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We are doing perf testing of the AMD versions of HP/Dell servers. We may tech refresh about 40k servers with epyc-2 if performance is better than Intel. It's

We are doing perf testing of the AMD versions of HP/Dell servers. We may tech refresh about 40k servers with epyc-2 if performance is better than Intel. It's about time for some new servers anyway.

tgtweak 8y ago
It seems that they're on track to get epyc into OEMs and cloud providers in quantity. They've been successfully growing the ecosystem in the server space over the last 2 years (Supermicro, dell, HPE, Lenovo all pushing epyc sku's now) so they're very well poised to capitalize on it if they can keep up with supply. The power efficiency gains on 7nm will be pretty tempting to cloud providers and colocation clients alike. If you can put 256 cores (4 epyc2 sockets) into a 1U server and keep it under 1200W that's going to be a landslide win for density and running costs. Factor in pcie 4.0 and things are looking pretty sexy. I've read that wafer yeilds on zen2 are 70%+ which gives a huge advantage on cost and production efficiency to AMD. I think Intel's skylake yield for an equivalent 28 core die is sub-40%. If anything the limiting factor is going to be TSMCs ability to give AMD capacity on it's very crowded and in-demand 7nm fab.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Dell and HP already have them in quantity. We just have to perform due diligence to ensure all of our workloads will remain the same or better performance. Thus far, testing is looking good.
bArray 8y ago
Quick question: Why put all of your eggs in one basket? I know you want to maximize profits, but you also want to minimize risk? For all anybody knows the next big CPU CVE could be on AMD architecture, especially as people will now being taking the processor much more seriously.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Our eggs are already all in one basket across two vendors and that did already bite us. Cost wise, it doesn't make sense to load balance across Intel and AMD. We have to pick one or spares cost are doubled and tooling has more overhead. In a few years, if Intel have their act together and AMD start having more vulns, then we may swing back the other direction. Only time and vendor actions will tell. This assumes we even move to AMD.
shereadsthenews 7y ago
Have fun replacing all of the CPUs after a few months. There hasn't been an AMD CPU since Opteron that worked correctly on the first stepping. EPYC has a huge number of errata ranging from bit flips to voltage dropouts to hangs and reboots, most of which remain unfixed. I mean "Load Operation May Receive Stale Data From Older Store Operation" is a pretty serious erratum. And AMD has a history of this going back to Barcelona which just flat out didn't work (workarounds for broken Barcelona B3 parts cost 50% performance or more). They don't have the resources to qualify new parts properly and they rely on customers to find all the bugs for them.

We are doing perf testing of the AMD versions of HP/Dell servers. We may tech refresh about 40k servers with epyc-2 if performance is better than Intel. It's about time for some new servers anyway.

tgtweak 8y ago

It seems that they're on track to get epyc into OEMs and cloud providers in quantity. They've been successfully growing the ecosystem in the server space over the last 2 years (Supermicro, dell, HPE, Lenovo all pushing epyc sku's now) so they're very well poised to capitalize on it if they can keep up with supply. The power efficiency gains on 7nm will be pretty tempting to cloud providers and colocation clients alike. If you can put 256 cores (4 epyc2 sockets) into a 1U server and keep it under 1200W that's going to be a landslide win for density and running costs. Factor in pcie 4.0 and things are looking pretty sexy. I've read that wafer yeilds on zen2 are 70%+ which gives a huge advantage on cost and production efficiency to AMD. I think Intel's skylake yield for an equivalent 28 core die is sub-40%. If anything the limiting factor is going to be TSMCs ability to give AMD capacity on it's very crowded and in-demand 7nm fab.

LinuxBender 8y ago
Dell and HP already have them in quantity. We just have to perform due diligence to ensure all of our workloads will remain the same or better performance. Thus far, testing is looking good.

bArray 8y ago

Quick question: Why put all of your eggs in one basket? I know you want to maximize profits, but you also want to minimize risk? For all anybody knows the next big CPU CVE could be on AMD architecture, especially as people will now being taking the processor much more seriously.

LinuxBender 8y ago
Our eggs are already all in one basket across two vendors and that did already bite us. Cost wise, it doesn't make sense to load balance across Intel and AMD. We have to pick one or spares cost are doubled and tooling has more overhead. In a few years, if Intel have their act together and AMD start having more vulns, then we may swing back the other direction. Only time and vendor actions will tell. This assumes we even move to AMD.

shereadsthenews 7y ago

Have fun replacing all of the CPUs after a few months. There hasn't been an AMD CPU since Opteron that worked correctly on the first stepping. EPYC has a huge number of errata ranging from bit flips to voltage dropouts to hangs and reboots, most of which remain unfixed. I mean "Load Operation May Receive Stale Data From Older Store Operation" is a pretty serious erratum. And AMD has a history of this going back to Barcelona which just flat out didn't work (workarounds for broken Barcelona B3 parts cost 50% performance or more). They don't have the resources to qualify new parts properly and they rely on customers to find all the bugs for them.