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AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster
- tapoxi 8y agoEvery time I see SemiAccurate I remember their love for AMD and their constant, unending hate for Nvidia: https://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-boards-gtc/ https://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-board... I don't have any dog in this fight, SA is just a terrible news source.
- nv-vn 8y agoBut they were right in that case... I know it's a biased source but I've seen a lot of accurate info there in the past
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wmf 8y agoThey don't like Intel or Nvidia, but their facts tend to be mostly accurate. I wouldn't listen to any of their financial or market-share predictions since the market has remarkable inertia that disconnects it from technical factors.
- sixothree 8y agoThe article has a lot of boasting about their exclusive scoop. That and their annoyingly watermarked images.
- sizeofchar 8y agoThey started using watermarks this way when their news were plagiarized some 5 years ago by even big sites such as WCCFTech, Tom’s and others. It is ugly but understandable, they are independent, don’t live on ads, aren’t invited for most events and barely receive pre-release hardware for reviews.
- dman 8y agoIt might feel one sided, but I think SemiAccurate is one of the few places remaining doing old fashioned journalism (ie pursuing sources and gathering information from the real world). Most other tech news websites have devolved into wrapping up marketing materials from tech companies into "reviews".
- m_mueller 8y agoCalling Jensen “Dear Leader” though? Did I catch that right? If you have good info why resort to tasteless and frankly racist language?
- pellucide 8y agoIt is semi-accurate after all.
- ksec 8y ago>SA is just a terrible news source. Yes and does not belong to HN.
- jesuslop 8y agoQuestion, why is DRAM still packed separately?
- wmf 8y agoA lot of reasons. It's physically quite large (multiple thousands of sq. mm. of silicon). Customers want different amounts of RAM so you could end up with a cartesian product explosion of SKUs. Customers want to upgrade RAM. System vendors and integrators don't want to give up more margins to the CPU.
- extrapickles 8y agoFor higher power parts, heat dissipation is the primary reason. Most of the high end CPUs are purely heat limited in terms of performance. A TDP of 90W is about the limit for CPUs using cheap cooling techniques, and adding ram would lower that by 10-30W.
- ericd 8y agoIf you interleaved the memory with the processing, wouldn’t it decrease the heat density, though, which afaik is the limiting factor? You can get rid of quite a lot more heat than that if it’s not in too small an area to conduct away quickly.
- saltcured 8y agoThe semiconductor processing for high-end DRAM is not the same as for high-end CPU logic or cache SRAM, so it is not cost-effective to put both on the same chip. This was a recurring obstable to past processing-in-memory R&D projects. To mix the two for thermal reasons would lead to some crazy multi-chip modules as in the "chiplet" approach reported recently. However, I suspect you would need far too many chiplets and too many bonds to really give you this thermal benefit rather than just having individual chiplets which are still hot spots with problematic cooling.
- tmd83 8y agoI don't think that's feasible either. If you put memory in between chip element that means you now have to route around that adding to wastage. It also means the distance between the elements would increase slowing things down. At the speed that chips are running the physical distance matters (from what I recall).
- dman 8y agoIve been really enjoying my dual epyc 64 core workstation. Looking forward to when I can upgrade to 128 cores. :)
- montecarl 8y agoDid you build that yourself? Do you know of any good vendors for this type of workstation? I know building it isn't that hard, but typically an employer doesn't want to go that route.
- dman 8y agoI built it myself but there are multiple vendors selling prebuilt workstations eg https://www.velocitymicro.com/wizard.php?iid=327 https://www.velocitymicro.com/wizard.php?iid=327 PS: I have no affiliation with velocity micro, have never bought from them
- walrus01 8y agoSilicon Mechanics can build just about anything with your choice of Supermicro motherboard. http://www.supermicro.com/en/products/aplus/solutions/SP3 http://www.supermicro.com/en/products/aplus/solutions/SP3
- spiritcat 8y agowhat do you do with all those cores? if i may ask
- dman 8y agoSimulations and randomized testing.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoLooking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons. That said, this really does look like a pretty awesome chip for data centers. I would love a dual socket mother board that had 512G of RAM 1TB of Optane memory as additional "RAM", then 16TB of NVME SSD storage, and 32 SAS/SATA channels for an effective 360TB of rotating disk (dual parity RAID 6, 30 active drives, 2 parity drives). And then make a cluster of 48 of those monsters. Ah the places we would go and the things we would do with such a system.
- wmf 8y agoAt this point Intel isn't executing consistently either, so any customer who treats their processor vendor as "strategic" is going to pay the price.
- Dunedan 8y agoAMD had enough time to learn that lesson. Let's hope they did.
- user5994461 8y agoRAID 6 with 32 drives. All the things you would not do while the array is rebuilding.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoInteresting design. The 70mm^2 die is more similar to an embedded chip so I guess that explains how AMD was able to hit 7nm so much earlier than Intel. But reading between the lines, AMD is only showing benchmarks for extremely parallel loads much like they did with ThreadRipper 2. Between the physically separate processing cores and the nature of the marketing benchmarks, I suspect workloads that have high IPC or extremely low latency requirements won't fare so well on this chip. The weirdest part is to think what Apple might come up with if they were to take the A12X design and connect it on a die like AMD has done here. It would probably make for a pretty interesting Mac Pro.
- ip26 8y agoYou play to the strengths of the part and the interests of the target market. People willing to pay the price premium for ThreadRipper are interested in throughput, not latency.
- stcredzero 8y agoYou play to the strengths of the part and the interests of the target market. However the strategy to go with gluing smaller dies together also better fits the (long known) pragmatics of manufacturing processes. This allows AMD to hit lower price points and while getting better margins. It also coincides with Intel being hit with "The Thermocline of Truth" where they were too optimistic about overcoming the challenges of larger die sizes. "The Thermocline of Truth" http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...
- vondur 8y agoI’ve been wondering lately if the reason for the Mac Pro replacement not coming out until 2019 may be due to Apple switching to the 7nm refresh of the AMD ThreadRipper. That would certainly make for some interesting news.
- jamesu 8y agoBut then you've got other people who seem adamant they are switching the mac to their magically scaled up ARM chips. What on earth is really going on at Apple HQ?
- Waterluvian 8y agoI read somewhere that Apple has been trying to avoid uttering the word "Intel" in their latest presentations. If that's true, maybe it lends a bit of vague support to your idea.
- ksec 8y agoApple can't use Thunderbolt with AMD, and Intel has been delaying its opening of Thunderbolt standard for whatever reason. At this point I think Intel has been so disappointing in the past 3 years Apple should just dump them and takes matter into their own hands.
- walrus01 8y agoNot particularly related to Rome, but what you can buy right now for a single socket system, AMD is far ahead of Intel for reasonably priced workstations or small servers with a huge amount of I/O. One threadripper CPU has 64 pci express 3.0 lanes. One lane is 985MB/s. Working with a $399 threadripper motherboard that has four x16 physical slots, it can accommodate four Intel x710-4 10GbE four port NICs (each electrically x8), for a total of sixteen 10GbE router interfaces in a Linux kernel based FRR system, as a fully software implemented router. And with the RAM capacity of a 32GB system, no worries about FIB size. It's a very different approach to do with a routing entirely in CPU vs ASICs. But this can be built for under $4000. Or one could just as easily use those four physical x16 slots for four independent 100GbE interfaces.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoI looked into it for a server but I wasn't able to find a motherboard with remote management features. I suspect there might never be one so as not to muddy the waters of Epyc's intended market.
- hak8or 8y agoI looked into this in the past but had issues finding information about processing overhead for routing (or even switching) that much data. Could a, say, 2950 handle routing 40 gigabit worth of data over a network, assuming no crypto?
- LiterallyDoge 8y agoAnyone know if this chip addresses speculative execution exploits eg Meltdown?
- mainde 8y agoNot the answer you're looking for but Meltdown specifically has never affected AMD.
- LiterallyDoge 8y agoYeah my question was bad, was looking for Spectre
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- PedroBatista 8y agoThey don't, because AMD is not affected by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...
- LiterallyDoge 8y agoSpectre
- protomyth 8y agoFrom the article: The other big box to check is Spectre mitigations are now rolled in to the core but Meltdown and L1TF/Foreshadow are not. Why? Because AMD wasn’t affected by either one and never will be. Patching can work but to be immune from the start is always a better choice.
- LiterallyDoge 8y agoMeant Spectre.
- captaincoont 8y agoI wish AMD could catch up in single core performance as despite having huge potential in offline parallel processing it falls short in real-time applications.
- The_rationalist 8y agoNo it doesn’t fall short, Intel single core lead is < 10%. (except for the few programs that use AVX256) Btw, zen 2 will take the lead at every metrics.
- bitL 8y agoRumors are Zen 2 is 13% faster on average than Zen+. Looking at fastest single-threaded CPUs: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html The fastest Zen+ is 2950x at position 85, roughly as fast as Broadwell C, with score of 2230. Now 13% more would give it 2520, roughly matching Haswell 4790k (number 15). So no, it's not likely going to lead every single metrics.
- The_rationalist 8y agoLol Nice try and your calculus is 100% right for this benchmark under the assumption that only the zen ipc will increase (and new rumors say it could be higher). 7nm will allow higher frequencies too which should make the difference. If Intel still lead in single thread it would probably be negligible.
- The_rationalist 8y ago29% ipc gain under certain workloads !! https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9w16y1/amd_claims_zen_2_has_29_higher_ipc_than_zen_1_in/?utm_content=comments&utm_medium=hot&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=Amd https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9w16y1/amd_claims_zen_...
- bitL 8y ago
- BonesJustice 8y agoOh man, the licensing costs for any “per core” software are going to be insane :D
- PedroBatista 8y agoA few years ago many companies changed it to "per socket". Now with 64 cores in one socket things got even weirder, but then again, those licenses always have been in some parallel universe.
- Twirrim 8y agoThere's still a disturbing amount of software that operates on a per-core pricing model. Some of them include Hyperthread in that core count. When we launched Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, (as Bare Metal Cloud, before we launched our VM product), our standard bare metal instance had 36 cores, 72 threads with HT enabled. One interested customer couldn't use our platform because just licensing their standard software on our platform was going to set them back some $250,000 due to all those 72 "cores". The product manager at the time mentioned there were several other customers facing that issue with their various bits of enterprise software.
- fipple 8y agoHow are 7nm and 14nm mixed? Are they made separately and then... attached together? Isn’t a die made from a single wager “burned” with a single wavelength?
- pacificmint 8y ago7nm and 14nm do not refer to the wavelength of the light. They describe the size of the features on the chip (though that is getting increasingly inaccurate). Either way, Zen chips are already multi die chips. For Zen and Zen+ each die has (up to) four cores. Chips with more cores than four contain multiple dies. For Zen 2 they are going to be mixed differently, which is what you are referring to.
- atq2119 8y agoMostly correct, except Zen (and Zen+, and Zen 2) has eight cores per die. You may have been thinking of core complexes (CCXs), of which there are two on a die, and each CCX has four cores.
- atq2119 8y agoYou're mixing up a bunch of things. Each wafer, which is the disk on which many dies are produced, is produced using a single technology process. This means that Rome's IO dies (14nm process) are produced on separate wafers from the core dies (7nm process). The wafers are sliced into dies, the dies are tested and binned separately, and sufficiently good dies are then packaged together into a single package that goes into your server's CPU socket. The wavelength of the laser used for the manufacturing is a different story entirely. Pretty much all state-of-the-art photolithography uses 193nm wavelength lasers, and this has been the case for many years. Yes, the wavelength is larger than the size of the features produced with those lasers. There's a lot of magic involved. Since it's getting a bit too much magic, the industry has been trying to upgrade to 13.5nm (extreme ultraviolet) lasers for a long time. They're now starting to be used in actual practice. And EUV lasers are still basically magic, but of a different kind.
- fipple 8y ago