AMD Unveils 'EPYC' Server CPUs, Ryzen Mobile, Threadripper CPU and Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPU (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Today, at its financial analyst day, AMD lifted the veil on a number of new products based on the company's Zen CPU architecture and next generation Vega GPU architecture. AMD CEO Lisa Su lifted a very large server chip in the air that the company now has branded EPYC. AMD is going for the jugular when it comes to comparisons with Intel's Xeon family, providing up to 128 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, which Su says "allows you to connect more GPUs directly to the CPU than any other solution in the industry." EPYC currently scales to 32 cores/64 threads per socket and supports up to 8-channel DDR4 memory (16 DIMMs per CPU, up to 4TB total memory support). AMD also confirmed the previously rumored Threadripper CPU, a 16-core/32-thread beast of a chip for the enthusiast desktop PC space. AMD's Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Radeon Technologies Group, also unveiled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a workstation and pro graphics card targeted at VR content creation, visualization and machine learning. Radeon Vega Frontier Edition offers 13 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, 25 TFLOPS of FP16 performance and is powered by 64 computer units and 16GB of HMB2 memory for about 480GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The cards are expected to ship in June but there was no word just yet on when consumer versions of Vega will hit. Finally, AMD also shared info on Ryzen Mobile, which will incorporate both the Zen CPU architecture and an integrated Vega GPU core. Compared to AMD's 7th generation APUs, AMD claims Ryzen Mobile will up CPU performance by 50 percent while offering 40 percent better graphics performance. AMD also claimed those gains will not come at the expense of battery life, with a 50 percent reduction in power consumption, which reportedly will pave the way for faster, longer lasting premium notebooks and 2-in-1 devices.

Comments

As long as you can turn...

[EzInKy]

...all of these security holes off, it's all good

I hope

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not an epyc fayl.

Re:I hope

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an answer to Intel's EPIC end of life. (EPIC was one of the acronyms used to describe Itanium's instruction set).
And yes, Itanic is an EPIC fail, literally.

Re:I hope

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're going to go Welsh, why not got all the way?

*Threadryppyr...

It's all good...

[Anonymous Coward]

Competition is great (and kudos to AMD)!

it had to be done

[future assassin]

http://totally.mofo.sexy/mofo/...

Re:it had to be done

[drinkypoo]

That is an epic fail. All I get back when I try to load that PNG is nothing.

Re:it had to be done

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont tell me thats your site

Re:it had to be done

[future assassin]

sure is, its my xonotic game server box
MoFo with a shutgun
MoFo running with rifles
MoFo gear grinder
MoFo gun fu hustle

Re:it had to be done

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss nyud.net:8090

Core Wars

[mentil]

Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.

I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

Re:Core Wars

[F.Ultra]

I would say that most servers most definitely use more than 4-core CPUs, it's only a small subsection of the Xeon line that have "as low" as 4-cores. 12-22 cores per CPU is the norm on the servers that I administrate which of course say nothing about all the millions of servers in the world, but anyway.

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need large amounts of memory, depending on how the lower-end Ryzen 9 are priced, getting one of them may actually work out cheaper. With the 8 core Ryzen 7 chip you're stuck with 4 DIMM slots due to being only dual channel as opposed to the Ryzen 9 that supports quad-channel configurations. For a fixed amount of RAM you can therefore get away with buying cheaper lower capacity modules. Of course the price of the motherboard is likely going to be higher for the Ryzen 9, so that has to be factored in too.

Re:Core Wars

[jawtheshark]

I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that

Then you need to listen to different people. Virtualization for example, needs as much cores as you can get. Transcoding media streams would be another example.

12 Core (2x due to HT) and the four sockets isn't unheard of.

I've seen servers like that basically running each core at 100% 24/7.

Re:Core Wars

[PixetaledPikachu]

I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

A "server" might only require 4 cores, but nowadays most of them run on hypervisor which runs on top of a cluster of multiple 32 - 80 cores boxes. So yeah, definitely not niche.

Re:Core Wars

[gravewax]

I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

Bullshit, such a huge portion of hardware now runs a virtualisation layer and that makes use of whatever you can throw at it.

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC because I used a mod point in this thread already. You 'hear' that most servers use only 4 core CPU's? You obviously do not get out much. 8+ cores is typical even in SMB settings, and it's not unusual to see 2-4 physical CPUs with 4+ cores each in servers these days.

Re:Core Wars

[Kjella]

Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

I'm quite sure the "enthusiast" line of CPUs only exists because all the work is pretty much done for servers. Even paired with extreme high-end graphics cards it's completely unnecessary and people who do the kind of photo / video / rendering / simulation work that can saturate 8+ cores are more prosumers than consumers. But it's a lot better for AMD to offer good value for some than to offer poor value for everyone and it's easier to justify buying something good you might not strictly need. I bought an 1800X even though a quad core would probably be enough, but it's four more cores on the rare occasions I need them, future proofing and a fuck you to Intel's 5% IPC improvements and $1000+ CPU prices.

I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

Well a lot of servers will naturally trend towards what's the most cost efficient, if we do 100 2x4 core servers or 50 2x8 core servers it's still 800 cores type of thing. I think your information is a little out of date though, if you look at say AWS dedicated pricing they offer servers from 2x10 cores to 4x18 cores. If you need less than that you'd just get a virtualized instance with four cores. They still have high frequency 4/6/8 core CPUs for applications with crazy per-core licensing requirements but they're now the niche, 10 is normal. But there's lots and lots of servers that can't just scale horizontally like that, mostly because "eventual consistency" isn't good enough because either you sold the airplane ticket or you didn't. It won't be for every use, but it has plenty uses.

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

That pretty much is it. Microsoft Licensing demands a minimum 2 16 cores per physical machine these days. I have exactly one machine - new - that is lower (4 cores) and that one does one thing only: backup storage, so it is not busy. Anything else - I look forward putting 32 cores (2x16) in and anything small is virtualized.

Re:Core Wars

[CptLoRes]

Don't underestimate the enthusiast gamer willingness to pay top dollar for things they 'don't really need'.

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

>Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these?
Who really needs these comments on every single fucking thread about a new multicore CPU?

Re:Core Wars

[DarkOx]

I guess the definition of server is important here. For example. I don't think there is any hardware left in our VMWare clusters at work with only 4 cores.

On the other hand I don't think there are more than a two or three database server VMs that have more than 4 virtual cores. Most VMs have two or four cores, even Exchange.

So if server is a logical host, than I bet the GPP is correct most have only 4 cores or fewer. If server means the metal and glass, not so much

Re:Core Wars

[DarkOx]

well sandbox games with lots and lots of NPCs are one of the few consumer work loads that simply can't get enough threads and really enjoy hardware with full cores and shared memory.

Re:Core Wars

[cheesybagel]

It seems nice to do kernel compiles or any other compilation of large applications. So it could be nice if you are a developer.

Re:Core Wars

[dbIII]

Nearly everyone has something to record digital video these days so there are a lot of "prosumers" who could use as many cheap cores as they can get.
Also most programmers are finally dragging themselves into the 1990s and becoming capable of writing stuff for more than one core. We are finally getting to the point where single core speed versus price is no longer what people are looking for in a home PC.

if we do 100 2x4 core servers or 50 2x8 core servers it's still 800 cores type of thing

For tiny virtual machines maybe, however cores per amount of shared memory matters a great deal for some applications. Even for those VMs there is a space, power and general overhead saving in having a lot of cores on the minimum number of motherboards so long as it doesn't get insanely expensive.
As for me, I'm looking forward to having 128 threads running on a relatively cheap two socket board at close to double the clock speed multi-socket Opteron and multi-socket Xeon systems have been running at up until now. Being stuck on not much more then 2GHz for what seems like a decade has been disappointing.

Re:Core Wars

[nojayuk]

Intel's higher-end Xeons can have as many as 22 cores (E5-2699 Broadwell) with 44 threads per socket. All they cost is money.

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Consumer computers don't need a lot of cores. They need enough (2-4, depending on the application) cores that emphasize higher clock speed. Single threaded performance is still king for user facing applications. So much so that asymmetric clocking and scheduling schemes that devote more power and thermal budget to a single core (That's handling whatever application is using at the moment) are extremely popular.

Many cores offers few benefits to the overwhelming gross majority of consumers. If that changes both Intel and AMD are positioned to offer many core products to consumers.

AMD's new products improve their single thread performance significantly and offer a very attractive product to consumers, but Intel's products still edge out AMDs on the highest end. AMD, though, is clearly pushing down Intel's prices across all product lines. This is a good thing.

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

On servers - 2-4 virtual cores for a VM is fairly normal, 4 cores for a physical server is significantly lower than normal.

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, 4-core servers are definitely not the norm. As being pointed out, virtualization requires a lots of core. Additionally these days with containerization taking us with a storm, it also requires many cores (as possible per node) in order to run many containerized apps per node. And my impression is that the dual socket Intel E5-26xx CPUs was sold well by Intel as we could witness an overflood of e.g Intel Xeon E5-2670 (v1) on the second hand market.
At my job, we just retired an HP DL980 G7, which was an 8 socket Intel X7560 8-core 24M. That's pretty unsual server too see given the 8 socket with pretty high TDP, requring a good amount of cooling and power. As well, another HP DL585 G6 AMD 4 socket was retired - Amd 8439SE 2,8GHz 6-core each, pretty much the only one i've seen here.
And today, for the HPC part, we have deployed ProLiant DL580 Gen9 with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7-8870 v3 @ 2.10GHz (but only 4 sockets of these 8 way supported CPUs) yielding 144 threads :)
So datacenters are welcoming more powereffient multi-core CPUs :)

 

Re:Core Wars

[thegreatbob]

I hear they also accept arms, legs, and kidneys.

Re: Core Wars

[tigersha]

Not necessarily. I know this not for production but I just assembled a dual 14 core machine with 128 GB of DDR4 ECC for about 1100 $. That would be a 56 thread machine. Dead quiet too. Done parts off EBay some BWare but it makes a killer workstation

Re:Core Wars

[AmiMoJo]

It will be interesting to see what motherboards area available for this socket. Hopefully some workstation/gamer oriented ones.

Re: Core Wars

[threephaseboy]

Was the RAM from eBay as well? I just built a dual xeon (e5-26xx v4) and putting in 128GB of DDR4 ECC ram alone would have been over $1k.

Re:Core Wars

[BrookHarty]

People are doing more home editing of family videos, most people won't have 800 dollar gpu's for hardware encoding.

So low end cpu's with lots of cores are needed.

For high end, nobody wants to spend 3-5k on a high core cpu, then 2x for a server. CPUs are too expensive right now because Intel has the monopoly.

Most my servers run around 8 to 12 core as blades, around 6 core for 1U to keep costs down. Both are 2 sockets.

Re: Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people still play PC games?

I thought that mostly stopped with windows vista.

Re:Core Wars

[barc0001]

> I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

????

Maybe if this was 1999 that would be true. For certain server tasks threading between more than a few cores isn't that important. However the server world has largely shifted to virtualization and in virtualization every core you can get your hands on is better. My builds for basic ESX servers at our datacenter for low intensity VMs are a pair of 6 core 12 thread CPUs loaded with 128GB of RAM, and that's for a machine that is intended to host at most 10 light duty VMs. For more intensive multithreaded tasks like database operations the more cores the better for both VM and physical.

Re:Core Wars

[negRo_slim]

Photoshop is more about fast single thread performance tbqh

Re: Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice info. Thank you for taking the time to write this.

Re:Core Wars

[ckatko]

If you think I want to pay $1600 for a Xeon, plus the surplus of price for the motherboard and half the other components, you're insane.

There has ALWAYS been a market for high-end "prosumer" products. We might as well be saying "Nobody would ever want $600 a 4K camcorder. A PROFESSIONAL will buy a $30,000 one."

Re:Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

the whole discussion is around physical CPU's not virtual cores.

Re:Core Wars

[gravewax]

Considering he was explicitly talking about the value of multi core PHYSICAL CPU's I stand by my comment of him talking out his arse. As you mentioned almost no one buys CPU's for servers these days with only 4 cores in any serious businesses or enterprises.

Re: Core Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighten up, Francis.

I can say it

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS is a game changer

Nice to see AMD coming good again

[Big Hairy Ian]

Hope they get some traction from this before the MBA's flush it all down the tubes again

Re:Nice to see AMD coming good again

[Anonymous Coward]

This is definately a welcome step forward, specs actually enticing. I really hope the can take the top of the range away from intel. cpu development has been basically stagnent for ten years (yes i know things have gotten 'better', but 10 year old chips are still competetive).

Dont hold up much hope, dont expect they will, but at least all hope is not lost.

Re:Nice to see AMD coming good again

[petermgreen]

Do we have any independent evidence that this new architecture is any good or just AMDs marketing?

Re:AMD, As Always, A Losing Proposition

[MojoKid]

Actually, you have that quite backwards. They've spent the most R&D for these high-end enthusiast chips, on the data center EPYC/Naples architecture which is where the profit margins are. It just so happens that a subset of these chips, when pared down a bit, also works for high-end enthusiast desktop. Ryzen 7 and 5 were developed for desktop. ThreadRipper was born out of Naples/server/EPYC arch, which as you noted is where the money is.

Re:AMD, As Always, A Losing Proposition

[cheesybagel]

It also means that as a home user you can develop for one of these server architectures on your own workstation and expect it to run pretty much the same way on the server. Seems nice to me.

Boggled and Blown

[eyepeepackets]

Four (4) terabytes of RAM, ohhhhhh...I need a nap now.

More PCI-E then intel! it makes Kaby Lake-X joke

[Joe_Dragon]

More PCI-E then intel! with and quad channel for all cpus it makes Kaby Lake-X look like an sad joke.

Intel is likely stuck dumping Kaby Lake-X and maybe the lower end Kaby Lake-X with limited pci-e.

Also consider the thread count as you nap

[dbIII]

And that's only per socket! Imagine 8TB and 128 threads!

Re:Also consider the thread count as you nap

[Anonymous Coward]

But is it enough to make debug build of webkit?

too bad this only for spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

ya too bad this is only for the spyware windows ten

intel needs more pci-e!

[Anonymous Coward]

16 + 4 DMI is way to low with pci-e SSD's and USB 3.X.

Management Engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do AMD CPUs have a Management Engine, a la Intel's?

Re:Management Engine?

[sexconker]

Yes, they call it the PSP. Platform Security Processor, I believe. I think there's some ARM core at it's... core.
The recently committed to taking a serious look at the calls for them to either offer a way to verifiably disable it or to open source it. This was before the AMT fiasco hit, so I imagine they're motivated to actually do so to capitalize on the matter (assuming they are actually free to do so).

AMD needs an imaginative proofreader

[ChrisMaple]

Doesn't AMD realize that threadripper can be pronounced "3 dripper" ?

Re:AMD needs an imaginative proofreader

[governorx]

Yes, you are correct. All you need to do is throw out all language convention and then it will become 3dripper.

You should get a medal for participation.

Re:AMD needs an imaginative proofreader

[ArchieBunker]

Therapist or the rapist. You decide.

Re:AMD needs an imaginative proofreader

[Anonymous Coward]

let's not forget penisland

Re:AMD needs an imaginative proofreader

[sexconker]

Analrapist?

Re:AMD needs an imaginative proofreader

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I too once played on an elementary school playground.
Threadripper 3Dripper Thirdripper Turdripper

Introducing the new AMD Turdripper.

Re:AMD needs an imaginative proofreader

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Psycho the rapist.

don't run windows on bare metal and hyper-v sucks

[Joe_Dragon]

don't run windows on bare metal and hyper-v sucks.

Why does your backup system need to run bare metal windows?

gamers / enthusiasts cpus are workstions / serv

[Joe_Dragon]

gamers / enthusiasts cpus are really based workstations / servers needs.

Even on the desktop AMD was good to add pci-e for storage and USB 3.1 to cpu die vs putting that on the DMI bus. The 16 for video is a little bit to much for 1 card other then maybe an very high end one. And spitting that to X8 X8 for dual GPU works.

Intel's Skylake-X with lower pci-e on some cpu's on boards setup for the full pci-e lane count is just raping you and it stated when AMD as not doing so good!

and Kaby Lake-X with dual channel and 16 pci-e on the same boards is an sad joke was likely in the works long before AMD came back.

Next round Intel on the desktop needs at least 20-24 pci-e + DMI or 16-20 with much faster DMI and or add usb 3.X to cpu die with I3 range 2-4 cores. I5 range 4+HT or 6 cores. I7 range at least 6 cores + HT

Not enough PCI-E in consumer Threadripper

[Khyber]

Sorry, I want to be able to actually saturate all three of my GPUs while still having enough PCI-E lanes for my M.2 drives and have some room left for expansion (additional USB 3.0 add-on cards, etc.)

80 lanes minimum, please.

Re:Not enough PCI-E in consumer Threadripper

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Some of us want the best performance we can reasonably obtain for our desktop/gaming rigs. Please give us more lanes!

intel has taken the Gold and Platinum medal for na

[Joe_Dragon]

intel has taken the Gold and Platinum medal for nameing new cpus.

I'll take The Rapists for $200!

[Joe_Dragon]

I'll take The Rapists for $200!

Competition is great . . . for us.

[nehumanuscrede]

The non-typical* consumer may not need it today, but a processor like this is good for many years. Especially since the only thing really pushing hardware in the non-server department these days is VR. ( As long as Zenimax doesn't destroy everything with litigation greed )
Give me a motherboard where I can put two ( or more ) of these into play and things will really get interesting.

*non-typical = your 3D artists, gamers, video production and the like.

While watching Adobe Premiere Pro chew on resizing half an hour worth of 4k video ( Took two hours to convert on a quad core btw ) I was thinking how nice it would be to have a much larger processor to handle such things. Two days later, AMD makes this announcement.

All AMD needs to do now is keep reminding people of the Intel Management Engine debacle ( and the lack of any ability to disable it ) and watch how fast folks switch teams.

Re:Competition is great . . . for us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminding people of the IME won't do AMD any good, as they implement their own version of it called the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) that's just as bad.

Radeon is shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

F*ck you, AMD.

Re:don't run windows on bare metal and hyper-v suc

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess would be tape. You get more perf if you run tape drives as close to the metal as possible.

Re: More PCI-E then intel! it makes Kaby Lake-X jo

[Brockmire]

Please proofread and learn proper usage of "an". Your posts hurt to read.