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AMD’s Epyc Pummels Intel’s New Xeon-W Workstation CPUs
- Analemma_ 9y agoThe author sounds like they have an axe to grind with Intel. That's totally understandable, since Intel really has been soaking the server/workstation market, but it's not appropriate for a comparative article, especially one with no actual benchmarks. Just the facts, ma'am.
- tedunangst 9y agoFirst time reading semiaccurate?
- Analemma_ 9y agoYes, and probably the last time too if (as comments suggest) this is typical of their output.
- guardiangod 9y agoOf course Charlie Demerjian has an axe to grind with Intel. He was the reporter who broke the news that Intel threatened Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers to _not_ release motherboards for the then new AMD Athlon 64 CPUs. The manufacturers had to _leak_ this info to him in fear of Intel's retaliation ("Ops we have a shortage of north bridge chipsets, guess you guys aren't getting any chipsets allocation for the next three months.") He was also one of the first reporters to report Intel's secret paymenst to Dell to not use AMD Athlon CPUs, that ultimately greatly limited AMD's ability to generate revenue to increase its production capacity at its fab. Believe it or not, Intel acted like a mini-Microsoft back in AMD's Athlon heydays, and that pissed off a lot of people in the industry. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/06/5047-2/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/06/5047-2/
- coredog64 9y agoIs there anyone in the semiconductor industry that _doesn't_ have an axe to grind with Intel?
- guardiangod 9y agoProbably Qualcomm, but that's only because Intel's attempts were so pathetic (StrongArm and mobile Atoms?)
- FullyFunctional 9y agoIntel lost a lawsuit to Transmeta for similar nastiness [1] (of course the latter went out of business before the total could be collected). Charlie holds many grudges; he pissed NVIDIA off enough that they denied him access after which his been dumping dirt on them whenever he can, justified or not. "Semi-accurate" is an appropriate name. He's sometimes right. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta
- sliken 9y agoSimilar with Dec/Alpha. Amusingly they are suing Qualcom for doing the same thing to them in the mobile market.
- brian_herman 9y agoIts nice to see AMD competitive again.
- agumonkey 9y agoIt is. I wish them a nice and comfy market share mat to keep going nicely.
- astrodust 9y agoIt's nice to see that AMD is still around so this day could come. Things looked pretty grim in the Bulldozer era when they were being pounded by Intel on one side and slammed by NVidia on the other.
- lostmsu 9y agoA lot of water without actual benchmarks.
- sqeaky 9y agoPer Phoronix[1] AMD's threadripper does really good against Intel's workstation and HEDT CPUs. How could two more core complexes make it look less onesided. A Ryzen is one core complex, A threadripper is two Ryzen and an Epyc is 4 Ryzen. It is going to be the fastest until we look at Intel's highest end server chips. 1 - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-tr-1950x&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-tr-1...
- lostmsu 9y agoThis is not even the same processor series and number of cores. Article is about Xeon, and this benchmark is about iX
- sqeaky 9y agoWhat is it with this author and the word "mere". At first I thought it was legit because the AMD chip was cheaper, then sarcastic because a purely inferior Intel was more expensive then it was used everywhere so now I think the author doesn't know how to use it.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoThis is a poorly-written article with no benchmarks – so I think it might be worth reserving judgement until we have a better idea of how this all plays out. It will definitely be great for competition if AMD can become more competitive with Intel's latest chips.
- nl 9y agoThe benchmarks are out there and well known by now. This article summarizes them fairly: Intel still wins, barely, on single threaded performance. AMD of course ships more cores and more IO for a lower price. This is an opinionated editorial by someone who knows the market pretty well, and there is a place for that.
- c2h5oh 9y agoYeah, that article is shit, so here's some real data. Benchmarks: - Top AMD Threadripper model vs Top Intel I9 X-series currently being sold (same cpu as Xeon W-2155, just without ECC): https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-tr-1950x https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-tr-1... 14 and 18 core Xeon-W and i9 processors have only been announced, but are not available yet. We already know that the Intel 18-core parts will have a base clock of 2.3 GHz vs 3.3 GHz of the one tested above, both parts have 4 memory channels. The 16-core AMD Threadripper from that benchmark runs at 3.4GHz base clock and has 4 memory channels, the 32-core AMD EPYC runs at 2.2GHz base clock and has 8 memory channels. -- Educated guesses and extrapolation starts here-- Intel 10-core vs 18-core: +80% more cores -30% base clock Assuming perfect core & clock scaling: 1.8 * 0.7 = 1.26 AMD 16-core vs 32-core +100% more cores -35% base clock Assuming perfect core & clock scaling: 2 * 0.65 = 1.3 Even ignoring double memory bandwidth AMD is likely to increase any advantage (or catch up in AVX2-heavy workloads) over Intel. I'm only looking at base clocks, because Intel CPUs are not able to maintain boost clock for any meaningful amount of time, even with water cooling - the package doesn't transfer heat from the die fast enough. AMDs fare quite a bit better, but few people will bother with water cooling their workstations.
- kobeya 9y agoI thought all the AMD CPUs supported ECC, if the motherboard does?
- nl 9y agoI think one of the best outcomes of a competitive CPU market is that the artificial limitations Intel introduced to segment their CPU market are going to have to die. It's pretty clear that now AMD is speed competitive, people will look at features and this artificial segmentation will push more people to AMD. Eg, from the article: You may notice the Silver and Bronze tiers of Xeons are gone, as are the -M SKUs. This leaves the workstation parts crippled, you can’t get more than 768GB per socket on parts meant for heavy memory intensive tasks like CAD, FEA, and modeling large data sets.... AMD’s Epyc on the other hand can put up to 2TB in a single socket, 4TB with 256GB DIMMs versus Intel’s 756GB, an artificially enforced cap so DIMM side is irrelevant. Also, the Xeon 8180 is $10,000?! I used to spec servers, and I don't remember seeing CPUs anywhere near that price. Is that common in the workstation market?
- mtanski 9y ago> I think one of the best outcomes of a competitive CPU market is that the artificial limitations Intel introduced to segment their CPU market are going to have to die. Actually, for me following at home ... it seams like they have a whole new segmentation scheme. So not killing it, just changing it.
- deaddodo 9y agoAbout a decade ago, the top proc's were 4-6k. They've trended up. 8k was the top for awhile and now 10k+ is the new norm. It's definitely Intel abusing their position, in this case. Also, the $10k one isn't even the most expensive. The Xeon Platinum 8180M is $13,011.
- lettergram 9y agoThis line: > Intel doesn’t want to be put in the position of admitting they are charging significantly more for a new product that runs about half the speed of their cheaper competition. Unfortunately, people are locked into the Xeon line - so it doesn't matter a ton for now. In the coming years if AMD can keep up, they'll win - over and over time.
- convery 9y agoIt does get them a foot in the door though since most people never considered anything but Xeon. Personally I'll get an AMD the next time I upgrade just for variety; even if Intel would take the performance lead next generation. (Currently sitting on two E5-2660v2 for reference)
- snuxoll 9y agoEspecially at the pricing of AMD's parts, it'll cost me $400-500 for a Xeon E5-2420v2 to upgrade the E5-2403v2 in my TD340 to something more reasonable clock-speed and core/thread-wise - not to mention I HAVE to buy two of them to get full access to the PCIe lanes and memory capacity of the thing. I think instead of upgrading this thing any more I'll just sell it and build a new EPYC system once the parts are available outside of OEM configurations. At $600 the EPYC 7281 is a steal - 16c/32t, a full 128 PCIe lanes plus four memory channels (with 2TB of memory supported) on a single socket.
- tracker1 9y agoI'm not running workstation hardware, been on an i7-4790K for a few years now, but sometimes constrained on ram at 32gb, and recently went to a 1gb nvme for my primary drive + gtx1080. I will say that even Threadripper is compelling on value, and Epyc equally so. I'll probably go Threadripper for my next system, depending on how the next year or so shape up. Everyone using these systems has different needs, some need raw CPU power, others more memory, some max both. Intel has carved out too many parts to maximize profits and confuse customers. AMD seems to be sized "just right" on their parts, without killing features. I'm still pretty happy with my ~3yo pc, I did ditch windows as my desktop OS earlier this year. (aside: win10's aggressive advertising in the OS finally irritated me too much, and I'm not the only one).
- Teknoman117 9y agoI really wish AMD would fix the nested page tables bug in iommu...
- deaddodo 9y agoEpyc is a stepping above the early Threadripper's and Ryzen. Other errata have been patched, and knowing the influence virtualization has on the server space, I'd hope they'd fix this one as well.
- gigatexal 9y agoSemiaccurate is at best a clickbait hardware site. So this article is to be laughed at. AMD’s new server line is not to be laughed at but intel still commands the edge in cases where AVX is used and in gaming. AMD has become so much more competitive of late but intel can throw sheer cores and with those cores their improved IPC at the issue and enterprises will pay because of name recognition.
- nolok 9y agoIntel's domination in gaming and "low level" workstation is getting tenuous at best, and that's why they need to shake their entire lineup at that level too and doing several line release in a single year (which is hilarously obvious as to how unprepared they were). Yes, in pure per core performance intel still has a nice edge of roughly 10%, and yes games mostly care about single core perf, and yes if you want to make the best gaming machine money can buy you still go for intel. But gaming has not been CPU bound for quite some time, and amd's proposition there is not "the same thing, little bit less expensive and little bit less powerful", it's "the same price, little bit less powerful by core but still not cpu bound, and we give you twice the cores". Intel might very well fix that by the end of the year but right now you want a 600 - 1000 € gaming machine there is a very good chance you go for Ryzen. And of course that's why AMD did that, they did not go crazy with core count to be nice, they did it because that's what they finally needed to get over that "but intel's still ahead and there is no reason to go with amd if you don't need to save fifty bucks".
- gigatexal 9y agoWhat benchmarks show gaming not being CPU bound, everything I have seen says otherwise. 4 - 8 cores clocked as fast as possible make for the best performance. What I like about AMD is that they pack their chips with features. Low end ones support VT-D and VT-X, AES, etc., whereas Intel likes to segment the market a ton with arbitrary features turned off to prevent higher ticket SKUs from being replaced with lower priced ones.
- chx 9y ago
- jnordwick 9y agoDomain name checks out.
- elihu 9y ago> There are a few things to note here. First take a look at AMD’s 1S Epyc pricing, specifically the 32C 7551P. It costs $2100 or a mere $101 more than the 28C Skylake-X for 14C more, 1.25TB more addressable memory, and no artificial fusings of bells and whistles. The math doesn't work out here: 32 cores isn't 14 cores more than 28 cores. I think this was a typo and the author meant to compare with the 18 core Skylake-X, which exists (whereas there is no 28 core model).
- ComputerGuru 9y agoIPC, clock speed and core count don't tell the whole story any more. All these latest generation chips boost clock speed ("turbo" mode) the fewer cores there are in use. AMD is far more generous with its turbo modes at multiple tiers (read: higher percentage of top turbo speed at the same active core count) although at a significant TDP cost
- 013a 9y agoI'm confused. Xeon-W more directly compares with Threadripper. Xeon-SP compares with Epyc. Why is this comparison even a thing? Also, I need to bring this up every time we have an "AMD is destroying Intel" post: Intel's per-core performance is still higher than AMD, somewhere around 10% depending on the application. AMD is competitive again, which is great. But I'm still buying Intel because my use-cases demand maximum per-core performance.
- redial 9y agoYou don't need to bring it up, is right there in the article. There are many use cases, and maybe to you per-core performance is paramount, but he's making the case that for the market Xeon-Ws are aimed at, cores are more important than 10% peak performance, otherwise you wouldn't be buying a 36 core monster to begin with.
- dis-sys 9y agoIntel wants $1,440 for its 10 core and $1,113 for a 8 core Xeon-W? Is Intel in self-destruction mode? 4 memory channel, less PCI lanes, 8 less cores, but $120 more when compared to Threadripper 1950x? You really need to hate your hard earned $ with a passion to buy such rubbish with an Intel logo on it.