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

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61–70 of 169 posts

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

#61

This is what I have really been looking forward to. I theorycrafted a more ideal system for the genetics work a former employer was doing, but didn't get to build it until after I had left there. A quad 16 core opteron system for a total of 64 cores (for physics calculations in comsol). I think that there is more potential use for high actual core count servers than many people realize, so I can't wait to build one.…

Out of curiosity, I thought that genetics was the domain of gpus?

I did sequence-based bioinformatics back around 2006 or so.

Very few of the operations used GPU. Things may have changed since I was working there, but the work at the time wasn't suited for a GPU architecture.

Initial step was sequence cleanup, which is a hidden markov model executed over a collection of sequences of varying length, so hard to parallelize. Sequence annotation is embarassingly parallel on a per-library basis (each sequence can be annotated independently of the other), but the computational work is fuzzy string matching, which is once again hard to GPU-ize. Another major computational job was contig assembly, which is somewhat parallelizable (pairwise sequence comparisons), but once again involves fuzzy string matching so not GPU-izable.

So that's just sequence genetics. Don't know if GPUs are used in other areas.

Lots of cores, lots of threads, and lots of main memory. That was the key.

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

#62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes but four modules of ryzen to make this beastly naples chip isn't going to be clocked at the same frequencies. the top end intel chips have TDPs of 165W but 4 ryzen chips at 3.6ghz have a tdp of 65w a piece and you're not going to see a 260W server chip if you want to sell into the datacenter.

I can see a use case for it, as long as it delivers on performance. No one minds high TDP, as long as it offers a performance advantage. Hell, some servers have 4-8 Titans in them, and no one is complaining about their TDP. If a 260W CPU TDP is justified by the performance, no one will care.

maybe for single server or academia setups, but in datacenters TDP and power consumption absolutely do matter.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes but four modules of ryzen to make this beastly naples chip isn't going to be clocked at the same frequencies. the top end intel chips have TDPs of 165W but 4 ryzen chips at 3.6ghz have a tdp of 65w a piece and you're not going to see a 260W server chip if you want to sell into the datacenter.

The Ryzen 7 1800X has a TDP of 95W and beats the 140W Intel i7-6900K by 4% in performance. They've made some huge jumps in power efficiency. I don't know if AMD will make a new architecture or not, but I can't see why they wouldn't just release 32 Ryzen cores side-by-side and underclocked at the stock configuration.

The 1800X will use 130W+ in the same scenarios as the 6900k. AMD just seems to be defining TDP differently.

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

#65

I think Naples is a very exciting development, because: - 1S/2S is obviously where the pie is. Few servers are 4S. - 8 DDR4 channels per socket is twice the memory bandwidth of 2011, and still more than LGA-36712312whateverthenumberwas - First x86 server platform with SHA1/2 acceleration - 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented All in all Naples seems like a very interesting platform for throughput-intensive…

32 cores in one socket may also take a bite out of some servers that are currently 2 sockets.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes but four modules of ryzen to make this beastly naples chip isn't going to be clocked at the same frequencies. the top end intel chips have TDPs of 165W but 4 ryzen chips at 3.6ghz have a tdp of 65w a piece and you're not going to see a 260W server chip if you want to sell into the datacenter.

The Ryzen 7 1800X has a TDP of 95W and beats the 140W Intel i7-6900K by 4% in performance. They've made some huge jumps in power efficiency. I don't know if AMD will make a new architecture or not, but I can't see why they wouldn't just release 32 Ryzen cores side-by-side and underclocked at the stock configuration.

I've seen benchmarks showing the 95w number is very unrealistic and that it actually uses more like the Intel processor under certain loads

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

#67
post #62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see a use case for it, as long as it delivers on performance. No one minds high TDP, as long as it offers a performance advantage. Hell, some servers have 4-8 Titans in them, and no one is complaining about their TDP. If a 260W CPU TDP is justified by the performance, no one will care.

maybe for single server or academia setups, but in datacenters TDP and power consumption absolutely do matter.

And that was my point as well.

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

#68

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.

AdoredTV has a pretty objective video on this subject[1]. TL;DW he expects it to move past Intel perf in the future - based on how an older AMD chip is now beating a then-better Intel chip.

My opinion: if Microsoft is able to pivot the Scorpio over to the Ryzen (or indeed, any CPU with more than 4C/8T) it will drastically alter the lowest common denominator in terms of what game developerss target - i.e. we'll see games moving towards more modern threading architectures (e.g. futures/jobs as-per Star Citizen, which more thoroughly exploit CPU resources).

Furthermore, there is hearsay evidence that supports AMDs claims. Ashes of the Singularity currently runs better on Intel but the developers claim:

[2]> Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its 8-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive.

In addition to that, if you look at the CPU usage/saturation alongside the benchmarks (13:08 in [1]) it's strikingly obvious that the CPU is not the bottleneck - Intel is upwards of 90% on all cores while the Ryzen hovers around ~60%. I'm holding my credit card close until the aforementioned optimizations and rumored bios patches land, but I'm willing to give AMD a little benefit of the doubt - what we're seeing largely matches what they are saying.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ylvdSnEbL50 [2]: http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-launch-aftermath-gaming-perfor...

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

#69
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ryzen 7 is definitely not suited for gamers" The underperformance in gaming was tracked down to software issues according to AMD. Namely: - bugs in the Windows process scheduler (scheduling 2 threads on same core, and moving threads across CPU complexes which loses all L3 cache data since each CCX has its own cache) - buggy BIOS accidentally disabling Boost or the High Performance mode (feature that lets the process…

> bugs in the Windows process scheduler Blaming windows is just a desperate excuse from AMD to justify its lack of performances. Don't be tricked by that. It's possible -and rather common- that there are motherboard issues on the first generation of MB, which again, is not a a valid excuse but a bad thing that desperately needs fixing from AMD and a sign that it's still in testing phase.

Were you around for when bulldozer came out? There were huge problems with Windows task scheduling that were later fixed with updates.

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

#70
post #23
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?

"Ryzen 7 is definitely not suited for gamers" The underperformance in gaming was tracked down to software issues according to AMD. Namely: - bugs in the Windows process scheduler (scheduling 2 threads on same core, and moving threads across CPU complexes which loses all L3 cache data since each CCX has its own cache) - buggy BIOS accidentally disabling Boost or the High Performance mode (feature that lets the process…

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