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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

#81

Post by cyphar »

paulmd wrote: post #78
ken47 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sup…

> 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.

That shouldn't be a problem. They are both fundamentally the same architecture (amd64) and any CPU-specific features are already opportunistically handled by the vast majority of software because otherwise you wouldn't be able to run the same code on different versions of Intel's CPUs.

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

#82

Post by tooop »

gwicks56 wrote: post #32
snazz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Find nearest Micro Center, see wonderful deal, spend more than you came in looking to spend, repeat. Unless you don’t have any kind of physical computer store near you, I don’t see why buying it on eBay would be useful.

Damn, I have been desperately trying to get one since launch. Think the USA is getting them all, and the rest of the world is getting screwed. I paid on launch day, my store is getting 2 3900x's this month, they have 78 people who have paid in full and are waiting.

I am in Europe and a reputable local online shop shows that i can get it after a week for 690$ but that is including VAT (575$ without VAT).

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

#83

Post by paulmd »

cyphar wrote: post #81
paulmd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sup…

> 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 s…

OSs are not most software and are not designed around the instruction set changing underneath them during normal operation. Why would they be? You can't physically swap out a processor while the system is booted and you can't swap a virtual processor either.

It works fine if you shut everything down and reboot the system, but that is often undesirable.

The whole point of the feature is that the VM can be migrated around different physical hardware without having to interrupt service. It just suddenly is running on a different host instance. But it has to be the same type of processor... or at least the same feature set. "Close" is not good enough, it needs to be a 1:1 match.

You can manually disable features until you have found the lowest common denominator between the feature sets of the different processors. But obviously the more types of processors you have in your cluster, the more problematic this is. In very few clusters will you find servers of mixed types, you buy 10,000 of the same server and operate them as a "unit". You don't just add in servers after the fact, sometimes you don't even replace failed servers.

And that hardware decision will have been made years ago, very often. The server market is hugely inertial, it's nothing like you putting together a build one evening and then going out and buying parts and putting it together.

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

#85

Post by blihp »

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.

People are creatures of habit. There are people still using Yahoo! for no reason other than it's what they are used to. For many people, buying Intel is the same thing. It takes years to win those people over. (and usually the argument that ultimately wins them over is 'everyone else is using it', rather than the economic one) Those of us who are early adopters jump ship as soon as it's obvious there's a better option, the masses move at a much more glacial pace.

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

#86

Post by ken47 »

brandmeyer wrote: post #80
ken47 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 budget…

Exactly right. AMD has not only been telling their big customers about it -- they've been letting their customers test it. Google has been testing Rome for months, and have decided to move forward with a full-scale deployment, not only for their own data centers, but for their public cloud. They are using Rome in their production servers today.

Like it or not, Google's stamp of approval carries a tremendous weight in this industry. And if that's not good enough for you, Microsoft and AWS are stepping up their deployments of EPYC as well.

As a result, a lot of smaller companies will now require a much lower standard of due diligence when approving an EPYC Rome deployment.

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

#87

Post by twotwotwo »

twotwotwo wrote: post #5

Page 4 ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/4 ) lines up AMD's prices, core counts, and frequencies with Intel's. AT says all these have 128 PCIe 4 lanes and support up to 4TB RAM aper socket. Intel's own competitive analysis figured competition in servers "is likely to be the most intense in about a decade" ( https://www.techpowerup.com/256842/intel-internal-memo-revea... ). Sounds about righ…

Two more thoughts:

- A slide in AMD's presentation suggested 64C would cost $7k, but that's for the top two-socket-capable version. If you "just" want 64C, not 2x64C, there is a $4.4k single-socket 64C part. Or if the RAM/PCIe capacity of two sockets is useful, you can get two 32C parts, and those start at $2k each. Makes pricing look better at 64 cores.

- Since they turned on most everything on the I/O die for all parts, seems possible to build boxes with lots of RAM and I/O but as little as 8C or 16C ($500 or $1k) of CPU. Of course, balance tends to be nice, but the ability to make it as lopsided as you want could be relevant for applications that are very RAM/IO heavy (caching), or if you're running a commercial DB where you pay by the core. Neat.

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

#88

Post by ken47 »

blihp wrote: post #85
ken47 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People are creatures of habit. There are people still using Yahoo! for no reason other than it's what they are used to. For many people, buying Intel is the same thing. It takes years to win those people over. (and usually the argument that ultimately wins them over is 'everyone else is using it', rather than the economic one) Those of us who are early adopters jump ship as soon as it's obvious there's a better optio…

Sure, people are creatures of habit. But this isn't Yahoo vs Google we're talking about. People are going to be throwing down hundreds or thousands of dollars per CPU, and the differences are not remotely subjective.

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

#89

Post by bri3d »

mktmkr wrote: post #34
aeleos wrote: post #33

> "We designed this part to compete with Ice Lake, expecting to make some headway on single threaded performance. We did not expect to be facing re-warmed Skylake instead. This is going to be one of the highlights of our careers" Looks like AMD expected Intel would actually start to fight back a few years ago when AMD started the Zen and Rome cores, and AMD has been running full steam ahead since then. Meanwhile, in…

In the “what a time to be alive” category, this is essentially a repeat of Opteron.

Zen was originally led by the same person as Opteron/K8/Hammer, Jim Keller... who now works for Intel.

I think the situation is a bit different this time around though as AMD’s bet on TSMC is paying off in a major way while Intel continue to flounder in the fab space.

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

#90

Post by Teknoman117 »

devonkim wrote: post #43
chubbyrabbit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially inflated ebay prices. I'm experiencing the opposite. There has been so many deals on 3900X that I have to constantly tell myself I don't need an upgrade.

I am genuinely intrigued. I've been going to my local Microcenters in the DC VA area for weeks now and they said they have gotten ZERO shipments in since release day of the 3900X and have a couple 3700X maybe on shelves. This doesn't necessarily completely invalidate my point though - distribution by AMD is clearly needing some work when one region is drowning in 3900X processors and a very wealthy metro area has non…

Odd. I was in Microcenter on Tuesday and they had a few 3900X's in the case. When I was there closer to launch, there weren't any and they told me that people would come in and ask for them before they even hit the shelf.
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