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AMD Unveils “EPYC” CPUs Featuring Up to 32 Cores and 64 Threads for the Datacenter
- djrogers 10y agoGiven how much these types of processors are used for virtualization, wouldn't a lower core count at a higher clock speed be just as useful? 32 cores at 1.4Ghz only seems useful if you need to use a lot of processor affinity, but assigning faster vCPUs to your VMs doesn't seem to have a downside. Just not sure what advantage this would have over a 16core 2.8ghz chip as a comparison.
- jlawer 10y agoMany Virtualised workloads have many VMs with light CPU utilisation on each. As such this kind of core configuration allows lots of VMs to be doing low intensity background tasks at the same time. As such this would be ideal for things like VDI and web / cloud hosting where the quantity of VMs is very high, but the load from each is typically not.
- djrogers 10y ago> Many Virtualised workloads have many VMs with light CPU utilisation on each Which is why every virtualization platform out there lets you oversubscribe CPUs. That's a solved problem, what's the benefit of having 100 VMs run on 32 slow cores vs 16 fast ones?
- foota 10y agoSomeone else mentioned the costs of context switching
- adrianratnapala 10y agoOnly for a weak definition of "solved". As mentioned above, context switching is expensive and extra L1 cache is valuable. Time-sharing can also have a huge effect on latency (because requests must wait until their server is scheduled), even when the throughput is still good. Even if time-sharing performs well most of the time, when it goes wrong, the performance problems can be opaque and hard to debug. In general solution that "really" does something will save engineer-days as compared to a thing that does it at the same price/performance trade-off, but virtually.
- sliken 10y ago1.4GHz is just the base clock, designed for power efficiency when the CPU isn't under load. The turbo-clock is 2.8 GHz. Intel does similar, the E5-2650 v4 is 2.2 GHz to 2.9 GHz.
- djrogers 10y agoOn at least some Intel chips, the turbo clock is only applicable to one core - do you see any indication that all 32 of these cores can run at 2.8Ghz? And if so, sustain that for any period of time?
- wtallis 10y agoIntel's Turbo Boost isn't binary. CPUs typically have a base clock, a maximum turbo frequency that may only be attainable when using a single core, and numerous intermediate states depending on how many cores are active, including an all-cores turbo frequency that may be usable only for short bursts or may be indefinitely sustainable given a sufficiently lightweight instruction stream (ie. not much AVX). As an example, the 22-core Intel Xeon E5-2696v4 has a base clock of 2.2GHz. With one or two cores active, it can turbo up to 3.7GHz. With three cores active, the maximum is 3.5GHz, and it decreases by 100MHz per active core until ten cores are active. With 10 or more active cores, the limit is 2.8GHz, provided that the chip is still within its power and thermal limits.
- effie 10y agoI wonder, is there any way to control this behaviour from software? Or via microcode/BIOS update?
- wtallis 10y agoHigher core count means more total cache and fewer context switches. If your workload actually has 32 threads, then the 32-core processor will probably be faster overall than a processor with sixteen of the same cores running at twice the clock speed.
- CyberDildonics 10y agoIt also means less memory latency per clock cycle.
- pavlov 10y agoMy understanding is that lower-clocked cores run cooler and consume less power. CPUs designed for high clock speeds will have "hotspots" where certain units are running very hot compared to the rest of the chip. Slower cores have more even thermal profiles. So, if you don't need the high peak clock speeds, 32 half-speed cores would be preferable for datacenters to save money on electricity and cooling design.
- CarVac 10y agoI haven't seen anywhere but wccftech give the 1.4 GHz number, though.
- Sanddancer 10y agoSwitching tasks is expensive [1]. Twice as many cores running at half the speed can be considerably faster in the real world because you're not constantly stopping to flush the cache, save the kilobytes of register a modern CPU has, etc. Honestly, I'm surprised that x86 has kept with just two virtual threads for this long. Architectures like Sparc and Power have 4+ threads per core because so many modern jobs are built around hurrying up and waiting. [1] http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/cli/research/switch.pdf http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/cli/research/switch.pdf
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gpderetta 10y agoA core at twice the frequency is better than two at half the frequency every time. The problem is usually the trade-off is not that clear (either the slower cores consume significantly less or they are faster than just half as slow). Regarding HT, 2 threads is really a sweet spot for a 4-wide CPU. More than that and the competition for cache resources, execution units and register file become significant. POWER8 is special because a factor of x2 is because each power 'core; is pretty much two distinct smaller cores that can gang together to speed up one thread (it also helps on per core software licensing), while the other x2 factor is for very specialized loads (this is also true, or used to be, for SPARC). IIRC XeonPhi which is also a specialized cpu has 4xHT.
- jlawer 10y agoReally not sure on the "EPYC" name for an enterprise part. It seems more enthusiast then button down enterprise. But as long as it doesn't exclusively come in servers with glowing neons and tri-colour fans, I don't exactly care... I just imagine it will make it easier for intel's marketing to imply these are toys rather then true enterprise grade parts.
- monocasa 10y agoAs opposed to Xeon?
- ATsch 10y agoI personally think EPYC is a lot more tacky than Xeon or Opteron since "epic" has gaming and (internet) pop culture connotations for me. I was pretty surprised when I heard the name and heard it was an enterprise product.
- EdSharkey 10y agoMaybe it's pronounced "EP-yick", which would make it less gamey and more enterprisey.
- hinoki 10y agoI don't know, Itanium is one of the most enterprise things not made by IBM, and it was called EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing)
- pierrec 10y agoIt might be completely deliberate, as the WoW generation might be coming into positions where they are now the "enterprise guys" that need to be targeted. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into a whimsical name.
- faitswulff 10y agoI've heard of children named "Riku" and "Sora," so I think the WoW generation has definitely come of age by now...
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI just boggle at the idea of a server with 1TB of RAM. I'm sure the oil&gas folks are salivating as this allows them to to put an entire high resolution 'cube' into memory and analyze it but for us mere mortals at what point is there so much stuff in memory that you need a couple hours of hold up time just to flush it out to SSD.
- api 10y agoRun your whole system in RAM with periodic backup to "slow" SSD?
- Keyframe 10y ago1.4 gigabytes per second or more for 4K flat video work at 4 color components at 16 bits at 25fps (PAL land) each raw for each channel on the timeline saturates system real quick. For online finishing systems that would be sweet. 8 TB would fill an average 90 minutes movie if you had a finishing timeline (no additional ones over it). With over 12TB I wouldn't know what to do anymore, as of this point in time. Sure, you can build a RAID that fast already though.
- threeseed 10y agoThose of us in the Big Data space can easily chew through that. Few HDFS data sets stored in RAM or some more Data Science Spark workloads.
- flukus 10y ago> at what point is there so much stuff in memory that you need a couple hours of hold up time just to flush it out to SSD A few hundred megabytes for our "enterprise" financial software...
- gfody 10y agoWe've had database servers with 2-3TB of RAM in production for years. You can get servers today with 24TB RAM - they're 8-way so lots of NUMA going on but still tons o' RAM.
- apaprocki 10y agoThe bread-and-butter HP DL380 goes up to 3TB. On the other end of the spectrum you have beasts like the IBM E880 that goes up to 32TB.
- dbcooper 10y agoAMD's put a page up for the Pro/Compute version of their new "Vega" GPU. http://pro.radeon.com/en-us/frontier/ http://pro.radeon.com/en-us/frontier/ 13 TF FP32, 16GB HBM2 RAM (480 GB/s).
- TimAhKin 10y agoHopefully at the end of this month we will know more about VEGA RX.
- redtuesday 10y agoIdeally with a message like "in stores now/tomorrow" or something along those lines.
- undersuit 10y ago"Paper launch coming soon!"
- redtuesday 10y agoThey also announced Threadripper, which is AMD's new HEDT platform with up to 16 cores and 32 threads, they also showed Radeon Vega Pro SSG (16 Gbyte HBM and 2 Terabyte SSD on the GPU) and DeepBench vs Nvidia P100 (with an advantage of ~30%) etc . A good summary (with pictures) by a reddit user: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6bjvy6/amd_2017_financial_analyst_day_discussion_thread/dhn6p7u/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6bjvy6/amd_2017_financ...
- Koshkin 10y ago> 16 cores and 32 threads I have met software engineers who could not believe me when I pointed out that multi-threading was invented, made sense, and, in fact, was thriving - on single-core computers (with no hyper-threading)!
- fulafel 10y agoWe still haven't figured out how to parallelize most software without unreasonable effort though. Servers happen to be the happy case for it beacuse they can just run many copies of the same single threaded code that we haven't figured out how to parallelize.
- noir_lord 10y agoIn my life that matters less than you'd think, it's not about speeding up a particular program, it's more about been able to run a particulary program at full speed on one core and not drag the rest of them to a halt. If I have an IDE, 2-3 VM's, a couple of browsers, continuous integration running in the background, webpack/ts-loader with off thread hinting I can easily have 4-5 processes running that all benefit from having a full core to play with. It's for that reason when I had to build a new desktop for the new job I went with the Ryzen 1700, each core isn't that important (as long as it's comparable with the core in my current jobs i5-3570K which it broadly is), it's having eight of them.
- vosper 10y ago
- JonRB 10y agoI'd love to know what the "security hardware" is - It's tacked on the end as a bullet point but I want to know what they mean by that...
- eberkund 10y agoProbably hardware accelerated encryption
- monk_e_boy 10y agoIs this pitched for SSL and HTTPS? Isn't this already done in hardware?
- ktta 10y agoMaybe SHA instructions like Intel?
- vengefulduck 10y agoIt also might be referring to their platform security processer
- dom0 10y agoZen has SHA1/2 extensions compatible to the Intel SHA extensions, yes. These are kinda new on desktops, but since they existed for some years some software already supports them out of the box (like OpenSSL and cryptopp); so applications will automatically profit. With this extension Zen does SHA1 @ 2 cpb, SHA-256 @ 3 cpb and SHA-512 @ 2 cpb (off the top of my head). (All of which are faster than the fastest BLAKE2 implementation I know on Haswell).
- ktta 10y agoDo you by chance have hard numbers about SHA2 with/without hardware instructions and BLAKE2 on a specific Intel CPU? I've wondered about trade off between SHA256 vs BLAKE2. In the future there'll be no debate since more and more computers will have SHA instructions. But right now I'm wondering about the speedup of BLAKE2 vs SHA256 with hardware. On the other hand, many computers, especially servers don't have SHA2 instructions for the foreseeable future which will make BLAKE2 a very good option.
- Keyframe 10y agoWill these be available for workstations in two or more configs? Also, what's the situation with AMD and Thunderbolt? Does that exist at all?
- tutanchamun 10y agoThreadripper (16c/32t, quad channel memory, 44? PCIe 3.0 lanes) will probably be the Workstation platform. Wouldn't AMD need to license Thunderbolt from Intel? There are repeatedly rumors about a license agreement between Intel and AMD regarding AMDs GPU IP, if that is true maybe they get access to Thunderbolt.
- Teknoman117 10y agoDo you need to license Thunderbolt to use it? I thought you just had to buy their transceiver chips (which just hang off a PCIe3 x4 interconnect).
- wmf 10y agoIntel is refusing to sell the chips unless you swear undying loyalty to Intel.
- foota 10y agoThat's not at all anticompetitive
- Dylan16807 10y agoIt's pretty terrible. You're just unable to make certain kinds of devices on what should be a super generic pci-e extender.
- astrodust 10y agoIt's a dark ritual that involves men in robes and drinking out of Andy Grove's skull no doubt.
- gfody 10y agoI bet a 64c Zen chip would be amazing with mixed SQL Server workloads but SQL Server's per-core licensing will make it crazy cost prohibitive. $456k for one server - ouch! Here's hoping per-core licensing goes tf away.
- richdougherty 10y agoSince we're doing more low power cores nowadays, maybe Microsoft should charge per watt? ;)
- gfody 10y agoI would totally get behind that, especially if it could be actual wattage used and not just based on the tdp of the CPU. Nothing sucks more than having to pay huge money for servers that are sub 5% utilization because you're trying to have some headroom.
- stefs 10y agoand from time to time a MS sales rep drops by and measures your power consumption to recalculate cost. or maybe have a power consumption tracking dongle that sends the information back to MS for billing while the MS techs just check if those are connected to the correct machine.
- richdougherty 9y agoGreat ideas!
- mtgx 10y agoWasn't the fact that Microsoft began charging per processor, one of the reasons the antitrust lawsuit against it started? But these days Microsoft is also beginning to exclude third-party browsers from its store, so I guess they don't care they're repeating the same violations all over again. Too much money on the line, when the worst case scenario is a slap on the wrist financially and some "monitoring" by federal agencies.
- drewg123 10y agoI wish we had more details about the on-die internconnect ( Hypertransport successor) in terms of latency and bandwidth, and even topology. We run a NUMA .. challenged .. OS, and depending on the interconnect that may or may not matter so much for our workload.
- valarauca1 10y ago<rumor> Initial leaks point to a PCIe 3.0 64x interconnect </rumor>
- dom0 10y ago^ Well we do already know that the interconnect between modules uses the same PHYs as PCIe 3.0.
- drewg123 10y agoSure.. but I'm wondering about the on-die interconnect between the 4 different packages that share the die. Eg, everything seems like an EPYC is 4 Ryzen packages, and a "thread ripper" is 2 Ryzen packages. So it seems logical that there is something connecting those 2 or 4 packages, and that fabric as bandwidth and latency characteristics. If it is somehow infinitely fast, then that's great for me.
- lightedman 10y agoActual verification shows up to 128 PCI-E lanes.
- julian_1 10y agoAre they secure? Do they have undocumented PSP arm cores with dma access?
- jlebrech 10y agois it AM4 and can you create a workstation with it?
- nrki 10y agoNope, it is a new socket "SP3" - LGA and 4094 pins. AM4 is PGA and 1331 pins. :)
- lightedman 10y agoAnd about half of those pins are purely dedicated to PCI-E.
- msimpson 10y agoSo, presently, this is what I've been able to gather: -------------- Xeon E5 2699 v5 32C/64T @ 2.30 GHz L1 Instruction Cache: 32 KB x 32 L1 Data Cache: 32 KB x 32 L2 Cache: 256 KB x 32 L3 Cache: 46080 KB -------------- AMD EPYC 32C/64T @ 1.4 GHz L1 Instruction Cache: 32 KB x 32 L1 Data Cache: 64 KB x 32 L2 Cache: 512 KB x 32 L3 Cache: TBA -------------- It's going to be interesting to see what the performance per dollar amounts to on both sides. I'm guessing the Xeon will land somewhere around $4K. Although, I have no idea about the EPYC.
- redtuesday 10y agoThe EPYC is 4 dies connected by AMD's Infinity Fabric. I wonder how much cheaper that makes the chip to produce. Regarding the L3 cache: if nothing changed from Ryzen it will be 64 MByte.