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All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes
- wiredfool 9y ago64 lanes would be good for something like 4-6 GPUs @ 8 lanes per, and some high speed storage/networking? Anxiously awaiting Intel's "I am not left handed either" response.
- redtuesday 9y agoYeah, depending on the configuration it would maybe even be enough for 7 GPU's with 8x PCIe 3.0 (60 of the 64 are feeding PCIe and M.2 slots, 4 go to the chipset). Seems like it will be a nice CPU to use for machine learning. Other sites also report that it will support 2 TByte of RAM like the single socket Naples/Epyc, but LRDIMM and official/validated ECC support was not mentioned in the stream.
- hishnash 9y agoOh, yer will be very nice for Machine learning I can see a lot of people getting this. Also even though they did not mention it for lower end servers. Servers currently using a single Xeon. > official/validated ECC support Given all the other Zen cpus have this i think it will, after all it is just 2 ryzen CPUs with a load of PCI!
- Quequau 9y agoIntel already supports a significant number of PCIe 3.0 lanes with their Xeon E5 chips. If I recall supermicro sells a dual socket Xeon board with 10, 8xPCIe 3.0 sockets.
- redtuesday 9y agoBut Threadripper compares to Intels i9 series. Xeons competition is Naples/Epyc, which has 128 PCIe lanes in a single socket.
- masklinn 9y agoSalient point: > all 64 lanes being enabled for all ThreadRipper SKUs. This will be broken up into 60+4: 60 lanes directly from the CPU for feeding PCIe and M.2 slots, and then another 4 lanes going to the chipset And > the 16 core processor will for most purposes be half of an Epyc processor Epyc (formerly Naples) is the server-grade arch with 8 memory channels, 32 cores and 128 PCIe lanes per socket.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoI wonder if it's the same silicon as Epyc, just ThreadRipper gets the worse bins. Or maybe there's one less chip in the package?
- bryanlarsen 9y agoThreadRipper has 2 CPUs in its MCM, and Epyc has 4.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoAh, so the high-end ThreadRipper would contain the same chips as a high-end Epyc, just twice as many, and likewise for the lower-end variants, I guess? That makes sense.
- masklinn 9y ago> just twice as many Half. Epyc gets 4 MCM[0], ThreadRipper gets 2 (with each MCM containing 8 Ryzen cores) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-chip_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-chip_module
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoUh, right. Got it the wrong way round.
- redtuesday 9y ago
- grabcocque 9y agoWe all benefit when AMD is a player. And this player is fighting HARD right now. Me gusta.
- johansch 9y agoI've long been thinking that it would make sense for e.g. US+EU to fund AMD just in order to get some actual competition going.
- neolefty 9y agoBut would they have the same incentive to take risks? I hear you -- I want them to do well too, and keep making cool things, but giving them too much help may kill the golden eggs. Or something.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoWhat golden eggs? We are (or were) rapidly approaching a point where Intel would be the only PC, laptop, and server processor worth considering. If that happened, their only competition would have been themselves, the remnants of AMD, and start-ups who would be behind by hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure. In that situation, would they be likely to keep developing new processors, making them more efficient and more powerful, investing heavily into R&D, and aggressively pricing their products? Or would they give themselves a bonus, their stockholders dividends, and rest on their laurels while taking in the cash for a product that has become essential to the global economy and really the future of humanity? Or were you speaking of AMD being the good that is working hard, taking big risks, and laying golden eggs because it is fighting an uphill battle? If so, consider that risks are risks because they don't always work out. Sometimes they fail. And while that works if you are an angel investor risking a few tens of thousands on dozens of start-ups, where any one success can make up for the loss of all the others, it is not as smart when you have a single company you're risking and success means you just get to keep playing a little longer. And having a handful of processor companies takes more than a few tens of thousands each.
- kogepathic 9y ago
- nicktelford 9y agoThe huge number of PCIe lanes is pretty exciting to me. For consumers, the limiting factor in PCs these days tends to be I/O. With this, you could have 4 PCIe M2 SSDs (that's a bit under 16Gbps bandwidth, assuming RAID0), and still have 44 lanes (the number in the top-end Intel CPU) to spare for GPUs and other peripherals.
- vbezhenar 9y agoI don't fully understand. So 1 SSD need 1 lane. How many lanes need something like NVisia 1080Ti? What use of the remaining lanes? If I want to build something like 1 CPU/1 GPU/1 SSD configuration without additional peripherals, 62 lanes will be effectively wasted?
- imeron 9y agoThe newer M.2 SSDs suck up 4 lanes. That's 16 lanes for four drives, burning through all available lanes on a Kaby Lake CPU.
- masklinn 9y ago> burning through all available lanes on a Kaby Lake CPU. Don't you also get something like 4x via the chipset through DMI?
- floatboth 9y agoA GPU can use 16x 3.0 lanes, theoretically. In practice 8 lanes is enough, people have measured performance between 16x and 8x, it's almost the same. SSDs use 4x, if you do buy an NVMe drive that is. (In my country, these things are TWICE as expensive as SATA SSDs lol)
- shaklee3 9y agoMaybe for games, but for cuda this is certainly not the case. Double the lanes is double the host to device bandwidth.
- xbmcuser 9y agoI was of the opinion that Intel will only face real competition when arm reaches parity with desktop class cpu. Nice to see AMD rise back up again. Hope Intel is not able to strong arm the oems like last time when AMD had design wins but Intel using anti competitive practice stalled its growth till it was able to catch-up and later go ahead.
- nicktelford 9y agoI doubt we'll be seeing desktop ARM systems any time soon, especially high end workstation or enthusiast systems. The problem is that the ARM64 architecture is completely different from x86-64, which almost every desktop application is compiled for exclusively. Remember when Microsoft launched an ARM Surface? It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as very few applications are compiled for Windows on ARM.
- adrianN 9y agoMy Raspberry Pi does almost all things that I would like to do with a computer. I could definitely imagine buying an ARM based computer.
- jrimbault 9y agoBecause we have the sources for most of the software, it can be recompiled. Not true for Windows, especially old closed source software.
- adrianN 9y agoApple switched processors several times. They provided an emulator for old programs, so they could run without the user noticing anything (except worse performance). You could probably do the same for ARM.
- swsieber 9y agoAnd Windows has done the same thing for ARM. I think it was posted here in the last month or so. Edit: found it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14318406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14318406
- doe88 9y agoRelevant link [1] for background informations on expected shortcomings of the recently announced concurrent Intel CPUs. [1] http://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/30/intel-announces-x-series-without-details/ http://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/30/intel-announces-x-series-...
- altcognito 9y agoDo the extra PCIe lanes help the GPUs for deep learning applications, or is the data typically pretty localized on the GPU board?
- nspattak 9y agoExtra PCIe lanes mean more peripherals might be available on a system, eg more GPUs and/or hard disks and/or other IO devices.
- hishnash 9y agoYes, massivly deep learning is all about learning from data. With the work I have done I have seen that currently unless you buy a 2xeon server you can't get enough data through to justify haveing 4 GPUs on one machine. So commonly its cheaper to break out to multiple machines, but this then has an impact on how you code your learning since communication between the GPUs then is much slower. Think of training a NN to learn cats expressions and such Meme txt to go along with pictures of cats. So 1) you collect as many cat memes as you can (easy,... 40k memes of cats later) you start training... you need to normalise all the images you need to extract the meme txt and normalise this and you need to feed this through your tenso flow (or other system) to train it. This means pusshing your small data sample of 40k through the GPU and back out and possibly doing this a lot, there is no way they will all fit on your GPU and even if they do you need to get them on there in the firrst place.
- Nereus77 9y agoI dare say, that might be enough lanes....
- bkjelden 9y agoI didn't see pricing info in the article. Has that been announced anywhere?
- redtuesday 9y agoNo, there was also no word on official/validated ECC support, only that Threadripper will launch this summer. But people hope for something between 999$ (since it is two Ryzen R7) and 1499$ for the 16 core CPU. 999$ would be awesome, but 1499$ sounds much more realistic, maybe even more, since it has a much larger socket, high end platform bonus etc.
- hishnash 9y ago> there was also no word on official/validated ECC support I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given. > 999$ (since it is two Ryzen R7) and 1499$ I think it will be more around the 999$ but the motherboard will be quite expensive, it is after all basically a duel CPU main board. Don't expect to pick up a board for under 500$
- redtuesday 9y ago> I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given. Yes, Ryzen can use ECC if the motherboard maker supports it, but ECC support is not validated. [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def6vs2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
- hishnash 9y agoI think that in the end this will be down the mainboard makers to get validation so possibly will not be validated on non-server style boards. But if there is demand given epic is basicly the same thing just bigger im sure they will do it.
- znpy 9y agoCompetition is supposed to bring prices down, yet Intel released i9 processor for an insane prize (nearly 2000$). If AMD manages to ship similar performance (not necessarily higher) at a lower price... Sooner or later Intel will have to slash its prices. Looking forward to such times.
- clarry 9y agoThese aren't your average consumer/gamer/enthusiast CPUs though. For what it is, the price doesn't look insane at all. And I'm concerned that AMD is not going to be much of a winner here because most people looking at these top-of-the-line workhorse CPUs are probably going to pick the better performer over the cheaper part -- they aren't exactly doing budget shopping.
- redtuesday 9y agoIntel lowered their prices with the release of the 18 core for 2000$. Before AMD became competitive again you had to pay 1700$ for only 10 cores or go for a 3000$ or 4000$ 18 core Xeon. EDIT - of course there are also Xeons between 10 and 18 cores, but it should show that you had to pay much more to get 18 cores, or only slightly less for much less cores.
- hishnash 9y agoI think AMD have been really clever in how the have built the Zen system, unlike Intel these higher end CPUS are basically just multiple lower end ones put together. This means they don't need different fabrication (they just build ryzen7 CPUs) and given they have such good yields on those chips know they can bring the price down. I would expect this chip to be at most 2x a ryzen 1800. However, it is not jus the chip cost for these systems its also the mainboard if AMD can get the motherboards to be cheaper then that will make a big difference in the overall price.
- webaholic 9y agoBut it did. Intel reduced their 8 core processor prices from 1000$ to 600$. See their new lineup: http://imgur.com/a/LSpau http://imgur.com/a/LSpau
- gigatexal 9y agoIf the clock speeds are decent (and the price is reasonable) this will be my next workstation CPU. Can't wait.
- slizard 9y agoThreadripper & EPYC are a truly epic move to jump into the dense GPU workstation and server market! With a Threadripper you get four x16 GPUs without PLX or three + a couple of SSDs. Time for @nvidia to switch the DGX boxes to @AMD CPUs? :)
- crb 9y agoAny word from AMD on support for Thunderbolt 3, now Intel are making it available royalty-free? https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world-thunderbolt-3-everywhere/ https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world-thunder...
- masklinn 9y agoThey've only announced it would be royalty-free circa 2018: > next year Intel plans to make the Thunderbolt protocol specification available to the industry under a nonexclusive, royalty-free license. no point in AMD saying anything at this point.
- crb 9y agoAny word from AMD on support for Thunderbolt 3, now Intel are making it available royalty-free? https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world-thunderbolt-3-everywhere/ https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world-thunder...
- old-gregg 9y agoBefore you get excited about unleashing the power of 16 cores on your desktop... I have recently upgraded from the 4-core to 6-core i7 with roughly the same frequency/turbo and noticed that compile times have actually increased. Disappointing, I thought, especially because in addition to extra two cores I now sport a quad-channel DDR RAM. Well, turns out that compiling my Go projects does not generate enough "hot" threads, and the Linux scheduler keeps moving them around between 6 cores, letting the cores to "cool down" and drop to 1.2Ghz idle frequency. Meanwhile the 4-core box is happily spinning at 3.4-3.8Ghz during the compile cycle. The only way to make the 6-core box to perform was to enable "performance" policy for intel_pstate which leads to the CPU running at its full speed even at idle (not great). Once I did that I saw the performance increase by 50%. Here are the compile times of the same project on both machines with different CPU frequency scaling policies: governor/cpu 4-core 3.4Gz 6-core 3.3Ghz ------------ ------------- -------------- standard 13 sec 15 sec performance 11 sec 9 sec As far as I know, AMD does not have an equivalent of intel_pstate in Linux kernel and relies on legacy ACPI governor which isn't as sophisticated as Intel's (where the CPU is more self-regulating) and I wonder what kind of effects to expect in regards to performance / power consumption if I go for Ryzen.
- Xeoncross 9y agoSolution: Keep all CPU's active. go build main.go & go build main.go & go build main.go & go build main.go & go build main.go & go build main.go & /s
- hinkley 9y agoI get that you're being funny, but there's a valid question in there. Does go not support parallel build jobs? If so then he should be setting the count to six instead.
- old-gregg 9y agoThe bigger question, at least for me, is either high-core machines improve your desktop experience if you're mostly running low-threaded workloads, for example a web browser. One humble piece of evidence I gathered says that no, more cores make your low-threaded applications run slower because the Linux scheduler keeps placing them onto "cold" cores running on idle frequency, and once they "spin up" the thread gets moved to another cold core.
- geiseric 9y agoDoes any remember the DEC Alpha? Windows NT 4.0 was ported to it. The Alpha was a 64-bit RISC processor. (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) An ARM is just an Advanced RISC Machine. RISC architecture has an instruction execution advantage over CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) that is what Intel is famous for. Although they did have a i860 and i960 RISC which many of them were for embedded military systems. Other RISC systems were from Silicon Graphics, with their MIPS processor were used for 3D graphic processing. RISC has shown that it has its place in the computing world time and time again. My personal appeal is their low power requirements and compact designs. Obviously cell phone manufactures like it too for the same reasons.
- Corrado 9y agoYes, I actually managed a SQLServer computer running on a DEC Alpha machine. I don't remember anything specifically wonderful about the DEC other than it was one of the biggest servers I had seen at the time and it had a large ducted fan in the front for cooling. Neato!