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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmmm, isn't deep learning starting to pick up for genetics? No idea if it is actually is, but everyone in DL seems to be talking about it, I thought I'd ask someone actually in bioinformatics :)

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Hmmm, isn't deep learning starting to pick up for genetics? No idea if it is actually is, but everyone in DL seems to be talking about it, I thought I'd ask someone actually in bioinformatics :)

I suspect DL will have a limited to modest role in the actual search / alignment part, and a lot more to do with the analysis part. This includes medical diagnosis, identifying regulatory patterns based on high throughput expression data, such stuff.

Not necessarily in comp. genetics / sequencing.. / the DNA stuff..

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

#93

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.

Sorry but for years the mantra was for a gaming pic to invest in a i5 or even an i3 and spend the extra money in a good GPU. But for some bizarre reason suddenly everything that is not performing as an i7 7770k is a "bad cpu for gaming". It's ridiculous.

Hell in 30 million households there are 8 jaguar x86 core gaming machines active now with an IPC that is probably (I assume) atrocious.

I build my i7 4770 4 years ago and the sad part is that it will probably still take a lot of time for it to become a bottleneck in 90% of the games.

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

#94
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.

The bigger E7 scratch the 200 W mark pretty hard and IBM already had POWER chips go beyond 200 W. However, cooling and power density are ... problematic. The same goes for accelerators. Supermicro will happily deliver you a 1U box with four pascals and two Xeon sockets, but there is no datacenter in the world were you can stuff 42 of those in a cabinet. [Which doesn't mean that these don't make sense]

However, high end systems don't lend themselves well to mass-deployment (i.e. scale out).

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

#95

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…

> 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented Yes, definitely drooling at this. Assuming a workload that doesn't eat too much CPU, this would make for a relatively cheap and hassle-free non-blocking 8 GPU @ 16x PCIe workstation. I wants one.

That does sound pretty spectacular, and really loud. What kind of case would you put that in? Would you work with ear protection?

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

#96

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.

Or when Intel HT first appeared. Or when Intel HT reappeared. Or when the first dual core appeared. Every time Windows needed updates to perform properly; Linux also needed patches to adjust scheduling for Zen and also received patches in many other instances.

This is nothing new or outstanding at all.

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

#97

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.

The scheduling decisions of Windows are not unknowable. It was entirely AMD's call to make a CPU that was effectively hyperthreaded but to still mark the cores as fully independent.

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

#98
I think Naples will be a very serious threat to Intel in the server market. As Ryzen benchmarks & reviews have shown, Zen really shines in heavy-multithreaded applications. The typical workload of a server.

Though I am kind of worried concerning memory access. Latency penalties when accessing non-local memory are very high on Zen CPUs due to the multi-die architecture design.

Does that mean we will finally see some serious interest in Shared-Nothing design and alike in the future ?

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

#99

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.…

Wouldn't Xeon phi be a good choice for that kind of usage?
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