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Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

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Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#91

Post by xxs »

lbill wrote: post #87

I get that Intel feels threatened by AMD. They are trying to impress the consumers... but bullshitting a demo is a very bad move! When a consumer decides to build a new PC, the characteristics of the product matter, but so does the reputation of the company that manufactures it. Right now Intel is putting too much effort into sketchy marketing practices: it undermines the actual work being done on their processors by…

That would be akin to i7 8086k on 7.2GHz... just add LN2. What they presented was an extreme overclocking area with insulation (due to subambient condensation), a one HP chiller that runs on a banned gas and a 4 second benchmark (seriously aside CB being free is not a true testament of overclocking prowess). Such a demo is as pointless as it is almost as practical as daily LN2 use.

I can imagine few cases where first-to-right-the-bell performance on a single core determines if you get a specific quote in HFT but that's that.

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#92

Post by Shivetya »

yomritoyj wrote: post #19

As an outsider to 'enterprise-grade' computing, I'm curious about situations where a high number of cores in a single processor would be superior to multiple processors with the same total energy draw sitting on a single motherboard? I can understand HPC applications where the high-speed interconnect on the chip would make a big difference. But in business applications where the cores are dedicated to running indepen…

I am on POWER8 at work, the wiki article [1] gives a great description of the advantages of many cores per chip though ours only has 6/12 cores. Part of our hardware configuration to migrate from POWER7 to POWER8 was to have 40g of memory per core available. I think POWER7 was 30g. We use this in the iSeries environment but we have pSeries machines with the same hardware running AIX/Oracle and POWER7 VMs running many *nix implementations.

In my usage case, the core/thread count really helps DB2's SQL implementation as an iSeries is effectively a giant DB2 database with extras added on. Hence query engine (SQE/CQE see old doc [2] on our machine can make great use of many cores/threads. When serving data to intensive batch applications as well as thousands of warehouse users and double that through web services access to data is the name of the game.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER8 [2] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_i5_54/rza... <- that is quite a few years old but describes the query engines available - CQE is 'legacy' and SQE is modern

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#93

Post by [deleted] »

jpalomaki wrote: post #66
solomatov wrote: post #2

AMD did a great job with Threadripper, making high end CPUs much more affordable. It's interesting that Intel doesn't lower their prices. What's the logic behind it?

Is there some maintained "bang for buck" chart available that would show how many units of certain performance metric one $ buys with different CPUs?

[deleted]

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#94

Post by xxs »

vbezhenar wrote: post #71
yomritoyj wrote: post #19

As an outsider to 'enterprise-grade' computing, I'm curious about situations where a high number of cores in a single processor would be superior to multiple processors with the same total energy draw sitting on a single motherboard? I can understand HPC applications where the high-speed interconnect on the chip would make a big difference. But in business applications where the cores are dedicated to running indepen…

If your cores are independent, you're blessed and can scale just by adding more cheap servers.

Yeah, embarrassing parallel stuff is not very interesting.

However when there is communication necessary - the length of the bus matters and having the dies next to each other does help a lot

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#95

Post by throwaway2048 »

devttyeu wrote: post #86
Kubuxu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already the case with Thread Ripper processors. They have multiple NUMA nodes inside one socket.

It actually presents itself to the system as a single node: On a TR 1920x system: $ numactl --hardware available: 1 nodes (0) node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 node 0 size: 32107 MB node 0 free: 20738 MB node distances: node 0 0: 10

windows is spectacularly poor at dealing with NUMA CPUS so threadripper is not displayed to the OS as NUMA.

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#96

Post by washadjeffmad »

devttyeu wrote: post #86
Kubuxu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already the case with Thread Ripper processors. They have multiple NUMA nodes inside one socket.

It actually presents itself to the system as a single node: On a TR 1920x system: $ numactl --hardware available: 1 nodes (0) node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 node 0 size: 32107 MB node 0 free: 20738 MB node distances: node 0 0: 10

That's not normal. Is it set to Channel/NUMA mode?

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#97

Post by pixelpoet »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #95
devttyeu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually presents itself to the system as a single node: On a TR 1920x system: $ numactl --hardware available: 1 nodes (0) node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 node 0 size: 32107 MB node 0 free: 20738 MB node distances: node 0 0: 10

windows is spectacularly poor at dealing with NUMA CPUS so threadripper is not displayed to the OS as NUMA.

Really? I've been thinking of getting a TR for some NUMA coding experience, and if Windows can't see that then it really sucks.

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#98

Post by zeusk »

xxs wrote: post #91
lbill wrote: post #87

I get that Intel feels threatened by AMD. They are trying to impress the consumers... but bullshitting a demo is a very bad move! When a consumer decides to build a new PC, the characteristics of the product matter, but so does the reputation of the company that manufactures it. Right now Intel is putting too much effort into sketchy marketing practices: it undermines the actual work being done on their processors by…

That would be akin to i7 8086k on 7.2GHz... just add LN2. What they presented was an extreme overclocking area with insulation (due to subambient condensation), a one HP chiller that runs on a banned gas and a 4 second benchmark (seriously aside CB being free is not a true testament of overclocking prowess). Such a demo is as pointless as it is almost as practical as daily LN2 use. I can imagine few cases where first…

> I can imagine few cases where first-to-right-the-bell performance on a single core determines if you get a specific quote in HFT but that's that.

That is actually the case from what I've heard, A lot of them buy consumer chips then disable all but one core and overclock it to the max.

Here is a guy from optiver talking about their process at CppCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#99

Post by theandrewbailey »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #38
chrisper wrote: post #35

I just recently replaced my old i7 920 in the homeserver with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600. Really like it so far. Price / performance is great. This is my first AMD since probably ever.... The two things I don't like is that their CPUs are pin based. It seemed kind of old fashioned after Intel CPUs. But this is really a minor thing. The other issue is memory compatibility is a bit finicky. Maybe it has to do with the CPU bei…

Ryzen chips scale in performance more than Intel when you overclock the RAM. Some part of the chip cache is more tightly coupled to the RAM latency, and my rampant speculation is that Intel doesn’t really care about memory bandwidth as much on the desktop anyways.

Ryzen CPUs divide the cores into two "core complexes" that communicate over a bus called infinity fabric. Probably to make the engineering easier, the memory controller and RAM speed is the same as the infinity fabric's speed. You'll get good gains up to 3000 MHz, less so with more.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11857/memory-scaling-on-ryzen...

http://www.legitreviews.com/ddr4-memory-scaling-amd-am4-plat...

Re: Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality

#100

Post by TwoNineA »

chrisper wrote: post #62
iamforreal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threadripper is lga ;-)

Putting a Threadripper in a homeserver is overkill. Besides I wanted to replace the i7 920, so that it won't be that hot anymore in that room (130W TDP vs 65W). I think a threadripper would achieve the opposite. Maybe I should just do seasonal CPUs... Threadripper in Winter and Ryzen in Summer.

> Putting a Threadripper in a homeserver is overkill.

Running 2 gaming VMs for me and my kids and one ubuntu WS on a 12 core Threadripper. Host is also doing file serving and runs Unifi controller.

One server to rule them all.

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