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AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

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Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#71

Post by streb-lo »

leetcrew wrote: post #52
chx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very slight advantage of Intel CPUs in non-GPU constrained games (which means more or less 1080p only...). Very slight. Price/performance falls on Ryzen 3 so hard it's foolish to get an Intel for sure. There's no business reason on desktop or server for Intel for sure but there's so much inertia here which AMD needs to counter, it'll take years. Intel is down on the floor until 2021-2022 when their 7nm (whi…

> There's a very slight advantage of Intel CPUs in non-GPU constrained games (which means more or less 1080p only...). Very slight. Price/performance falls on Ryzen 3 so hard it's foolish to get an Intel for sure. it's not a huge advantage, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it foolish to buy intel at this point. if your only serious workload is gaming, intel seems like the obvious choice to me. you can ac…

At 1080p on 100hz+ monitors...

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#72

Post by mtgx »

clhodapp wrote: post #42
devonkim wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, "literally no reason"? Maybe because AMD can't keep up with demand for their new CPUs. I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially inflated ebay prices, the BIOS issues out of the gate are super annoying, and all of these factors are not necessarily technical or performance factors but the fact is that I can get a 9900K right now with mature UEFI firmware on them from reputable motherboard manufac…

What? Intel are currently in the midst of a massive ongoing supply shortage. Lack of ability to keep up with demand is at least as much an Intel problem as it is an AMD one at this point.

Intel's shortage is due to I tel's 10nm screwup not "high demand'.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#73

Post by indemnity »

steve19 wrote: post #15
snazz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be interested to see how long it will be before this devastates Intel's business. At the moment, there's literally no reason to buy an Intel desktop or server processor, so how many of the Intel purchases coming from OEMs and big cloud companies are just because of contracts that might let up in a few years?

I think the one reason is that if you need the best gaming desktop performance Intel still dominates, but that little extra performance is coming at a very steep price. My next desktop of will be AMD+Nvidia. Now if only I could avoid the Nvidia tax for deep learning...

I’ve looked at a lot of the benchmarks and the difference was in the ballpark of 1-5%, which isn’t dominating from my perspective... did I miss a few?

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#74

Post by wahern »

mktmkr wrote: post #20
frankchn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon already has 1st generation EPYC servers available: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ so I assume they will follow up as well.

Yeah but AMD should just beg Amazon to remove that instance type. It's hilariously slow. I don't know if Naples was just the beta of Rome or what but if you use it you won't like it.

Everybody seems to gloss over single-threaded performance. AMD is trading cores for clock rate.

I just put together an EPYC (Naples) 3201 (8 cores, no SMT, 2133MHz DDR4) and my circa 2012 Xeon E3-1230v2 (4 cores/8 threads, 1333MHz DDR3) is still faster because of the higher clock rate. More interestingly, the EPYC peaks at 45W at the outlet but the Xeon only hits ~55W. The EPYC advertises a 30W TDP, but IIRC the Xeon advertised a 65W TDP for the chip, so Intel substantially over performs.

I don't regret building the 3201, and I'm looking forward to the next generation of EPYC embedded.[1] But Intel still has superior design skills when it comes to power consumption and clock rates. I'd expect Intel to keep pressing this advantage, especially because at this point it's all they've got left.

[1] Anybody know when it's coming out? Are they gonna wait for Zen 3?

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#75

Post by paulmd »

jdietrich wrote: post #53
devonkim wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, "literally no reason"? Maybe because AMD can't keep up with demand for their new CPUs. I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially inflated ebay prices, the BIOS issues out of the gate are super annoying, and all of these factors are not necessarily technical or performance factors but the fact is that I can get a 9900K right now with mature UEFI firmware on them from reputable motherboard manufac…

>Maybe because AMD can't keep up with demand for their new CPUs. You're confusing bandwidth and latency. Ryzen 3000 launched a month ago, the 3900x outperformed expectations, so the initial shipments sold out faster than expected. You can't magic up stock out of thin air, so there's an inevitable lag between retailers reporting unusually high demand and AMD being able to deliver sufficient stock. The bandwidth questi…

> TSMC's 7nm process is stable, providing excellent yields and has plenty of available capacity

Yields in terms of getting lots of operational dies, sure, but one of the underlying problems here is chip quality. They have lots of chiplets but most of those chiplets are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for the 3900X.

In fact, even a lot of the chiplets sold as 3900X are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for 3900X, as well as elsewhere throughout their range. There are a lot of people finding their chips only boost to 50-200 MHz less than the advertised frequency of the chip.

Essentially, the boost algorithm now takes chip quality into account when determining how high it will boost. And most of the chips have silicon quality that is too poor to hit the advertised clocks, even on a single core, even under ideal cooling, etc etc.

Thus, AMD has the somewhat dubious honor of being the first company to make the silicon lottery apply not just to overclocking, but to their stock clocks as well. They really wasted no time before shifting to anti-consumer bullshit of their own; all they had to do was advertise the chips as being 200 MHz lower and everyone would have been happy, but they wanted to advertise clocks the chips couldn't hit.

And again, the underlying problem is chip quality - a lot of these chiplets can't boost to 4.3 or 4.4 GHz let alone 4.7. AMD simply can't yield enough 4.7 GHz chiplets to go around, even if the chiplets are nominally functional. The process may be "stable and providing excellent yields" but it's not stable and well yielding enough to meet AMD's expectations.

That's a major reason they're now introducing 3700 and 3900 non-X variations - that will allow them to reduce clocks and satisfy demand a bit better.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#76

Post by ta0943007 »

ken47 wrote: post #55
positr0n wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many small and large companies with relatively small compute needs (small meaning the own a small datacenter or two). Lots of the code they are running is _extremely_ legacy, and it may or may not be in their risk tolerance to switch vendors to save a hundred grand a year on CPU costs. Especially if they think like OP and believe Intel will match them again in just a few more years. Why rock the boat?

Of course such decisions are always political. But now with Google backing EPYC Rome, there is the political risk of not switching, and finding yourself in the Stone Age 5 years from now. There's a lot more incentive to explore EPYC than there was a day ago.

AMD's marketing department has addressed this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#77

Post by CitizenKane »

privateSFacct wrote: post #57

The thing is you can't even get Ryzen inside a Dell or Lenovo machine - so for businesses it's kind of hard to get onboard with they hype. So intel is going to keep up market share until AMD can get into some prebuilt systems.

The shift for this is likely going to take some time. The design cycle for business machines is glacially slow.

Even the first generation Ryzen CPUs are amazing for multitasking and general computing workloads. Zen 2 is quite a bit further beyond that, and is priced highly competitively. That's something that can translate into increased productivity along with savings, but it's going to take some time before OEMs are really ready to take the plunge rather than just dipping their toes in.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#78

Post by paulmd »

ken47 wrote: post #40
chx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very slight advantage of Intel CPUs in non-GPU constrained games (which means more or less 1080p only...). Very slight. Price/performance falls on Ryzen 3 so hard it's foolish to get an Intel for sure. There's no business reason on desktop or server for Intel for sure but there's so much inertia here which AMD needs to counter, it'll take years. Intel is down on the floor until 2021-2022 when their 7nm (whi…

Disagree. Why would it take years to counter this "inertia?" It's not like you're asking someone to give up a religion they've had from birth. They are being asked to make economic purchasing decisions, and the economics are crystal clear.

Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually supported. That kind of thing.

Also, software is very often the largest cost for these systems. It's not hard to find yourself paying $100k a month for an Oracle license. A one-time expense of $50k for one piece of hardware vs another is barely a blip.

And in fact that hardware is often charged based on spec. So if you have 4x as many cores on Epyc, you will pay more in software costs on a monthly basis as well. That, or the software will simply refuse to use them until you buy an upgrade, meaning those extra cores are sitting there doing nothing.

It's counterintuitive to people whose experience is building a gaming desktop at home, but hardware expenses are not necessarily a big part of total cost of ownership for enterprise operators.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#79

Post by DuskStar »

Apotheos wrote: post #59
DuskStar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have you been able to find them? PCPartPicker hasn't exactly shown great availability on the 3900X so far [0], Amazon is full of scalping [1] and Ebay... Well, $700+ is what I'm seeing there. This is the CPU that'll probably be powering my next build, so if you've got a source close to MSRP I'd love to hear it! 0: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/tLCD4D/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-36... 1: https://smile.amazon.com/AMD-Ry…

Check out the buildapcsales subreddit, that's where I consistently find the biggest discounts.

I don't care about getting it at a discount, I care about getting it at MSRP...

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#80

Post by brandmeyer »

ken47 wrote: post #40
chx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very slight advantage of Intel CPUs in non-GPU constrained games (which means more or less 1080p only...). Very slight. Price/performance falls on Ryzen 3 so hard it's foolish to get an Intel for sure. There's no business reason on desktop or server for Intel for sure but there's so much inertia here which AMD needs to counter, it'll take years. Intel is down on the floor until 2021-2022 when their 7nm (whi…

Disagree. Why would it take years to counter this "inertia?" It's not like you're asking someone to give up a religion they've had from birth. They are being asked to make economic purchasing decisions, and the economics are crystal clear.

There is momentum in the computing industry. The laptops and pre-assembled desktops being sold today are based on the OEM decisions that were made 1-2 years ago. Most corporate client computing machines are on a similar timeline. IT departments don't want to support a wide variety of hardware, so they standardize on a single model or variations within that model for years.

Warehouse-scale computing has similar budgets and timeframes. You don't decide how to re-build this month's 10k machines based on this month's benchmarks. You made the decision as far back as the supply chain required you to do it, maybe a year or more.

I'm sure that AMD's sales team has been telling their big customers about this generation's performance improvements for a while. But with their history, decision makers are going to discount the story a bit until they can see it in production silicon.

So the next few month's movements in AWS and the like will all depend on the extent that their decision makers were convinced many months ago.

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