New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta • Hacker News Board

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#51

Post by noahl » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

tpetry wrote: post #2

Now its getting really interesting: In the end you have to compare pricing for a vCore (which is a thread on a cpu) with per-thread performance on AMD vs. Intel. Does anyone know a benchmark like this? Epyc Processors are most often tested on heavy parallelizable tasks and not strictly single thread tasks.

I don't work there any more, but back when I was at Google Cloud we developed our own benchmarking suite, partly to answer questions like this. It's open source, you can run it too: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/PerfKitBenchmarker

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#52

Post by sdesol » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #39

AMD's stock is wild. It was around $2 just a few years ago and has been on a non-stop trend up to almost $60 today.

They really are doing something disruptive. I can't quite remember if this is correct (it has been a while since I last studied business), but in business there is a "blue ocean strategy". The basic premise is, if you can provide a product for half the price, with the twice the value, you will destroy the incumbent.

What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors low on purpose and/or if they have found a way to manufacture cheaper and/or Intel was screwing consumers with their pricing since they were so dominate.

No matter what, AMD is able to provide something that is measurably better and significantly cheaper than the incumbent, and if the blue ocean strategy holds, they should become the new incumbent in the near future.

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#53

Post by blattimwind » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

sdesol wrote: post #52

tempsy wrote: post #39

AMD's stock is wild. It was around $2 just a few years ago and has been on a non-stop trend up to almost $60 today.

They really are doing something disruptive. I can't quite remember if this is correct (it has been a while since I last studied business), but in business there is a "blue ocean strategy". The basic premise is, if you can provide a product for half the price, with the twice the value, you will destroy the incumbent. What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors lo…

> What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors low on purpose and/or if they have found a way to manufacture cheaper and/or Intel was screwing consumers with their pricing since they were so dominate.

Both. AMD uses chiplets for higher yields compared to Intel's huge monolithic processors (HCC, XCC), which lowers costs, and Intel jacked prices up because they had a monopoly.

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#54

Post by coder543 » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

thedance wrote: post #40

wmf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically. This is the best server processor.

Big claim there. On what basis?

This article goes into great detail: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-deliv...

Another follow-up article: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7702p-review-redefinin...

AMD is offering incredible performance on every metric: single threaded, multithreaded, total RAM per socket, PCIe 4.0, power consumption, total performance, total price, performance for price, etc.

Outside of some very niche applications, the only reason someone would choose Intel for servers right now is because "no one ever got fired for choosing Intel."

AMD's Epyc Rome processors are truly excellent, best-in-class processors.

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#55

Post by thesz » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

sdesol wrote: post #52

tempsy wrote: post #39

AMD's stock is wild. It was around $2 just a few years ago and has been on a non-stop trend up to almost $60 today.

They really are doing something disruptive. I can't quite remember if this is correct (it has been a while since I last studied business), but in business there is a "blue ocean strategy". The basic premise is, if you can provide a product for half the price, with the twice the value, you will destroy the incumbent. What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors lo…

Smaller chips have better yield. As AMD's current chips are composed from several smaller ones (I believe two or three), each composite has better yield than one bigger of same real estate size.

So yes, they figured out how to produce cheaper solutions.

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#56

Post by thedance » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

coder543 wrote: post #54

thedance wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big claim there. On what basis?

This article goes into great detail: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-deliv... Another follow-up article: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7702p-review-redefinin... AMD is offering incredible performance on every metric: single threaded, multithreaded, total RAM per socket, PCIe 4.0, power consumption, total performance, total price, performance for price, etc. Outside of some very niche ap…

There are literally no server benchmarks anywhere in those articles. Unless you are planning to run a distributed C build node there's nothing in these articles that can inform your choice. Distributed building is an extremely narrow, niche use case. Where are the nginx and mysql and grpc benchmarks?

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#57

Post by boulos » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

QUFB wrote: post #10

boulos wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not yet support AMD's nested implementation (we do on Intel). But cvallejo is also the PM for Nested :). As for 224, we've always reserved threads on each host for I/O and so on. Figure 2 from the Snap paper [1] is probably the best public reference. We also don't make it clear (on purpose) what size the underlying host processors are, though you can clearly guesstimate pretty easily. [1] https://research.googl…

Speaking of nested virtualization, are there any plans to support this on E2, or will we have to use other instance types?

The blocker here would be the need for supporting nested on AMD parts (as E2 can choose between Intel and AMD parts).

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#58

Post by bcrosby95 » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

sdesol wrote: post #52

tempsy wrote: post #39

AMD's stock is wild. It was around $2 just a few years ago and has been on a non-stop trend up to almost $60 today.

They really are doing something disruptive. I can't quite remember if this is correct (it has been a while since I last studied business), but in business there is a "blue ocean strategy". The basic premise is, if you can provide a product for half the price, with the twice the value, you will destroy the incumbent. What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors lo…

Not only disruptive to their industry, but game changing for those of us writing software. I remember reading all the hoopla over the loss of Dennard scaling 15 years ago (e.g. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm). Intel poked along at 2 and 4 core consumer systems for so long.

The argument was always "no one can use more than X cores" - but software seems to trail hardware in these examples, not the reverse. When Zen was first released, many of the less expensive 6 core options performed worse than Intel's similarly priced 4 core chips. But when comparing modern software using those old parts, AMD's 6 core offerings tend to hold up better.

It feels like AMD is finally ushering us into an era where being able to take advantage of large amounts of parallelism is going to become important for almost every developer.

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#59

Post by wyxuan » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

sdesol wrote: post #52

tempsy wrote: post #39

AMD's stock is wild. It was around $2 just a few years ago and has been on a non-stop trend up to almost $60 today.

They really are doing something disruptive. I can't quite remember if this is correct (it has been a while since I last studied business), but in business there is a "blue ocean strategy". The basic premise is, if you can provide a product for half the price, with the twice the value, you will destroy the incumbent. What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors lo…

Two problems is production capacity and data center, since AMD is competing against Apple for production by tsmc. on the point about data centers, Amd narrowly got on the train here. Semiconductors are a very cyclical industry and since the end of the business cycle is coming in Amd is in for a rough time. There's room for growth, but arguably the stock is priced in

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#60

Post by loeg » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #43

thedance wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big claim there. On what basis?

You can pick almost any basis you like, it's still winning. Most performance, most performance per watt, most performance per cost. Also, more performance per thread than high-threadcount intel chips. (Although, some of their low-threadcount Xeons do have an edge on that one.) Oh, and best memory interface and best IO, too.

Raw single-thread perf still matters for many workloads. Epyc doesn't come in especially high clock / fewer core configurations that are beneficial to some workloads. (Additionally: cloud vendors don't buy that end of configuration; they buy the high core count, high perf per watt configurations. E.g. GCE's N2D is the 2.25 GHz base clock, 64 core Epyc 7742 in a 2P configuration, but you can get EPYC 7302 with 16 cores at a 3 GHz base clock.)

For my business' workloads, Threadripper 3 (same gen 2 Zen, same IO chiplet, etc) would likely be a much better fit (and competitive with Intel) if AMD sold it with the same kind of enterprisey guarantees they do for Epyc (ECC, etc). Threadripper 3970x, for example, comes with 32 cores and a base clock of 3.7 GHz. That's a much better fit for us than Epyc 7742 or 7302.