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The Zen core had a pretty good (but no that amazing) success in the consumer market, because although people admired its multi-threaded performance, they were m
by mrb 9y ago
The Zen core had a pretty good (but no that amazing) success in the consumer market, because although people admired its multi-threaded performance, they were merely lukewarm about its single-threaded perf which "just" almost matches Intel. But oh boy, the Zen core in the server market is going to make a killing. Servers are all about multi-threaded performance (hence why 80% of the server market is dual socket). And it looks like a single socket EPYC is beating a dual socket Xeon... ouch. Finally a good kick in Intel's resting bottom.
- jacquesm 9y agoI've used a dual cpu AMD Bulldozer for years (and still do), it's been rock solid and the 32 threads really helped with certain workloads. At the time the equivalent from Intel would have been far more expensive.
- gravypod 9y agoWhat board supports had dual socket FX? Those chips have come down in price to a point where it's now cheap to buy second hand systems for the price of the chip when it was released. It would make a nice home VM server.
- jacquesm 9y agoIt's an HP server, I don't know if they make those any more. I can look up the model number if you want, I'm sure I have the invoice somewhere.
- gravypod 9y agoIf you wouldn't mind grabbing a model number that would be great.
- jacquesm 9y agoOk, give me a moment. edit: this is the one: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/archives_Division/12162_div_v22/12162_div.HTML http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/archives_Divis... It's a DL 385 G7. Cpuinfo: (there's two of these but they're obviously the same) processor : 31 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 21 model : 1 model name : AMD Opteron(TM) Processor 6274
- morganvachon 9y agoLooks like they are going for around $190 used on eBay with the CPUs and RAM included (some with HDDs and some without, but personally I'd buy without and use my own SSDs). Not a bad deal for the horsepower!
- noir_lord 9y ago> The Zen core had a pretty good (but no that amazing) success in the consumer market, because although people admired its multi-threaded performance, they were merely lukewarm about its single-threaded perf which "just" almost matches Intel. That's highly variable, I was actually pretty astounded by it's single core performance and completely blown away by its multicore performance. I built a 1700 (not even a +) for work a few weeks ago and I keep running into things where I pause and think something crashed because it can't have finished that fast... Yesterdays was 5Gb of mixed data in 18s (turns out the SSD is the bottleneck), if I wasn't busy with a new job I'd be trying that 5Gb of data out of a RAM disk just to see how fast pigz (love pigz by the way, multithreaded gzip) can go with 8 cores/16 threads.
- cmurf 9y agoPigz do fly.
- Zenst 9y agoCertainly for server software that is licensed per CPU and not per core, this is a major plus point for AMD.
- onli 9y ago> The Zen core had a pretty good (but no that amazing) success in the consumer market In the communities I look at, the only Intel processors still getting regularly recommended are the Pentium G4560 and the Intel i7-7700K. And that's from consumers to consumers. Also, when I look at my meta-benchmark for games, I see Ryzen with really good results by now. That changed a bit, it improved now that games are getting optimized and ram support is getting better. Before the i5 was still more viable. I don't have insight into the whole market, but from my small observer position Ryzen does look like a pretty huge success.
- nodesocket 9y agoWhile the raw compute performance numbers of Zen may be better than Intel, don't underestimate other economic and business factors. AMD has always played 2nd fiddle to Intel and it is hard to shake that perception. I'd love to see a major cloud provider (AWS, Google, Azure) actively buying AMD chips and making them available for compute. However, I am still a bit skeptical this is ever going to happen. There is just too much risk for a cloud provider. Intel holds market and nearly all mindshare in mainstream cloud computing. Disclosure: $AMD shareholder
- chao- 9y agoI wouldn't be so sure. As Intel's customers, the cloud providers are very interested in not seeing Intel maintain the near-monopoly they have inched toward over the last 5 years. They don't want to pay $7K each for the highest performance Xeon if it could be $6K in a slightly more competitive market. So much so that Google and others joined the OpenPOWER Foundation. Whether that was just for signaling alone, or if they legitimately thought a POWER8 chip would come available that met their needs, I of course do not know.
- nodesocket 9y agoI agree, but there is inherent risk to switching for a cloud provider, even though AMD might offer a cheaper and faster CPU.
- arcanus 9y agoCertainly a risk, but this is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook we are talking about here. The largest public companies in the world. Some of the most technologically advanced as well. If they cannot bring pressure to Intel, no one can.
- wmf 9y agoCloud providers aren't going to switch fully to AMD, but I wouldn't be surprised if they buy a mix like 70% Intel / 30% AMD. There may be a situation, however, where the servers that are rented to customers are 100% Intel which would perpetuate the appearance of a monopoly even if it no longer exists.