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

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

#31

Post by fortran77 »

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?

We always use dual (Xeon) systems here--because we need as many PCI lanes as we can get for 4 GPU systems. Getting enough PCI lanes is one main reason people run dual CPU systems.

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

#32

Post by tw04 »

It's extremely frustrating that none of the vendors are taking advantage of the built-in 10Gbe functionality of the new AMD chips. I've seen the same with the embedded options that compete with the Xeon-D. If anyone happens to work in that specific portion of the industry and can comment - I'd be curious if there's a reason other than motherboard mfgs just don't want to invest the time and effort so they slap a 1Gbe intel NIC on the mobo and call it a day.

Little stuff like that makes the AMD option (which SHOULD be cheaper) not cheaper for a lot of applications because now you've got server + NIC vs. just the server from intel.

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

#33

Post by xVedun »

So I was looking at the H12DSU-iN(https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/H12DSU-iN) which would seem to be another option. But it looks like the article implies that this would only be available to buy through getting an entire server with it. Although it looks like it could be possible that they sell it if you ask. The server they are going to release is here: https://www.supermicro.com/en/Aplus/system/1U/1024/AS-1024US...

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

#34

Post by kentonv »

tw04 wrote: post #32

It's extremely frustrating that none of the vendors are taking advantage of the built-in 10Gbe functionality of the new AMD chips. I've seen the same with the embedded options that compete with the Xeon-D. If anyone happens to work in that specific portion of the industry and can comment - I'd be curious if there's a reason other than motherboard mfgs just don't want to invest the time and effort so they slap a 1Gbe…

I recently researched EPYC 7002 boards available via retail channels and found four options: Supermicro, Asrock, Tyan, and Gigabyte. Of these, Asrock and Tyan both offer 10Gbe options. I ended up buying the Asrock board with 10Gbe from Newegg, but haven't hooked it up yet.

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E...

https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S8030_S8030GM4NE-2T

Though now that I look at it, the ASRock board is advertising "10G base-T by Intel® X550" -- is this different from the "built-in" functionality you mention?

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

#35

Post by tw04 »

kentonv wrote: post #34
tw04 wrote: post #32

It's extremely frustrating that none of the vendors are taking advantage of the built-in 10Gbe functionality of the new AMD chips. I've seen the same with the embedded options that compete with the Xeon-D. If anyone happens to work in that specific portion of the industry and can comment - I'd be curious if there's a reason other than motherboard mfgs just don't want to invest the time and effort so they slap a 1Gbe…

I recently researched EPYC 7002 boards available via retail channels and found four options: Supermicro, Asrock, Tyan, and Gigabyte. Of these, Asrock and Tyan both offer 10Gbe options. I ended up buying the Asrock board with 10Gbe from Newegg, but haven't hooked it up yet. https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E... https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S8030_S8030GM4NE-2T Though now that I look at it…

Yup. AMD has an on-die 10gbe controller that would show up as AMD. Anything that says Intel/Broadcom/realtek/etc are off chip and something the MFG put on the motherboard which adds cost.

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

#36

Post by AnotherGoodName »

rbanffy wrote: post #20
posix_me_less wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

Alder Lake from Intel will have a big and little core layout.

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

#37

Post by arminiusreturns »

nullc wrote: post #17

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 no…

Having built a few quad/dual cpu AMD Opteron systems since ~2013 with supermicro boards, I can tell you they are extremely sensitive to RAM brands/models and variations. Sometimes even RAM in the verified supermicro list would have issues.

On a side note, it was about then that I foresaw AMD's move towards high core counts and I love what they have been doing both on desktop and in the server space. Honestly though, I think if I were to try to do a newer amd server I might try to push a threadripper if the power profile fit the DC/colo instead of an epyc mostly because of the lanes and the fact that anything I'm doing on a system that powerful is going to have a 40gb+ mellanox and often in combination with GPUs.

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

#38

Post by leetcrew »

rcxdude wrote: post #25
raphaelj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it explain why we are seeing more improvements in rendering quality compared to physics and AI? As you said, AI and physics are inherently not really parallelizable while rendering is. AI and physics from the Athlon 64/Pentium 4 era (e.g. Half-Life 2, Crysis) are similar to what we get now, while visual quality greatly improved (better textures, more detailed objects, longer visibility range).

I think for AI the core reason is more sophisticated AI isn't particularly great from a game design POV. In a game, predictability is key, both because a) it allows the game designers to actually change the AI behaviour to balance it and be able to incorporate it into their game design, and b) if the players can't predict the AI they can't plan around it, and the ability to make a plan around a game's systems and try…

I think you're right; at least it jives with everything I've read about game dev. a common design goal in modern games is to never allow the game to fall into a state where forward progress is impossible due to a player action (excepting stuff like dying, of course). realistic physics simulation adds a lot of weird edge cases that need to be tested or hacked around. unlike cs:go, cs:source had lots of collidable physics props in the maps. they looked benign at first, but malicious players could use them to block important passages, make it impossible to defuse the bomb, or arrange them in ways that other players would get stuck in them.

here's a video of hl2 devs reacting to a speedrun of the game using many exploits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_PdwL5Y8g

kind of a long video, but there's a lot of interesting commentary on how much work it was to make the physics puzzles robust against unexpected player actions.

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

#39

Post by kentonv »

tw04 wrote: post #35
kentonv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently researched EPYC 7002 boards available via retail channels and found four options: Supermicro, Asrock, Tyan, and Gigabyte. Of these, Asrock and Tyan both offer 10Gbe options. I ended up buying the Asrock board with 10Gbe from Newegg, but haven't hooked it up yet. https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E... https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S8030_S8030GM4NE-2T Though now that I look at it…

Yup. AMD has an on-die 10gbe controller that would show up as AMD. Anything that says Intel/Broadcom/realtek/etc are off chip and something the MFG put on the motherboard which adds cost.

Hmm. I'm speculating, but I'd guess that tossing on the same external controller that they've put on a million other motherboards in the past probably actually saves cost, vs. designing something unique to expose the on-die controller.

I wonder what the performance impact is, though. I'd guess (very naively) that an on-die controller would perform better.

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

#40

Post by rbanffy »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #36
rbanffy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 con…

Alder Lake from Intel will have a big and little core layout.

It'll be fascinating to see how OSs deal with it.
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