AMD Looks To 'Crush' Intel's Xeon With New Epyc Server Chips (extremetech.com)

AMD has unveiled the first generation of Epyc, its new range of server processors built around its Zen architecture. Processors will range from the Epyc 7251 -- an eight-core, 16-thread chip running at 2.1 to 2.9GHz in a 120W power envelope -- up to the Epyc 7601: a 32-core, 64-thread monster running at 2.2 to 3.2GHz, with a 180W design power. From a report: These chips are built on the same fundamental architecture as the company's Ryzen CPU cores, and they're aimed at the incredibly powerful data center market. AMD's 32-core / 64-thread Epyc CPUs combine four eight-core dies, each connected to the other via the company's Infinity Fabric. According to AMD, this approach is significantly cheaper than trying to pack 32 cores into a single monolithic die -- that approach would leave the company potentially throwing away huge amounts of silicon during its production ramp. The Infinity Fabric is deliberately over-provisioned to minimize any problems with non-NUMA aware software, according to Anandtech. Each 32-core Epyc CPU will support eight memory channels and two DIMMs per channel, for a total maximum memory capacity of 2TB per socket, or 4TB of RAM in a two-socket system. Each CPU will also offer 128 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 support -- enough to connect up to six GPUs at x16 each with room left over for I/O support. That's in a one-socket system, mind you. In a two-socket system, the total number of available PCI Express 3.0 lanes is unchanged, at 128 (64 PCIe 3.0 lanes are used to handle CPU -- CPU communication). Anandtech has a longer writeup with more details on the CPUs power efficiency and TDP scaling. Further reading: ZDNet, press release.

Comments

Hopefully not too late

[thegreatbob]

Who knows what Intel might have in their back pocket after chilling around for half a decade? I know benchmarks aren't everything, but at least there's some hope for them wiggling their way back into the server market.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knows what Intel might have in their back pocket after chilling around for half a decade?

Haven't we already seen some indication that Intel's been caught flat footed? Their response to Ryzen has been strange and erratic with confusing product launches (or at least announcements...) the tech media is still trying to untangle, $1500+ 175W i9s that hardly anyone will buy and other bad ideas.

I expect their marketing people will sperg out and invent some bizarre new name for embiggened chips based on existing process tech and blow a few million on the "launch event."

The fact is AMD has caught up. So now there is competition and Intel has to compete. If Intel does have anything "in their back pocket" they'll have to use it to hold the market share they've earned. If not then they'll have to compete on price etc. It's all good. We win either way.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[war4peace]

Judging by their knee-jerk response, no they don't.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[mtmiller100]

I've gotten the impression that Intel has lots of stuff prepped, and ready to deploy, in response to any threat by AMD.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[gweihir]

Intel very likely has nothing. They made huge profits being fat and lazy and they expected that to continue. Remember that comparable small AMD has declassed Intel before. Intel may well need several years to catch up.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who knows what Intel might have in their back pocket after chilling around for half a decade?"

A few billion in cash, probably.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[tlhIngan]

I've gotten the impression that Intel has lots of stuff prepped, and ready to deploy, in response to any threat by AMD.

Yes, but only to maintain, but not eliminate AMD.

You see, Intel's goal is to keep AMD where they are. They WANT AMD to have a foothold in the server market where the money is. But not too big a foothold.

For Intel, AMD"s position is perfect - they are the distant second and will nip at the heels like an eager puppy. Which is where Intel wants them. Too powerful and they have competition, too weak and AMD could die off and unleash all sorts of government investigations, regulations, anti-monopoly rulings and other things. Worse yet, AMD's patents that are cross-licensed with Intel might go to ARM or others forcing Intel to pay or cross-license.

So Intel needs AMD to be around, but not too powerful nor too weak. They could crush AMD with what they have, but they won't, so they just need to deploy "just enough" to counter the threat without actually harming AMD.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[Ramze]

Don't know where you got that impression.

Intel already showed its hand with the i9 series they shoved out the door as a knee-jerk reaction to AMD. It's a mess.

They've basically taken existing Xeon cores and prepped them for consumer use -- but with crazy options for the sockets for the new pin counts needed -- making motherboard manufacturers have to deal with different CPUs all for the same slot type, but some have different feature sets meaning it's hard to make a mobo that works with all of the chips that fit that slot type.

Most of the i9 series is vaporware -- sure, they have the specs laid out, but they only have a butchered Xeon to fit the new slot type to test with so far.

AMD is ready to roll out and has chips available today for Ryzen and soon Epyc. Meanwhile, Intel likely will take a year or more to offer i9s. Sure, Intel will eventually switch production lines and tailor the chips better and come out on top eventually... but, they were caught with their pants down on this.

Intel's solution is basically to offer the Xeons as consumer-level products with more cores and a different pin count (but without ECC ram compatibility) to match the higher level Ryzen offerings... and now they'll have to do even better to match the Epyc offerings at the server-level. Most likely, it'll take them 2 years to repackage the Xeons to take advantage of as many PCIe lanes as they'll likely have to change the slot type again and work with mobo makers to get the right thermal envelope down for the new slot type on their boards. The PCIe lanes are the key difference as AMD is betting a lot of AI and graphics rendering is done on GPUs... and their Epyc chips will let companies connect a lot more GPUs and other peripherals at high speed by PCIe to the multi-core CPU. Intel..... doesn't currently have anything like that -- and it will take them time just to re-purpose a current chip to support that, much less roll it out in large production.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[guruevi]

AMD may be competing on cost but it hasn't caught up on performance, power consumption nor compatibility. Intel is still king when it comes to servers, it might be good for gamers where interconnects between CPU's, memory and massively parallel IO is not as important but I guess I'll have to see what the current crop of AMD processors brings.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[Aighearach]

Cost generally is for a specific level of performance and heat. It is like Ohm's Law, you can't separate the parts. Different sides of a die.

As far as compatibility, you have to buy a motherboard for one or the other, and everything else works the same. That's a complete wash, and has been since the EISA bus went out of fashion.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[guruevi]

When you fill a datacenter with machines, the price and performance per unit does matter. The internals of the CPU and how it connects to the systems don't quite work the same (last few iterations Intel has had more bandwidth between CPUs as well as between CPU and high-speed peripherals). AES for example is about twice as fast on Intel as AMD and the virtualization set isn't exactly the same leading to Intel support being earlier and better supported.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[Aighearach]

Reading comprehension matters, too.

Also, not very much in a datacenter is encrypted. Intel has enhanced AES because they have enterprise remote management that has be encrypted and runs outside the main CPU cores. So it is more built-out.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[lsatenstein]

Don't know where you got that impression.

Intel already showed its hand with the i9 series they shoved out the door as a knee-jerk reaction to AMD. It's a mess.

They've basically taken existing Xeon cores and prepped them for consumer use -- but with crazy options for the sockets for the new pin counts needed -- making motherboard manufacturers have to deal with different CPUs all for the same slot type, but some have different feature sets meaning it's hard to make a mobo that works with all of the chips that fit that slot type.

Most of the i9 series is vaporware -- sure, they have the specs laid out, but they only have a butchered Xeon to fit the new slot type to test with so far.

AMD is ready to roll out and has chips available today for Ryzen and soon Epyc. Meanwhile, Intel likely will take a year or more to offer i9s. Sure, Intel will eventually switch production lines and tailor the chips better and come out on top eventually... but, they were caught with their pants down on this.

Intel's solution is basically to offer the Xeons as consumer-level products with more cores and a different pin count (but without ECC ram compatibility) to match the higher level Ryzen offerings... and now they'll have to do even better to match the Epyc offerings at the server-level. Most likely, it'll take them 2 years to repackage the Xeons to take advantage of as many PCIe lanes as they'll likely have to change the slot type again and work with mobo makers to get the right thermal envelope down for the new slot type on their boards. The PCIe lanes are the key difference as AMD is betting a lot of AI and graphics rendering is done on GPUs... and their Epyc chips will let companies connect a lot more GPUs and other peripherals at high speed by PCIe to the multi-core CPU. Intel..... doesn't currently have anything like that -- and it will take them time just to re-purpose a current chip to support that, much less roll it out in large production.

AMD runs at 70% of the power requirements of Intel's compatible device and at 30 percent price reduction. Benchmarks show AMD's offering is within 5% of Intel's non-pushed (standard chip) performance.
For 30% reduction in electricity costs, coupled with less than 5% difference in performance, the decision process is easy to make.

Re:Hopefully not too late

[fintux]

AMD actually beats intel in AES both in performance-per-watt, in performance-per-dollar and with most CPUs also in raw performance. See for example http://www.anandtech.com/show/... and http://techreport.com/review/3.... Note also that the only Intel offering in these beating the Ryzen 1800x in performance-per-CPU is the i7-6950x, which is more than three times the cost and almost 50% increase in TDP. That said, most of the benchmarks don't have the Intel server offerings included, so perhaps you can prove me wrong?

So it's not a 32 core chip

[dreamchaser]

It's a cluster of 4 8 core CPUs connected via a high speed interconnect. I'm not saying that is bad; I just wish a tech site would have more accurate reporting.

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[VernonNemitz]

It looks to me like they finally figured out a small part of something I wrote about more than a decade ago. Too bad I couldn't afford to patent it....

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[scumdamn]

It's not 32 core die but the CPU itself is 32 cores. The CPU is what goes into the socket. This whole conversation has been going back to the mid 2000s when Intel released their quad core CPU that was really two different dies glued together. Nobody cared that AMD had a "true quad core" where Intel just had a higher-performing part that had 4 cores spread among 2 dies.

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had working prototypes and designs of things that are now common place. The only thing that separates the clever from the rich is seed money for patents. :(

Re: So it's not a 32 core chip

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always Intel versus AMD. It's never about the good that having choices offers to us.

At least, I guess that's what is important in 'nerd culture' (oxymoron?)

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a cluster of 4 8 core CPUs connected via a high speed interconnect. I'm not saying that is bad; I just wish a tech site would have more accurate reporting.

Same as Intel always did in the past, I don't remember much reporting about it.

That actually beat AMD which kept trying to keep all the cores together.

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[gweihir]

You need to take into account that AMD CPU interconnect and thread migration always was far, far superior to Intel. Usually you lose low single digits in performance on AMD, while on Intel people hat to use an additional system to stream gaming, for example, because Intel inter-CPU communication is so bad.

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the patenting. The problem is writing it up so it can stand on its own in court, and paying for lawyers, getting the law to actually do something when necessary and finally, not going bankrupt when a big company cleanrooms your idea with a different implementation, leaving your patent mostly worthless.

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[Lost Race]

This whole conversation has been going back to the mid 2000s when Intel released their quad core CPU that was really two different dies glued together.

The 1995 Pentium Pro was two chips (core and cache) in one package. They called it a Multi-Chip Module.

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[Kryptonut]

Too bad you couldn't afford to patent it....IF you were going to do something practical with it. That I have no problem with.

If not, I'm glad you didn't. That's the problem with patenting "ideas"....a lot fail to implement them, then stifle the progress of the industry because it's easier to litigate than innovate. There's a whole thriving industry around that, which contributes nothing to society.

I swear....if there was a short time limit on how long a patented "idea" had until implementation before being made invalid, we'd be so much further ahead than we are now.

Re:So it's not a 32 core chip

[TeknoHog]

It's a cluster of 4 8 core CPUs connected via a high speed interconnect. I'm not saying that is bad; I just wish a tech site would have more accurate reporting.

As if "core" has any well-defined meaning besides marketing slogans. IMHO, it has 32 CPUs within a single package, in groups of 8 per die. Operating systems and applications will see 64 CPUs due to SMT.

I remember when the "multicore" chips came out around 2005, and it was portrayed as something revolutionary and hard to program efficiently. I had already been coding on multi-CPU systems years before, and putting the different CPUs on the same die didn't seem like a big deal. In fact, the shared caches and I/O seemed like a disadvantage, although there were obviously benefits too.

Epyc?

[ArchieBunker]

How do you even pronounce Epyc? Like "epic"?

Re:Epyc?

[thegreatbob]

I imagine that's what they were going for, but I personally reserve the right to pronounce it however the hell I like.

Re:Epyc?

[Kohath]

The "pyc" is silent.

Re:Epyc?

[JudgeFurious]

I refuse to do that. I insist on pronouncing it like "EeepYike". Stop judging me! It makes sense when I say it in my mind!

Re:Epyc?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eeep-Ice

Re:Epyc?

[thegreatbob]

This was actually the pronunciation that kept coming to mind...

Re:Epyc?

[BronsCon]

I prefer it's pronounced "e-pike", as in an electronic pike on which they wish to mount Intel's head; in that case, they would have chosen that spelling knowing that most people would think it was to be pronounced "epic", thereby completely hiding their intentions.

Or I just say that for a laugh because yeah they're going for "epic".

Re:Epyc?

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll forever be known to me as the e-pike processor.

Re:Epyc?

[__aaclcg7560]

The "pyc" is silent.

So these new AMD processors run Python compiled bytecode? Sweet!

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8822335/what-do-the-python-file-extensions-pyc-pyd-pyo-stand-for

Re:Epyc?

[Highdude702]

I like your first idea better and I'm adopting it for myself . Thank you!

Re: Epyc?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'pike' bit is about the pike or pickerel, a largish long freshwater fish, that is flipping around in the troll's motorboat after they hooked it with a controversial post on the forum thread.

The pike is a fish, but surprisingly sports either an Intel or an AMD jersey. Because team sports is where it's at.

Re:Epyc?

[BronsCon]

You're quite welcome! And, honestly, I wouldn't put it past AMD's marketing department lately, they seem to be on a roll with hidden messages.

Re:Epyc?

[link-error]

My first guess was 'E-Puke'

Re:Epyc?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you even pronounce Epyc? Like "epic"?

Eee-pie-see

Re:Epyc?

[Anonymous Coward]

So these new AMD processors run Python compiled bytecode? Sweet!

As opposed to literally every other x86 chip on the market (and many others, besides), which also run python compiled bytecode?

Thanks for your insightful contributions, creimer.

Re: Epyc?

[The Grim Reefer]

he 'pike' bit is about the pike or pickerel, a largish long freshwater fish,

Actually I like the idea of it being named after the fish. I used to fish for pike. I'd have to use steel leaders on my line as pike have some vicious teeth. I've seen them eat ducks and a small dog once. Most of the time they would bite a duck in half with the first bite and then come back for the other half on the second pass. They're also strong swimmers and fight like hell when you hook them.

Re:Epyc?

[__aaclcg7560]

As opposed to literally every other x86 chip on the market (and many others, besides), which also run python compiled bytecode?

Wooosh!

Re:Epyc?

[Highdude702]

Yes! Its fucking awesome, Hopefully they keep rolling out these power packed processors. Hope Vega is what theyre claiming.. nvidia needs a kick in the dick too.. even though i have a gtx1070 in this pc.

Re:Epyc?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent being modded troll is proof that /. we all used to love is dead. 15 years ago, parent would have been +5 Funny.

Personally I'm going to pronounce it "eh-peak," "e-pike," and "eh-pyick" (w/ fake Russian accent) to make fun of the idiots who think it's cool to use alternate spellings.

Re:Epyc?

[TeknoHog]

Like "fayl".

Re:Epyc?

[cthulhu11]

Goofy unpronounceable names dissuade me from buying a product.

are AMD good again now?

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean AMD are good again?

Re:are AMD good again now?

[bobbied]

So does this mean AMD are good again?

No.. It means they still ARE good (tongue firmly in cheek) ... Only now they are getting competitive on their power consumption vrs processing power numbers...

My problem with AMD

[theendlessnow]

Can you buy it? AMD arguably made "ok" CPUs (talking within past 2-3 years), and even some mildly interesting ones. But could you buy them anywhere? Oh, you might find something on eBay from the Russian Federation or something like that, but it would just be a part, then you have to find a mainboard, etc.. Several major distributors have stepped up on the stage with AMD.... the question is: Will they deliver? Or will this be a case of "one or two" non-configurable options up against a plethora of offerings from Intel.

AMD needs to learn. It's hard work. And you can't rest. Last time AMD put a dent into Intel (taking about 17% of the server market in a quarter), AMD chose to celebrate and relax for the next XXX years. And Intel, excuse the pun, came in and cleaned their clock, tick tock.

Looks awesome, but if I can't buy it, worthless. And AMD, be prepared, Intel doesn't sleep (for long) and I don't think they'll even give you 5% of the market this time.

Hope they succeed, but AMD hasn't proven that they can sustain...

Re:My problem with AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

About ten seconds of searching on Newegg found dozens of AMD systems. Same on Amazon. It's not AMD's fault that you're bad at simple searches.

Re: My problem with AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt they relaxed after their last big success. Instead, they were spent. An all in effort for one product, but lacking the resources to have the next thing in the pipe. Meaning once they start announcing and revealing their hand, Intel can poach any of their good ideas and bring that to market by the time AMD gets their 2nd generation out.

Re:My problem with AMD

[tonywong]

AMD made some huge mistakes but Intel was blatantly anti-competitive/abusive against AMD and got fined in the US, Europe and had to settle with AMD for billions of dollars.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-with-1-45-billion-fine-in-europe-for-unfair-and-damaging-practices-against-amd

AMD wasn't exactly partying like they ruled the world, the deck was stacked against them by Intel when AMD had a superior product.

Re:My problem with AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason AMD couldn't sustain is that Intel bribed their customers to stay with them as shown by the lawsuit Intel lost and the 1.2 billion dollars that Intel owes AMD. Intel has made many times that by essentially marginalizing AMD so the fine is most likely worth it to them. It is worthy to note that AMD still hasn't received a penny of that fine from Intel since they agreed to pay in 2009.

There was a separate, similar case in the UK with a similar outcome. Intel owes another 1 billion euros to AMD from the second case which it has been appealing unsuccessfully for several years.

Overall Intel owes AMD close to 3 billion dollars in fines but has successfully delayed paying it for the better part of a decade.

Re:My problem with AMD

[Gravis Zero]

Can you buy it? AMD arguably made "ok" CPUs (talking within past 2-3 years), and even some mildly interesting ones. But could you buy them anywhere?

Yes you can.

Re: My problem with AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a netbook with an AMD processor.

And a cheap desktop box I bought at WalMart.

I believe AMD made second source 8088 processors, too.

Re:My problem with AMD

[alvinrod]

This is just dripping with FUD. Several big players in the server market have already announced they'll be shipping products with AMD's CPUs. If you couldn't find any server CPUs from AMD in the recent past its because they didn't bother making any after a point because their Bulldozer architecture was so much of a failure that they left that part of the market. Just look at the Wikipedia article that lists their server chips and notice that the pretty much stopped after 2012 outside of a few ARM or Jaguar-based parts that were for micro-servers.

Also, the last time AMD put a dent into Intel, Intel started fighting back in a large number of ways that were later found to be illegal. Celebrate and relax, indeed.

Re:My problem with AMD

[Kohath]

I can understand why board makers weren't very interested in supporting AMD's second-rate CPUs the past few years. It's nice to see them offering something competitive again.

Re:My problem with AMD

[bobbied]

Can you buy it? AMD arguably made "ok" CPUs (talking within past 2-3 years), and even some mildly interesting ones. But could you buy them anywhere?

You are kidding right?

I have 4 retail establishments within 30 min of my home which have AMD CPU's available for immediate purchase, usually with motherboards and all the rest of the stuff you need to build a system. Then there is Google (assuming it's not broken where you are) where scads of mail order suppliers are easily found.

Now if you mean "available in pre-build solutions", then I suggest you take a closer look at what that means. Intel has huge power to strong arm system integrators into using it's products, both though economies of scale and their ability to market. AMD equipment IS available, just not as common in some kinds of systems. However, my last 2 laptops where AMD based, so they exist if you look for them.

Re:My problem with AMD

[andydread]

Please see here for the information you requested thanks.

Re:My problem with AMD

[PIBM]

I'm pretty sure he was talking of ready to use AMD servers, which have been nowhere to be found for the last 5 years or so.

Re: My problem with AMD

[Brockmire]

What third world do you live in?

Re: My problem with AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

At the top of that Amazon page is a sponsored spot to an Intel Core i7.

Re: My problem with AMD

[that this is not und]

Can't the server companies buy AMD motherboards and lots of Phillips screwdriver and... and... and...

Re:My problem with AMD

[Khyber]

Plenty of servers on Pricewatch.com

I'm surprised someone of your UID doesn't know of the place. Newegg advertises there and gets beaten fairly regularly.

Re:My problem with AMD

[PIBM]

Oh yes, you can find old servers / much less powerful ones on the web, but that`s not the kind of server that gets purchased repeatedly. We could always have replacement on hand in our small market (Quebec) for intel servers, or upgrades to the newer ones, even rare raid unlock chips, but there was nothing on hand for AMDs. With a 99-1 split in the server market, that is expected I guess..

For some nice read, the following & further;
http://marketrealist.com/2017/...

Re:My problem with AMD

[ChrisMaple]

It isn't a question of AMD slacking off. Intel has always had a process advantage, but as physical limits are approached that advantage is diminishing. The only time AMD outperformed Intel was during Intel's netburst-RAMBUS blunder.

Intel has a financial advantage that allows it to outspend AMD 10:1 on research. As the process advantage slowly becomes history, the research advantage that gives Intel more cycles-per-clock is all that's going to be left. I think that also will diminish over time as X86 architecture becomes a solved problem with no general-purpose advances possible.

Assuming no breakthroughs or blunders, I think we'll see Intel and AMD at the same performance level in 10 to 15 years, and an end to X86-silicon progress. But I hope not.

Re:My problem with AMD

[Khyber]

Uh, no. Pricewatch already has Ryzen out and as soon as EPYC hits the market they will have it as well.

Not my fault you're in Quebec where if the product doesn't have fucking French on it then it can't legally be sold there. Yes, I've fucking been there. That was 17 years ago. Haven't gone back since because of that intolerant bullshit.

Re:My problem with AMD

[dshk]

I bought three AMD servers without any issue in the last years. I buy motherboard and usually case + power supply from Supermicro. I could buy Opterons, ECC memory and data center SSD-s from quite a few shops. The AMD motherboard offers of Supermicro is easily understandable: I select processor generation, socket count, whether I want SAS, whether I want remote management chip on the motherboard and that is all, there is one motherboard which correspond to my conditions. I also do not have to consider which features I want from the processor, because (and in contrast to Intel), all AMD processors of the same generation contains the same features, even the cheapest one.

Re:My problem with AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the OP's question was about the server chips.

Last time I gauged the situation, every major player except one had no Opterons for sale.

Re:My problem with AMD

[PIBM]

Ryzen is not a server cpu, and it's already available here too.

Re:My problem with AMD

[Khyber]

Ryzen is just a cut-down EPYC chip, so yes, it is a server CPU. Even supports ECC.

Re:My problem with AMD

[PIBM]

Supporting ECC doesn't make it a server cpu. Similarly, using ECC memory doens't make a computer a server -- see the late mac pro -- so much trouble running a farm of those! I would not be running ryzen chips in my 2U enclosures -- performance / volume would not be good at all. Anyway I am no longer working with local servers.. While I am eagerly awaiting the 128 cores epycs to see how they fares, I will simply start using them should the price / performance ratio becomes better than corresponding intel server on the cloud.

Also, with the compilations issues I've seen reported on ryzen cpu, I do hope they aren't really simply cut down epycs, or are they ??

Re:My problem with AMD

[cthulhu11]

Among them having CEO who printed posters with himself styled as Indiana Jones protecting his trophy wife.

Yes, these were posted around the Austin campus.

Re:My problem with AMD

[Khyber]

"Supporting ECC doesn't make it a server cpu."

In reality, that's about the only feature separating consumer and server-grade chips now days. Everything else is either feature-compatible, or cut from the same die and just laser-locked.

Re:My problem with AMD

[samwichse]

https://www.supermicro.com/pro...
https://blog.dellemc.com/en-us...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...

They sure have AMD now (or coming shortly).

180 watts per - think of the cooling needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Put 10,000 of these in a data center all running full blast, that's 1.8 Mega watts. Can simple air flow cooling keep the data center from burning up? Perhaps refrigerated water coolers requiring even more wattage will be necessary.

Re:180 watts per - think of the cooling needed

[silas_moeckel]

At the current high density of about 400 Xeon per rack (could be higher this is the most I've seen) your still looking at 250 racks filled with blade servers alone, Somewhere your going to need network and storage nodes as well. Those cool with air just fine.

Re: 180 watts per - think of the cooling needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Air cooling is enough at that level.

Put 250kW in a single rack for immersion cooling solutions.

Re:180 watts per - think of the cooling needed

[Khyber]

"Can simple air flow cooling keep the data center from burning up?"

I can cool 300w of LED on a LGA775 heatsink and keep it at 70C.

So maybe you might want to think about the cooling solution instead of the processor itself, n00b.

Re:180 watts per - think of the cooling needed

[ChrisMaple]

400 x 250 = 100,000.

180 Watts

[Ensign_Expendable]

Whoa!

Re:180 Watts

[thegarbz]

Yeah this! I thought we were past the days of these super hot TDPs. The hottest Intel Xeon is 155W I believe. Is this going to be so desirable in a datacentre of all places where power consumption and cooling are already a significant portion of a system's ownership costs?

Re:180 Watts

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the best broadwell processor is the 2699 http://ark.intel.com/products/91317/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2699-v4-55M-Cache-2_20-GHz
145w for 22 cores at 2.2GHZ.
That makes the Epyc more power efficient even if Broadwell had an equal IPC, which it doesn't.

Usual disclaimer, if you don't need 32cores you probably shouldn't buy a system with that many.

Re:180 Watts

[epine]

Is this going to be so desirable in a datacentre of all places where power consumption and cooling are already a significant portion of a system's ownership costs?

The answer is yes.

Because the critical considerations are compute efficiency (wallop per watt) and compute density.

Escalating wallop density is ultimately going to cost you on the TDP front, except as compared to free lunch.

A = 2 x (1 platform + 1 CPU)
B = 1 x (1 platform + 1 turbo CPU)

Suppose turbo CPU is 50% hotter, 100% more powerful.

Or perhaps you've swallowed the SOC blue pill in a single gulp, and think that the mainboard is just a bunch of fiberglass, epoxy, plastic restraining clips, and copper artwork.

The mighty 6" between your two CPU sockets doesn't come for free, either. (Also known as mighty slow, as in ye mighty 6" of the 1 ns electrical round tip.)

Re:180 Watts

[thegarbz]

Not at all. But I also haven't swallowed marketing hype yet. Let's see just how much faster this is in real terms before we go accusing each other of popping mythical pills.

whay that is

[Jodka]

There are at least two forces driving this, one physics, the other economic:

The big picture is that, as feature size approaches physical limits of silicon, progress toward ever-higher gate density has slowed. In fact, Intel has had to revise their Tic Tock design cadence to pad in more CPU architecture re-designs as they await finer processes. So though Intel was way out ahead, their rate of progress slowed, allowing AMD to catch up.

The other point is, Intel's positive re-enforcement loop of having the best processors because they had the most revenues from selling the best processors to develop new processor fabs has been broken by ARM. Competition from ARM architecture drives fab R&D outside of Intel, so much so that Samsung foundries were shipping Qualcomm ARM processors at 10nm while Intel was still stuck at 14nm.

   

Re:whay that is

[Kohath]

The other point is, Intel's positive re-enforcement loop of having the best processors because they had the most revenues from selling the best processors to develop new processor fabs has been broken by ARM. Competition from ARM architecture drives fab R&D outside of Intel, so much so that Samsung foundries were shipping Qualcomm ARM processors at 10nm while Intel was still stuck at 14nm.

 

No, Intel just dropped the ball on that (or decided to let go of it). They had an 18-24 month lead and they let TSMC and Apple catch up.

Maybe they decided that dragging out (prolonging the inevitable end of) scaling by 4 years or so would be more profitable between now and 2025 than galloping to the finish line.

Re:whay that is

[Anonymous Coward]

10nm and 14nm are marketing terms. The actual silicon measurements in each is very much reversed in the specific case you note. That this actually matters or not, I don't know. Numbers must go higher, er lower, whether they mean anything or not.

Re:whay that is

[Anonymous Coward]

Process scaling is the brute force method applied when gobs of money are your primary resource. Actual architectural innovation is of far greater difficult, yet finally there is motivation to pursue it. This is a good thing for everyone but those with monopolies on legacy architectures.

Most interesting architectural work is taking place outside of Intel, a focus on milking x86 will eventually bite them in the ass. The Itanium is a fine example of Intel's mediocrity in architectural innovation, and a single process node advantage won't guarantee a lead in the coming years. With any luck, Intel will fail miserably and be reduced to competing as a foundry.

Re:whay that is

[ctilsie242]

The problem is that moving to a new CPU architecture is something that not many companies want to do. POWER and SPARC are all but dead, which pretty much leaves us with x86 and ARM as what runs everything out there. I will say the Itanium was a definite step up, with hundreds of registers, but getting Linux ported, and a top tier distro maker to actually port packages to that architecture, and support it, will be an uphill battle.

The exception would be an architecture that can virtualize x86, allowing software to use x86, then dip their toes in features that the new architecture provides. This at least would get people moving to it slowly, however it can backfire, similar to OS/2 ("Why run a Windows 3.11 instance in an OS, when we can just run the OS bare metal?")

Re:whay that is

[lsatenstein]

Part of the consent decree is that AMD is intitled to use any/all related Intel patents. AMD is allowed to put AES into microcode. I would have preferred that they put twofish or threefish instructions.
The latter two are stonger than AES for hacking and are fast in execution. But being much harder to hack than AES, you can guess why blowfish/twofish was not chosen.

Re:New 12-32 core cpu's interest me this way... ap

[Anonymous Coward]

APK you are the wind beneath my wings

Don't ever change.

Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have something that can play the 2016 version of Doom.

Re:Finally...

[PIBM]

You had promised not to upgrade your computer until AMD was the king of performances again ? I hope that those processors pan out, and I'd say you should get something like the i7-7700k, perfect performances in D2016!

Robert E. Murray

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet that idiot Robert E. Murray still uses a 486 processor

New 12-32 thread/6-16 core CPU & OS potential

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Executive]
"AdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads"=dword:00000008
"AdditionalDelayedWorkerThreads"=dword:00000008

* I.E. - How much extra cores will help BEYOND today's CPUs for the OPERATING SYSTEM itself in juggling threads in itself & for other processes...

(Those are settings in WINDOWS you can adjust to take advantage of added cores as you upgrade to CPUs w/ more cores, for example).

APK

P.S.=> ANYTHING/EVERYTHING, in theory, gains there alone (less "process scheduler thrashing" in other words) - I don't care so much about applications/programs (they are probably written to their practical limits anyhow as to what threadwork will gain them) but again, MORE about how the OS will utilize them (per the 2 TUNABLE PARAMETERS in the .reg file I note above as a way to REALLY use the extra cores, almost guaranteed - Windows allows it, not sure of other OS like *NIX based ones)... apk

EPYC vs Broadwell (2.5 yr old CPU architecture)

[StreamingEagle]

Note that EPYC performance is being compared with Intel Broadwell Xeons (E5 v4), a slight enhancement of the Haswell CPU architecture. In the very near future, Intel will launch their Purley Xeons (Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family), based on the Skylake architecture (with many significant capabilities not found in the consumer grade Skylake desktop and mobile processors, like AVX-512 instructions). Purley Xeons will have up to 28 cores per socket. Until we have Purley vs EPYC numbers, we won't know who has the best performance per core, or performance at each price point, for each data center workload. It won't be long now. In fact, the Skylake-X processors (Core i9) are repurposed consumer versions of Purley Xeons, and they'll be available in 4 days. Wait for it.

Re:EPYC vs Broadwell (2.5 yr old CPU architecture)

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel will launch their Purley Xeons (Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family), based on the Skylake architecture (with many significant capabilities not found in the consumer grade Skylake desktop and mobile processors, like AVX-512 instructions).

Which are largely useless on most server scenarios. See if a Hyper-visor or Database engine will use it at all, for example.

Wait for it.

No need to wait. I'll just tell you right now how it will turn out: Intel will win at performance per core and AMD will crush Intel on price/performance.

Re:EPYC vs Broadwell (2.5 yr old CPU architecture)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Note that EPYC performance is being compared with $SHIPPING_INTEL_CHIPS, a slight enhancement of $OLDER_INTEL_CHIPS. In the very near future, Intel will launch $FUTURE_INTEL_CHIPS. $FUTURE_INTEL_CHIPS will have $MORE_SHIT_THAN_CURRENTLY_SHIPPING CHIPS. Until we have $FUTURE_INTEL_CHIP vs $SHIPPING_AMD_CHIP numbers, [I will delay analysis because if I did the analysis now it would not benefit Intel]"

Data centers and GPUs

[Cajun Hell]

they're aimed at the incredibly powerful data center market. .. Each CPU will also offer 128 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 support -- enough to connect up to six GPUs at x16 each with room left over for I/O support.

Seriously, I just don't know: why would a product targeting data centers, make a big deal about connecting GPUs? Are a lot of them really doing that, or are they using the great I/O bandwidth for something else (what?) or does this usually go greatly underused?

(Yes, I realize there are applications for GPUs (other than rnedering graphics, of course!) but I wouldn't think it'd be a significant fraction of the data center market. How wrong am I?)

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[EmagGeek]

There are also applications for PCI-e that are not GPUs.

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[Cajun Hell]

Tell me more. I can think of some things, and yet when I imagine these data center computers (anyone else get it yet? I don't work in a data center!) I mentally picture most of them as having nothing plugged into their PCI-e slots.

Ok, I picture one that has a bunch of SAS adapters plugged into there, and runs a fuckton of disks or SSDs. But then the others just use those disks over the network or storage network.

I maybe picture one that has some amazingly fancy network adapter in it .. and a bunch of others on that network, which don't have that fancy adapter.

I maybe picture a highly specialized rack, used by some particular company, which might all have GPUs in there. And who maybe comprises 1% of the data center computer market.

After that my imagination runs out of steam, unless it's the most obvious thing (but somehow this just doesn't sound right, maybe that's my mistake): they're all using their own M.2 SSDs. I guess I can believe that. Is that it?

That's my question: what are data centers doing with all that PCI-e? What's the situation, what's the common application, where you'd walk into a data center and see most of the computers using their PCI-e, and the owner or user is really happy that the new generation has more lanes than the older one?

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just saying I don't know, and it sounds to me like something that wouldn't happen, unless it's SSD. Hmm. It's for hooking up SSDs, isn't it?

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

When providing VDI you absolutely need a lot of GPUs in your server or your density will suck.

That said, 100/40gig NICs, cluster interconnects, and solid state storage are just some additional options.

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[iCEBaLM]

You are wrong. GPUs are being used more and more for general compute. From AI to bitcoin mining they're the way to go. NVidia and AMD both make GPU cards that have no video outputs specifically for data center use.

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Not GPUs... but add-in cards, especially fancy hard drive controllers. Offering dedicated drives and dedicated NVMe SSDs to VMs is attractive. Each NVMe drive takes 4 PCI lanes.

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Those only need 1 PCIe lane. There are already mining-designed boards with lots of PCIex1 lane slots that accept 16X GPU cards.

Only a rendering system needs the full 16 PCIe lanes for GPU cards.

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[wbo]

High performance shared storage arrays based on SSDs typically need as many PCIe lanes as they can get. In fact, many use PCIe switches to allow more devices to be connected. See this article for an example of where high performance storage is going.

Also quite a few lanes need to be dedicated to high speed network adapters. Modern servers often have at least 2 NICs that run anywhere from 10 GBps up to 100 GBps each.

The other thing high numbers of lanes is used for is compute servers with large number of GPUs to provide high floating point performance (typically using GPUs optimized for floating point use - not quite the same as consumer GPUs used for graphics.)

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Both AI and vector mining depend on mathematical constructs that are highly parallel in scope and can be treated as vector calculations. For anything outside that narrow scope, GPU's aren't so great.

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[Thumper_SVX]

Just to name a few server components off the top of my head (and yes, I do this for a living);

* GPU's used for large scale data analysis and AI. Big usage in large datacenters already today, particularly companies where large amounts of data require quick processing (think GIS for example)
* Network interfaces. The next generation of networking will bring 25Gbps Ethernet as well as bring greater support for 100Gbps Ethernet. Throw 32Gbps Fiber-Channel in there, too.
* FPGA's. Possibly to me more exciting than GPU's because they have a tighter thermal and power envelope and are incredibly flexible at what they can accomplish. We're going to see a lot of this in the datacenter in the next few years.
* NVMe drives. Each NVMe drive is basically a PCIe x4 device. A 2U server (the most commonly sold servers in the world, still) can hold 24 hot swap drives. 24 hot swap NVMe drives is 96 channels which is the max a dual-proc Intel can give you without running any other hardware... this requires PCIe switching to make it work which has a performance impact. AMD with it's integrated southbridge can bring those drives directly to the CPU which is really interesting for Hadoop and/or HyperConverged workloads.

Re:Data centers and GPUs

[EmagGeek]

I said there are applications that were not GPUs.

You were able to come up with some all by yourself.

Why do I need to tell you more? You answered your own question.

Question on package

[AlanObject]

Can someone with knowledge on the topic post what the packaging and cooling strategy for the 175W chip looks like? Is air cooling still going to be enough? Will a typical system still be able to run at 50C ambient?

Re:Question on package

[Anonymous Coward]

That power isn't that far off from high end Pentium4s. Yeah, huge heat-sink and a big fan would do it.

Not for long

[Anonymous Coward]

Software designers will find a way to suck that extra capacity

Re:New 12-32 core cpu's interest me this way... ap

[Anonymous Coward]

windoze? w.t.f.? who cares?

yes and its a elongated spear as well

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_%28weapon%29

"A pike is a pole weapon, a very long thrusting spear formerly used extensively by infantry. Unlike many similar weapons, the pike is not intended to be thrown. Pikes were used regularly in European warfare from the early Middle Ages[1] until around 1700, and were wielded by foot soldiers deployed in close quarters. "

Re:yes and its a elongated spear as well

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what she said

More cores isn't better

[ooloorie]

Given the same aggregate performance, the fewer cores a CPU has, the better because the less you have to worry about concurrency and cache issues.

More cores _can_ be better

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the same aggregate performance, the fewer cores a CPU has, the better because the less you have to worry about concurrency and cache issues.

You are right, "given the same aggregate performance" that's true. I understand that the value proposition of AMD is _higher_ aggregate performance thru higher core numbers, and probably lower overall price.

Re: More cores _can_ be better

[ooloorie]

My point is they should talk about performance, not number of cores.

Support?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Is AMD assigning engineers to help port stuff that has gone Intel-only in the years that AMD failed to compete in the server space?

I'm thinking of some of the newer Xen features, codec assembly, etc. If we have to wait a year to try Ryzen they may have missed their opportunity.

Can't wait for Ryzen laptops.

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD has seemed willing to challenge Intel in their traditional strongholds. Their laptop APUs will be becoming out later in the year and will no doubt be priced aggressively to challenge Intel. They'll probably start with a basic quad-core at the bottom, six-core (with HT) in the middle, and eight-core with hyperthreading at the top.

The Zen-based desktop APUs are also coming out. They're probably geared for corporate buyers/manufacturers since the integrated graphics mean no discrete GPU is needed. (I guess they won't overclock since A320 boards serve no purpose when every Ryzen CPU overclocks). This will better challenge i3/i5/i7s which all contain integrated graphics.

If AMD's Threadripper and Epyc gave Intel a panic attack, just wait until those start coming out.

The only product I don't see AMD challenging right now is the Atom line. Those are geared to very low-end phones/tablets/laptop and AMD has made no indication they are aiming at that market segment.

I know they're server-side, but what a laptop! :)

[spiritgreywolf]

Personally I'd love to have an 8 core chip running in a laptop with something like 128 or 256 GB of RAM. I already do most of my work from an MBP running VMWare Fusion and having two or three desktops running simultaneously. Something like that would put me in heaven.

Hmm... I wonder how far away we are from running a laptop with at least 16 cores, at least 1 TB of RAM, multi-terabyte SSD all with a battery that could last at least 8 hours? Running multiple instances of machines (Linux, Windows, etc.,) for developing multi-tier data intensive apps - and never having to use swap space on disk.

Yeah, that would be my nirvana. I'd never look at a desktop again.

huge mistake

[slashmydots]

This is absolute proof that the biggest mistake AMD ever made was stopping production of desktop CPUs to make console CPUs for whoever that contract as with. Now that they're done with that and they're back making desktop CPUs and server CPUs, a MUUUUUCH larger market, they're crushing Intel. That garbage socket that's the replacement for x99 is rushed, glitchy, overpriced garbage which is how a complacent Intel has always done business in the last 5 years.

Re: huge mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the volume and life of the console chips gave them the capital needed to design the Zen platform.

Re:New 12-32 core cpu's interest me this way... ap

[Anonymous Coward]

people who work and play. It is an unfortunate reality, but reality nevertheless.

Data centers and FPGAs

[Anonymous Coward]

FPGAs and ASICs seem to be Microsoft and Google's preferred plug-ins.

Re:New 12-32 core cpu's interest me this way... ap

[Anonymous Coward]

In a lot of environments, you will use windows on the job, or you won't have a job.

intel has cut down pci-e and held back boards that

[Joe_Dragon]

intel has cut down pci-e and held back boards that have to work with cpu's that are just desktop cpus stapled on an workstation / 1 cpu server layout / chip set.

So an board with up to 4 ram channels and up to 44 pci-e lanes from cpu have to work with cpu's that only have 2 ram channels and 16 pci-e. Maybe some will just feed slots from the X4 DMI feed chipset to give them more io over lot's of different cpus.

One big tech company trying to "crush" another

[Anonymous Coward]

By coming out with a new line of product with superior feeds and speeds, power consumption, etc.

How quaint.

Re:I know they're server-side, but what a laptop!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just expanded a few 1U servers to 768 GB RAM using 32 GB DIMMs... That's 24 DIMMs total. Laptops usually have only 2 DIMM slots, that would mean 512GB per DIMM and if you want it to run 8 hours on a charge, low power too.

Also, the 8 hours don't apply to running at full tilt, really use the CPU in a current laptop and the 10h runtime becomes a 1h runtime (Ok, maybe not 1h, but not that much more). All in all, don't hold your breath for your dream laptop...

Personal rant: The keyboards of all current laptops suck. None of them can hold a candle to a keyboard with Cherry MX black switches.

24 hot-swap U.2 NVMe drive bays supermicro

[Joe_Dragon]

24 hot-swap U.2 NVMe drive bays supermicro

now just think if each one had its' own X4 link and you still have PCI-E leftover for say 4 10G links.

So, Intel will have to respond

[Anonymous Coward]

This means Intel prices will have to come down and that they will have to make a next generation core. Last time AMD was in a performance dominant position, Intel gave us the Core technology.

Re:New 12-32 core cpu's interest me this way... ap

[Khyber]

APK doesn't even know that AMD has always had better 'process scheduler thrashing handling' so you already know his "AV Solution" is utter shit in the face of today's OSes and threats.

Re:I know they're server-side, but what a laptop!

[wkwilley2]

You're a long ways out from having 1TB of RAM in a laptop, only dog knows why you would want that much.

But the 16 core CPU is possible now and multi-terabyte drives are already here.

Re: I know they're server-side, but what a laptop!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Cherry mx Black switch is thicker than most laptops too.