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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

#71

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…

Let's hope this isn't niagra again: it needs to have decent clock speeds as IPC is still worth something today. But yes, I totally agree, this is an exciting chip.

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 up to 8 fine-grained threads in total. That made it more like a barrel processor.

Starting with the T3, two of the threads could be executed simultaneously. Then, starting with the T4, sparc added dynamic threading and out-of-order execution. Later versions are even faster and clock speeds have also risen considerably.

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

#73
post #49
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's opportunity cost to consider. Google has Skylake-E now which is not even available at retail yet.

Well, it also seems that Intel prioritized its customers. If I were Amazon or Microsoft (the rumors said Google and Facebook were the priority customers), I would get Naples just to spite Intel (it doesn't hurt that AMD's Naples likely offers better perf/$, too, though): https://semiaccurate.com/2016/11/17/intel-preferentially-off...

Really dumb move by Intel, this what happens when a company becomes too arrogant. They knew about Zen but probably just laughed it off as nothing. At the high level business decisions, things like this matter just as much as technical details like performance/$. Hard to believe they were dumb enough to piss off Amazon AWS, MS Azure, and others.

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

#74

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 thermal design power is the maximum amount of heat generated by a computer chip or component that the cooling system in a computer is designed to dissipate in typical operation. TDP =/= power consumed

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

#75

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 think there is plenty of room for GPU usage in bioinformatics, but there are some barriers that prevent it from gaining prevelance, such as cost vs cpus, and lack of updates (example, gpu-blast is still 1.1, blast is 1.2).

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naples is based on Ryzen which, if you look at early benchmarks, is beating the competition on all fronts except gaming (suspectedly due to software optimisation and motherboard issues).

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.

Ryzen is highly-efficient up to 3.3GHz:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technica...

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's quite rare to find GPUs being used in genetics.

//OT::

Your user name: a fan of the cre-lox system, or the enzyme itself?

Cool uid!

In my past life, I've used flp/frt & cre/lox; and studied mismatch repair enzymes. And topoisomerases.. :)

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's quite rare to find GPUs being used in genetics.

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.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A Google searches indicates that this is not accurate.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-libra…

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

Very much this. Which is why I ended up theorycrafting that the AMD many core CPU's would be so useful.

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