I'm looking forward to deploy AMD Turin bare metal servers on Hetzner. The previous generations already had a great value but this seems a step above.
Here I am running a 12 year old Dell PowerEdge with dual Xeons.. I wonder when the first gen Epyc servers will be cheap fodder on eBay.
1-3rd gen Epycs can be had super cheap, but the motherboards are expensive.
Also not worth getting anything less than 3rd gen unless you're primarily buying them for the pcie lanes and ram capacity - a regular current gen consumer CPU with half - a quarter of the core count will outperform them in compute while consuming significantly less power.
Lots of great second hand hardware to be had on ebay. Even last gen used CPUs, as well as RAM, at much less than retail.
However when you end up building a server quite often the motherboard + case is the cheap stuff, the CPUs are second in cost and the biggest expense can be the RAM.
IMO, 1st gen Epyc is not any good, given that 2nd gen exists, is more popular and is cheap enough (I actually have epyc 7302 and MZ31-AR0 motherboard as homelab). Too low performance per core and NUMA things, plus worse node (2nd gen compute is 7nm TSMC)
Unsure about the Epyc chips but Ryzen 5 series kit was being given away on Amazon in the week...
I snagged a 9 5950X for £242
Thanks for pointing out, it's still up there for £253 - I might consider upgrading my 8 core 5800X3D.
Not worth. Get 9654 on eBay for $2k plus $1k for mobo. $7k full system. Or go Epyc 7282 type, and that’s good combo easily available.
They already are, and aren't very good.
Truly mind boggling scale.
Twenty years ago we had just 1-2 cores per CPU, so we were lucky to have 4 cores in a dual socket server.
A single server can now have almost 400 cores. Yes, we can have even more ARM cores but they don't perform as well as these do, at least for now.
700+ threads over 2 cores, can saturate 2 400gbe Nic's 500 wats per chip (less than 2 wats per thread)... All of that in a 2U package.... 20 years ago that would have been racks of gear.
Just in time for Factorio 2.0.
ChipsAndCheese is one of the few new tech publications that really knows what they are talking about, especially with these deep dive benchmarks.
With the loss of Anandtech, TechReport, HardCOP and other old technical sites, I'm glad to see a new publisher who can keep up with the older style stuff.
Interestingly, Slashdot originated from a site called "Chips & Dips". Similiar inspiration?
Did you mean to say HardOCP?
I'd like to see the 9965 in action. These parts are crazy. Will definitely be looking to buy a machine from this generation.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/9005-...
I wonder how this compares to the 7950x3d. So much cache and a high boost clock. https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/9005-...
Great if you have 16 independent workloads, terrible for things that care about communication between threads.
It has 16 CCD, each with only one thread enabled, latency between CCD is ~150ns.
Surprise surprise, not every tool is right for every job.
Not sure if this comment was about to come out as snarky but the parent rightfully pointed out the not so obvious design of EPYC CPUs. CCD is a NUMA in disguise.
At 1:11 in the video, there's a chart of the TDP (which I looked for in the text but couldn't find). At 125-500W, these things run very hot.
Doubtful, the 350W threadripper parts don’t run particularly hot with normal desktop cooling. I’ve overclocked a 7975WX with an unrestricted power limit, and could dissipate over 800W while keeping it below 90C (admittedly, with water cooling). 500W with server cooling (super high RPM forced air) shouldn’t be a problem.
https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/AMD-...
Has the full range with TDP. 500w is only for the 128/192 monster chips. The 16 core fast sku has a 320W TDP.
> 500w is only for... 128/196 chips. The 16 core fast sku has a 320W TDP.
When you think about it. 180W more for 7x threads is amazing
It’s not new that high frequencies require higher power.
The base clock falls by half between the fastest and the widest chips.
The 7950x3D is rated at 120w TDP. 320w seems quite high.
that's the processor you're supposed to buy only if you are paying $10000 per core per year for some ridiculously expensive enterprise software. the extra power comes from all the extra memory channels and cache
You just need one unit of these in dual socket config per room of your house, and you're sorted for the winter (if you live somewhere cold).
That depends on the size of the processor, surely.
Socket sp5 is more than 3x the area of am5.
The part with only 16 cores but 512MB L3 cache ... that must be for some specific workload.
Oracle can charge $40-$100k+ for EE including options per core (times .5)...and some workloads are very cache sensitive. So a high cache, high bandwidth, high frequency, high memory capacity 16 core CPU[1] (x2 socket) might be the best bang for their buck for that million dollar+ license.
[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/9005-...
Surely that's a good reason for Oracle to increase their prices even more, leading to a cat-and-mouse game between CPU makers and software license sellers.
The topology of that part is wild, it's physically the same silicon as the 128-core part but they've disabled all but one core on each compute chiplet. 112 of the 128 cores are switched off to leave just 16 cores with as much cache as possible.
Does anyone know if modern AMD chips allow mapping the L3 cache and using it as TCM instead of cache? I know older non-X86 processors supported this (and often booted into that mode so that the memory controllers could be brought up), but not sure if it's possible today. If so, that would sure make for some interesting embedded use cases for a large DRAM-less system...
The coreboot docs claim that modern AMD parts no longer support cache-as-RAM.
Lame.
Using it as TCM ram seems super useful.
Although you would need to fight/request it from the OS, so technically I see why they might ditch it.
> Apparently we now think 64 cores is ‘lower core count’. What a world we live in.
64 cores is a high-end gaming rig. Civilization VII won't run smoothly on less than 16.
Civ 6 really doesn't utilize cores as much as one would think. I mean it'll spread the load across a lot of threads, sure, but it never seems to actually... use them much? E.g. I just ran the Gathering Storm expansion AI benchmark (late game map completely full of civs and units - basically worst case for CPU requirements and best case for eating up the multicore performance) on a 7950X 16 core CPU and it rarely peaked over 30% utilization, often averaging ~25%. 30% utilization means a 6 core part (barring frequency/cache differences) should be able to eat that at 80% load.
https://i.imgur.com/YlJFu4s.png
Whether the bottleneck is memory bandwidth (2x6000 MHz), unoptimized locking, small batch sizes, or something else it doesn't seem to be related to core count. It's also not waiting on the GPU much here, the 4090 is seeing even less utilization than the CPU. Hopefully utilization actually scales better with 7, not just splits up a lot.
> 16 core CPU and it rarely peaked over 30% utilization, often averaging ~25%. 30% utilization means a 6 core part (barring frequency/cache differences) should be able to eat that at 80% load.
As a rule I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the stuff Civ 6 is doing can't be parallelized at all, but then for that remaining 10% you get a 16x speedup with 16 cores. And they're underutilized on average but there are bursts where you get a measurable speedup from having 16 cores, and that speedup is strictly linear with the number of cores. 6 cores means that remaining 10% will be less than half as fast vs. having 16 cores. And this is consistent with observing 30% CPU usage I think.
If only 10% of the workload can be parallelized, then the best case parallelization speed up is only 10%. That doesn’t line up with the GP’s claim that Civ6 benefits from more cores.
My rule is more like I’d be willing to bet even odds that this could be sped up 100x with the right programmers focused on performance. When you lack expertise and things work “well enough” that’s what you get. Same for games or enterprise software.
That's what we get in a market dominated more by the need to release before the competition rather than taking some time to optimize software. If it's slow, one can still blame the iron and users who don't upgrade it.
I can't help but think that this sounds more like a failure to optimize at the software level rather than a reasonable hardware limitation.
That's the usual case when vid3o g4mes are "CPU limited". One has to just look whether the game does anything high-level that other games didn't do 10 years ago. Reasonable hardware limitations related to the CPU have normally to do with complex physics effects or unusually large crowds of NPCs. (Many games are CPU limited even for fairly small crowds because their engine isn't optimized for that purpose.)
> vid3o g4mes
Why do you type it like that?
If Civ 6 is any guidance, 64 or 32 won't make a slight difference. The next step calculations seem to run on a single CPU and thus having more CPUs is not going to change a thing. This is a software problem; they need to distribute the calculation over several CPUs.
civ6's slowness is purely bad programming. No excuses to be had.
[citation needed]
As the GPGPU scene trajectory seems dismal[1] for the foreseeable future wrt the DX, this seems like the best hope.
[1] Fragmentation, at best C++ dialects, no practical compiler tech to transparently GPU offload, etc
Civilization VII won't run smoothly.
Only recently I managed to build a PC that will run Civ 6 smoothly during late game on huge map
What are the specs?
Tangentially related, but I need to go check a18 civ 6benchmarks. The experience on my a15 with small map sizes was surprisingly good.
all high end "gaming" rigs are either using ~16 real cores or 8:24 performance/efficiency cores these days. threadripper/other HEDT options are not particularly good at gaming due to (relatively) lower clock speed / inter-CCD latencies.
I thought we grew out of the 12 year old child mentality of Matrix black trench coat stage giving hardware products cringe names (Banshee, Voodoo, TNT, etc). But here we are in 2024 with Turin, Epyc and lord knows what else.
Edit: Looks like the folks downvoting me are massive, massive fans of that THREADRIPPER architecture.
Naples, Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Turin are just cities in Italy; I'm not sure what's childish about that. They have to use something for codenames.
The criticism is about "EPYC" not about the codenames. That brand name has been used since 2017 but if you don't know that, it sounds quite gamery nowadays.
Admittedly I also have no idea why Intel calls theirs Xeon, which sounds like misspelled xenon. But then it might be a proper Greek word?
Trademarks are easier if they are not words (no prior use or conflicts), but having them be like words is easier so people can say them.
Whats wrong with an arbitary 16 digit number?
I'm sure each of the products has a numeric identifier. One can use that if they feel pressed by the "childish" names.
I think you’re seeing downvotes because your criticism seems painfully uninformed and uninteresting to boot.
This is lazy criticism and honestly, I'll take a name like Epyc over Intel Core Ultra 7 258V or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
> Looks like the folks downvoting me are massive, massive fans of that THREADRIPPER architecture.
Yes, it must be everybody else, not your comment, which is the pinnacle of deep analysis. Get real, dude.
