xeon type. Intel's profit margins will take a hit when they are forced to cut prices. It's unlikely that AMD has enough manufacturing capacity to fill all demand, so Intel will still make profit. History: AMD had similar upper hand against Intel with their Athlon processor 20 years ago. Intel's transition to the 180 nm process was delayed and AMD's K7 Athlon…

Correct me if I'm mixing up the timeline, but that's the moment in history when Intel used illegal market manipulation to keep AMD out of the OEM market, right? So Intel did more than lower their profit margin, they basically bribed their way through that period. An option they are unlikely to have again, and which as a strategy shouldn't even work anymore for the type of data centers existing today.

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

#137

Post by leetcrew »

manbatman wrote: post #100
Funnnny wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DigitalFoundry had an interesting take on frame rate/frame time performance on Intel/AMD. If you look at the graph you can see Ryzen dip down more for a few times when there's more computation or memory throughput needed.

That's not true, with more core Ryzen can run game with other apps without any problems it's not the same with Intel though.

unless you are compiling chrome in the background or streaming, you're not going to saturate even eight cores while gaming. in most benchmarks I've seen, the 9900k still performs better while streaming.

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

#138

Post by GrayShade »

Hikikomori wrote: post #133
paulmd wrote: 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…

Not reaching advertised boost clocks seem to be related to newer AGESA releases from AMD to motherboard vendors, so I wouldn't blame it on chip quality just yet. These contain bugfixes (RdRand for example) and other changes, but has impacted boost clocks. People running AGESA 1.0.0.2 report reaching boost clocks easily (sustained in single-core tests), while I and others running later releases have issues. New archit…

> Intel is on its second or third refresh of their Skylake architecture from 2015, all ironed out.

More like the fourth, I think.

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

#139

Post by TomVDB »

cyphar wrote: post #81
paulmd wrote: post #78

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 sup…

> 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…

> That shouldn't be a problem. They are both fundamentally the same architecture (amd64) and any CPU-specific features are already opportunistically handled by the vast majority of software because otherwise you wouldn't be able to run the same code on different versions of Intel's CPUs.

A very long time ago, I worked for a then very large company that sold servers. Plain standard 80486 based servers.

My job was to drive around and drop off these servers for evaluation at prospective customers, who would compare them against 80486 offerings from a different vendor.

Your argument about them all being fundamentally the same would be even stronger: it’s the same CPU.

And yet, customers did not take chances and would go through the eval motions. Because their business relied on it.

Now imagine that at a scale of thousands.

Claiming “they are fundamentally the same” is not wrong, but you don’t care about the fundamentals only. You care about the whole picture and you don’t take chances.

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

#140

Post by Nokinside »

onli wrote: post #136
Nokinside wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xeon has been making 50–70% profit margin depending on the Xeon type. Intel's profit margins will take a hit when they are forced to cut prices. It's unlikely that AMD has enough manufacturing capacity to fill all demand, so Intel will still make profit. History: AMD had similar upper hand against Intel with their Athlon processor 20 years ago. Intel's transition to the 180 nm process was delayed and AMD's K7 Athlon…

Correct me if I'm mixing up the timeline, but that's the moment in history when Intel used illegal market manipulation to keep AMD out of the OEM market, right? So Intel did more than lower their profit margin, they basically bribed their way through that period. An option they are unlikely to have again, and which as a strategy shouldn't even work anymore for the type of data centers existing today.

They did everything they could, but Intel did not win with just bribery and dirty tricks.
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