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The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

anandtech.com

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Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#11

Post by threeseed »

chx wrote: post #10

Anandtech. I called this guy out on Twitter eventually challenging him to show me any article (in this PC area) of theirs and I will find mistakes. I offered my editorial services for one dollar. I've been, long ago, one of the editors of the largest computer monthly in Hungary and was on the editorial board. This wouldn't have been my first rodeo. In this particular article there's not a lot of technical explanation…

The boards they listed e.g. MZ31-AR0 they have reviews for.

Cross linking in your site improves traffic and SEO which is far important to a website than whether they listed a PCIe 4.0 board or not.

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#12

Post by xdxdx »

greendave wrote: post #6

This feels a bit like they just took an existing Intel design and tried to adapt it for AMD. Nothing wrong with that per se - by all accounts it's a good solid board - but it leads to weird choices like not using 56 of 64 PCIe lanes on the second CPU.

There are some other potential reasons: - Simpler PCB routing (= fewer layers = cheaper board) only using lanes from the CPU closer to the slots - Slots still work when 2nd CPU is not installed without extra chips - Board is already not designed around heavy I/O use cases given lack of PCIe 4.0 support

This definitely feels like a board that's mostly intended for compute-intensive workloads that do not need much PCIe bandwidth.

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#13

Post by chx »

threeseed wrote: post #11
chx wrote: post #10

Anandtech. I called this guy out on Twitter eventually challenging him to show me any article (in this PC area) of theirs and I will find mistakes. I offered my editorial services for one dollar. I've been, long ago, one of the editors of the largest computer monthly in Hungary and was on the editorial board. This wouldn't have been my first rodeo. In this particular article there's not a lot of technical explanation…

The boards they listed e.g. MZ31-AR0 they have reviews for. Cross linking in your site improves traffic and SEO which is far important to a website than whether they listed a PCIe 4.0 board or not.

They listed the ASUS KNPA-U16 which they also didn't review...

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#14

Post by p_l »

metaphor wrote: post #9
p_l wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

majority of BMC solutions default to VGA connection, and any good one will have a serial port - either DE-9 or RJ style. It's much, much easier to standardize on VGA-based iKVMs than otherwise, and this drives the "let's use VGA" movement. (Only real difference would be switching to DisplayPort, and this doesn't bring any benefits either...)

Completely aware of the enterprise implication, but it's somewhat of a disappoint that with all that peripheral support, they could have at least dropped a courtesy single link DVI-I interface instead. It just smells like a decision driven to explicitly avoid paying out licensing royalties.

And pray tell, what would drive the digital part of the DVI? The video source has only analog VGA output available, so you can technically use a DVI-A connector, but pretty much nothing used them.

And while DVI/HDMI signaling is pretty much VGA-but-analog, recovering digital stream out of analog VGA signal would make no sense.

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#15

Post by rumanator »

greendave wrote: post #6

This feels a bit like they just took an existing Intel design and tried to adapt it for AMD. Nothing wrong with that per se - by all accounts it's a good solid board - but it leads to weird choices like not using 56 of 64 PCIe lanes on the second CPU.

> (...) but it leads to weird choices like not using 56 of 64 PCIe lanes on the second CPU.

The article mentions that out of a total of 128 PCI lanes, 64 are used for CPU-to-CPU communication and only 8 are used for an external PCIe device.

To be fair, a user that feels the need to cram two EPYC processors on the same motherboard is someone who is willing to pay a premium for CPU-bound computations.

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#17

Post by nullc »

I have this board with 7742s. I like it generally, though most of my affection is due to the CPUs. I wish it had PCI-E 4.

I've found it to be unreliable with memory running faster than 2933MHz but that might be the memory I was using. When I did have memory corruption problems running at higher memory speeds I didn't get a single ECC error, which I found surprising and concerning.

I also had issues with Kernel 5.4 not booting at all ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1783733 ) which I worked around by adding edac_report=off (I'm not sure if later kernels don't have this issue, because I've left the setting in, since taking it down and rebooting to test it is a bit of a pain-- as is typical with server boards with lots of cores and ram it takes many minutes to post)

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#18

Post by ShamelessC »

I've admittedly never actually considered the dis/advantages of running two CPU's on one board.

Is it correct that you can run two different processors with these? How much of a speedup does it give you? Is the operating system designed to take full advantage of both by default?

Why don't gaming builds use these? Too much cost?

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#19

Post by posix_me_less »

ShamelessC wrote: post #18

I've admittedly never actually considered the dis/advantages of running two CPU's on one board. Is it correct that you can run two different processors with these? How much of a speedup does it give you? Is the operating system designed to take full advantage of both by default? Why don't gaming builds use these? Too much cost?

The same processors should be used, I would be surprised if different one would work together. The processor model has to support two socket operation, those are more expensive. Speedup happens only if the running system benefits from more cores. The expected speedup is Gaming builds usually cannot take advantage of so many cores. Even if the machine is running the game and streaming, single 6-core or 8-core processor is enough.

Re: The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution

#20

Post by rbanffy »

posix_me_less wrote: post #19
ShamelessC wrote: post #18

I've admittedly never actually considered the dis/advantages of running two CPU's on one board. Is it correct that you can run two different processors with these? How much of a speedup does it give you? Is the operating system designed to take full advantage of both by default? Why don't gaming builds use these? Too much cost?

The same processors should be used, I would be surprised if different one would work together. The processor model has to support two socket operation, those are more expensive. Speedup happens only if the running system benefits from more cores. The expected speedup is Gaming builds usually cannot take advantage of so many cores. Even if the machine is running the game and streaming, single 6-core or 8-core processo…

> The same processors should be used

This is an interesting thing. I should be possible to be smarter about different timings. ARM has very mature asymmetric core support for quite some time now. Intel will soon launch their own in the mobile space.

> Gaming builds usually cannot take advantage of so many cores

Indeed. Games have long been limited in their support for multiple cores. It's a bit surprising because consumer Windows, while it took its time to be able to support multiple sockets, has been able to support them for a very long time now.

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