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AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

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Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#71

Post by zrm »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons. That said, this really does look like a pret…

> Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons.

That isn't really what happened though. It was a combination of two things. One was this:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-wit...

The other was that it happened around the time when CPU frequencies hit the power wall. That hit the Pentium 4 especially hard, which gave AMD the advantage, but Intel's anti-competitive behavior prevented AMD from capitalizing on it. Meanwhile Intel knew the Pentium 4 was too power hungry for laptops, so they kept iterating on the Pentium M, which is what became Core. It was designed for power efficiency rather than clock speed right when clock speeds unexpectedly started getting limited by power. It wasn't expected to be faster than the Pentium 4 (at half the power), but it was, so Netburst got canceled and suddenly Intel had the advantage.

The combination of the two things meant that AMD never had a chance to really profit from its investment in Sledgehammer, which meant they didn't have the money to put into R&D and fell behind for a decade.

There is no guarantee something else won't go wrong, but the chance of that same confluence of factors happening again seems pretty unlikely.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#72

Post by Waterluvian »

vondur wrote: post #54

I’ve been wondering lately if the reason for the Mac Pro replacement not coming out until 2019 may be due to Apple switching to the 7nm refresh of the AMD ThreadRipper. That would certainly make for some interesting news.

I read somewhere that Apple has been trying to avoid uttering the word "Intel" in their latest presentations. If that's true, maybe it lends a bit of vague support to your idea.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#73

Post by bitL »

The_rationalist wrote: post #68
captaincoont wrote: post #48

I wish AMD could catch up in single core performance as despite having huge potential in offline parallel processing it falls short in real-time applications.

No it doesn’t fall short, Intel single core lead is Btw, zen 2 will take the lead at every metrics.

Rumors are Zen 2 is 13% faster on average than Zen+.

Looking at fastest single-threaded CPUs:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

The fastest Zen+ is 2950x at position 85, roughly as fast as Broadwell C, with score of 2230. Now 13% more would give it 2520, roughly matching Haswell 4790k (number 15).

So no, it's not likely going to lead every single metrics.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#75

Post by PedroBatista »

BonesJustice wrote: post #58

Oh man, the licensing costs for any “per core” software are going to be insane :D

A few years ago many companies changed it to "per socket".

Now with 64 cores in one socket things got even weirder, but then again, those licenses always have been in some parallel universe.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#76

Post by ChuckMcM »

commentor10 wrote: post #53
ChuckMcM wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand the comment. I've used dual parity RAID systems for over a decade now and they work superbly when rebuilding even during a drive failure. (aka in 'degraded' mode). I typically run them in 22 drive sets because that is how many drives fit on a single NetApp drive shelf.

With 32 drives you should have at least 3 failure tolerances. Might even want to plan some hot spares in there. The idea is to build a large file system that won't die and take your data with it - nor introduce downtime (with a suitable failure tolerance). And of course, have an offsite backup for actually backing up your data.

Agreed with the hot spare. Typical RAID reconstruction on these systems is limited to available I/O operations (IOPS) after accounting for the number needed to meet performance goals. If these are the only drives on a fairly beefy system you have lots of extra IOPS available so you should be able to reconstruct a drive in under a day if you wanted to. There are the usual caveats about age related failures happening in groups but at least anecdotally and from what I know from the folks who work in NetApp customer support usage across a much larger population, it is quite reliable.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#77

Post by jaas »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #56
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons. That said, this really does look like a pret…

The older you are, the better you execute things. Look at AMD 2 years ago versus now

Lots of companies get older and lose ability to execute. AMD was very old already when Opteron happened.

The age of the company in a case like this is irrelevant. What matters is current management and staff and market context.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#78

Post by ChuckMcM »

bakul wrote: post #26
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons. That said, this really does look like a pret…

What would you do with such a system that is innovative and not just more of the same?!

I've been noodling on what it would take to build a generally conversational dialog machine.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#79

Post by fipple »

atq2119 wrote: post #69
fipple wrote: post #64

How are 7nm and 14nm mixed? Are they made separately and then... attached together? Isn’t a die made from a single wager “burned” with a single wavelength?

You're mixing up a bunch of things. Each wafer, which is the disk on which many dies are produced, is produced using a single technology process. This means that Rome's IO dies (14nm process) are produced on separate wafers from the core dies (7nm process). The wafers are sliced into dies, the dies are tested and binned separately, and sufficiently good dies are then packaged together into a single package that goes…

Yeah, I guess I never thought about putting multiple dies in one package. How are they wired up anyways?

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#80

Post by hak8or »

walrus01 wrote: post #36

Not particularly related to Rome, but what you can buy right now for a single socket system, AMD is far ahead of Intel for reasonably priced workstations or small servers with a huge amount of I/O. One threadripper CPU has 64 pci express 3.0 lanes. One lane is 985MB/s. Working with a $399 threadripper motherboard that has four x16 physical slots, it can accommodate four Intel x710-4 10GbE four port NICs (each electri…

I looked into this in the past but had issues finding information about processing overhead for routing (or even switching) that much data. Could a, say, 2950 handle routing 40 gigabit worth of data over a network, assuming no crypto?
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