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AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

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Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#101

Post by anarazel »

brianwawok wrote: post #13
andy_ppp wrote: post #11

How well does, say, Postgres scale on such hardware? Is anything more that 8 cores overkill or can we assume good linear increases in queries per second...

This is from 2012: http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2012/04/did-i-say-32-cores-how-abo... My guess is the 1 socket options scales great. 2 sockets are are less than ideal, and you will not double the 1 socket performance.

I've seen decent enough scaling on 8 socket servers. There's still some bottlenecks if you have a lot of very short queries (because there's some shared state manipulations per query & transaction), but in a lot of cases postgres scales quite well even at those sizes.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#102

Post by throwawayish »

floatboth wrote: post #19
ptrptr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming? More like consumer market, Ryzen 7 is definitely not suited for gamers, advertising it as such was IMO mistake. Nevertheless Naples can be big innovation in server segment. Also what with ECC? Ryzen can support it or not?

Not being the top single-threaded performer which is required to push many many hundreds of frames per second != "not suited for gamers". Games in general are more likely to be GPU-bound!! Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame. BTW they advertised it as good for gaming + streaming (h264 CPU encoding at the same tim…

> Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame.

The source engine isn't exactly the pinnacle of engine development.

It doesn't really know what to with more than 2ish cores, so you probably get more FPS by using a dual core instead of a quad core, which tend to go farther in terms of overclocking.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#103

Post by throwawayish »

user5994461 wrote: post #55
floatboth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being the top single-threaded performer which is required to push many many hundreds of frames per second != "not suited for gamers". Games in general are more likely to be GPU-bound!! Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame. BTW they advertised it as good for gaming + streaming (h264 CPU encoding at the same tim…

Pretty much all games are CPU intensive and it's not getting better. Try running on a cheap i3 from a few years ago and you'll understand your pain quickly.

CPU intensive != single threaded

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#104

Post by noir_lord »

moh_maya wrote: post #83
noir_lord wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because the workloads are fundamentally unsuitable for current GPU architectures or because no one has took a good stab at it yet? I know very little about computation genetics/biology but it sounds interesting.

I don't think it is because no one has tried it as much as the fact that the workloads need the cpu architecture / are not easily parallizable (as far as I understand). Comp bio in genetics is largely sequence alignment & search, which is still largely CPU / memory bound; but I don't understand programming enough to speculate if development in algorithms will allow GPUs to be used because the problem itself is not pa…

Thank you for your response, it was extremely interesting.

One of the nice things about HN is you get to look outside your own bubble (I mostly do Line of Business/SME stuff so this stuff isn't just outside my wheelhouse it's on the other side of the ocean).

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#105

Post by semi-extrinsic »

sorenjan wrote: post #95
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented Yes, definitely drooling at this. Assuming a workload that doesn't eat too much CPU, this would make for a relatively cheap and hassle-free non-blocking 8 GPU @ 16x PCIe workstation. I wants one.

That does sound pretty spectacular, and really loud. What kind of case would you put that in? Would you work with ear protection?

Wrt. noise: decibels (dB, "perceived loudness") are logarithmic in sound energy, so going from e.g. a single GTX 1080 at 47 dB to 8x GTX 1080 only increases the noise to 56 dB, which is noticeable but not really annoying, and very far from requiring ear protection. Recommendations for office spaces is that noise be kept Wrt. cases: I think a regular E-ATX compatible case should be enough, but it all depends on the motherboard, and those don't exist yet. Existing 8x GPU servers have been 4U rack mount dual socket affairs; you can also already get 7x GPU dual socket "EEB" motherboards and workstation style cases, but none that will do full 16x for all the GPUs.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#106

Post by [deleted] »

gigatexal wrote: post #82
binarycrusader wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, not only did AMD move from CMT (clustered multi-thread) design used in the previous Bulldozer microarchitecture, they now have an SMT (simultaneous multithreading) architecture allowing for 2 threads per core. By comparison, the performance of sparc substantially improved moving from the T1, T2 to T3+. The T1 used a round-robin policy to issue instructions from the next active thread each cycle, supporting…

I didn't know about this. Are there benchmarks that aren't canned by Oracle that you know of? I'm intrigued by this round-robin way of threading. I'm not a cpu expert, but how does this compare with the Power arch's way of threading?

[deleted]

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#108

Post by mozumder »

qaq wrote: post #81
mozumder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that still a problem with cheap NVMe drives that can do 500k IOPS?

Nope but everyone is running in the "cloud" and there you are lucky to get 50K IOPS

This is one of the reasons I don't run in the cloud.

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#109

Post by ajaimk »

This is the first I'm reading about the 32 cores being 4 dies on a package - Not sure how well that will work out in practice. IBM does something similar with Power servers where 2 dies on a package are used for lower end chips.

Basically, using multiple dies increases latency significantly between the cores on different dies. This will affect performance. I will not judge till I see the benchmark though :-)

Re: AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

#110

Post by noir_lord »

timeu wrote: post #88
noir_lord wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because the workloads are fundamentally unsuitable for current GPU architectures or because no one has took a good stab at it yet? I know very little about computation genetics/biology but it sounds interesting.

AFAIK probably a bit of both. A majority of genetics/biology workloads are I/O bound (mapping, blast, etc) and/or require a lot of memory (i.e. de novo assembly of genome) On the other hand many of the bioinformatics software solve a specific scientific question and usually are written by people with mostly non-computational background. They use higher level languages such as Python/Perl/R and people often don't have…

> They use higher level languages such as Python/Perl/R and people often don't have the expertise or time to implement them for GPUs.

That's an interesting thought, has anyone ever attempted to get 'regular' programmers interested in this stuff as a 'game'/code golf kind of thing?

(Too many) Years ago one of the programming channels I was active in got distracted for 3 weeks while everyone tried to come up with the fastest way to search a 10Mb random string for a substring, not in the theoretical sense but in the actual how fast can this be done, that was the point I found out that Delphi (which was my tool of choice at the time) had relatively slow string functions in it's 'standard' library and ended up writing KMP in assembly or something equally insane, I got my ass handed to me by someone who'd written a bunch of books on C but eh it was damn good fun, it was also one of the first realizations I had just how fast machines (back then) had gotten and just how slow 'standard' (but very flexible) libraries could be.

Obviously the total scope of re-writing researchers code would probably be far far beyond that but if they could define the parts they know are slow with their code and some sample data I know a few programmers who would find that an interesting challenge.

Thanks for the response.

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