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Disagree. Why would it take years to counter this "inertia?" It's not like you're asking someone to give up a religion they've had from birth. They are being as

by ken47 7y ago

Disagree. Why would it take years to counter this "inertia?" It's not like you're asking someone to give up a religion they've had from birth. They are being asked to make economic purchasing decisions, and the economics are crystal clear.

positr0n 7y ago
There are many small and large companies with relatively small compute needs (small meaning the own a small datacenter or two). Lots of the code they are running is _extremely_ legacy, and it may or may not be in their risk tolerance to switch vendors to save a hundred grand a year on CPU costs. Especially if they think like OP and believe Intel will match them again in just a few more years. Why rock the boat?
- ken47 7y ago
  Of course such decisions are always political. But now with Google backing EPYC Rome, there is the political risk of not switching, and finding yourself in the Stone Age 5 years from now. There's a lot more incentive to explore EPYC than there was a day ago.
  - ta0943007 7y ago
    AMD's marketing department has addressed this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0
  - TomVDB 7y ago
    What if Google did not include that very old legacy code during their evaluation process? And exactly what kind of risk are you taking about? If switching is as easy as you claim it is, you can still do so next year or the year after.
paulmd 7y ago
Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually supported. That kind of thing. Also, software is very often the largest cost for these systems. It's not hard to find yourself paying $100k a month for an Oracle license. A one-time expense of $50k for one piece of hardware vs another is barely a blip. And in fact that hardware is often charged based on spec. So if you have 4x as many cores on Epyc, you will pay more in software costs on a monthly basis as well. That, or the software will simply refuse to use them until you buy an upgrade, meaning those extra cores are sitting there doing nothing. It's counterintuitive to people whose experience is building a gaming desktop at home, but hardware expenses are not necessarily a big part of total cost of ownership for enterprise operators.
- cyphar 7y ago
  > Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually supported. That kind of thing. That shouldn't be a problem. They are both fundamentally the same architecture (amd64) and any CPU-specific features are already opportunistically handled by the vast majority of software because otherwise you wouldn't be able to run the same code on different versions of Intel's CPUs.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    OSs are not most software and are not designed around the instruction set changing underneath them during normal operation. Why would they be? You can't physically swap out a processor while the system is booted and you can't swap a virtual processor either. It works fine if you shut everything down and reboot the system, but that is often undesirable. The whole point of the feature is that the VM can be migrated around different physical hardware without having to interrupt service. It just suddenly is running on a different host instance. But it has to be the same type of processor... or at least the same feature set. "Close" is not good enough, it needs to be a 1:1 match. You can manually disable features until you have found the lowest common denominator between the feature sets of the different processors. But obviously the more types of processors you have in your cluster, the more problematic this is. In very few clusters will you find servers of mixed types, you buy 10,000 of the same server and operate them as a "unit". You don't just add in servers after the fact, sometimes you don't even replace failed servers. And that hardware decision will have been made years ago, very often. The server market is hugely inertial, it's nothing like you putting together a build one evening and then going out and buying parts and putting it together.
    - Nyandalized 7y ago
      >You can't physically swap out a processor while the system is booted and you can't swap a virtual processor either. I think you can do that on multisocket systems: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/core-api/cpu_hotplug.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/core-api/cpu_hotplug.h...
brandmeyer 7y ago
There is momentum in the computing industry. The laptops and pre-assembled desktops being sold today are based on the OEM decisions that were made 1-2 years ago. Most corporate client computing machines are on a similar timeline. IT departments don't want to support a wide variety of hardware, so they standardize on a single model or variations within that model for years. Warehouse-scale computing has similar budgets and timeframes. You don't decide how to re-build this month's 10k machines based on this month's benchmarks. You made the decision as far back as the supply chain required you to do it, maybe a year or more. I'm sure that AMD's sales team has been telling their big customers about this generation's performance improvements for a while. But with their history, decision makers are going to discount the story a bit until they can see it in production silicon. So the next few month's movements in AWS and the like will all depend on the extent that their decision makers were convinced many months ago.
- ken47 7y ago
  Exactly right. AMD has not only been telling their big customers about it -- they've been letting their customers test it. Google has been testing Rome for months, and have decided to move forward with a full-scale deployment, not only for their own data centers, but for their public cloud. They are using Rome in their production servers today. Like it or not, Google's stamp of approval carries a tremendous weight in this industry. And if that's not good enough for you, Microsoft and AWS are stepping up their deployments of EPYC as well. As a result, a lot of smaller companies will now require a much lower standard of due diligence when approving an EPYC Rome deployment.
- chx 7y ago
  Not only that but the Ryzen 3 3300U and friends are Zen+ and not Zen 2. It won't be until next year when the IT department even can buy a Zen 2 U laptop. The signs are there, Lenovo has called them T480 and A480 last year, T490 and T495 this year, indicating these are very close.
blihp 7y ago
People are creatures of habit. There are people still using Yahoo! for no reason other than it's what they are used to. For many people, buying Intel is the same thing. It takes years to win those people over. (and usually the argument that ultimately wins them over is 'everyone else is using it', rather than the economic one) Those of us who are early adopters jump ship as soon as it's obvious there's a better option, the masses move at a much more glacial pace.
- ken47 7y ago
  Sure, people are creatures of habit. But this isn't Yahoo vs Google we're talking about. People are going to be throwing down hundreds or thousands of dollars per CPU, and the differences are not remotely subjective.
  - TomVDB 7y ago
    As other have already noted: those hundreds or thousands per CPU are often just a blip on the radar compared to other costs. Your comments in this discussion are very small scale, retail oriented.
magashna 7y ago
Mobo compatibility and resource heavy enterprise applications that have been built around Intel's chips are not things that you can change overnight.

by ken47 7y ago

positr0n 7y ago

There are many small and large companies with relatively small compute needs (small meaning the own a small datacenter or two). Lots of the code they are running is _extremely_ legacy, and it may or may not be in their risk tolerance to switch vendors to save a hundred grand a year on CPU costs. Especially if they think like OP and believe Intel will match them again in just a few more years. Why rock the boat?

ken47 7y ago
Of course such decisions are always political. But now with Google backing EPYC Rome, there is the political risk of not switching, and finding yourself in the Stone Age 5 years from now. There's a lot more incentive to explore EPYC than there was a day ago.
- ta0943007 7y ago
  AMD's marketing department has addressed this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0
- TomVDB 7y ago
  What if Google did not include that very old legacy code during their evaluation process? And exactly what kind of risk are you taking about? If switching is as easy as you claim it is, you can still do so next year or the year after.

paulmd 7y ago

Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually supported. That kind of thing. Also, software is very often the largest cost for these systems. It's not hard to find yourself paying $100k a month for an Oracle license. A one-time expense of $50k for one piece of hardware vs another is barely a blip. And in fact that hardware is often charged based on spec. So if you have 4x as many cores on Epyc, you will pay more in software costs on a monthly basis as well. That, or the software will simply refuse to use them until you buy an upgrade, meaning those extra cores are sitting there doing nothing. It's counterintuitive to people whose experience is building a gaming desktop at home, but hardware expenses are not necessarily a big part of total cost of ownership for enterprise operators.

cyphar 7y ago
> Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually supported. That kind of thing. That shouldn't be a problem. They are both fundamentally the same architecture (amd64) and any CPU-specific features are already opportunistically handled by the vast majority of software because otherwise you wouldn't be able to run the same code on different versions of Intel's CPUs.
- paulmd 7y ago
  OSs are not most software and are not designed around the instruction set changing underneath them during normal operation. Why would they be? You can't physically swap out a processor while the system is booted and you can't swap a virtual processor either. It works fine if you shut everything down and reboot the system, but that is often undesirable. The whole point of the feature is that the VM can be migrated around different physical hardware without having to interrupt service. It just suddenly is running on a different host instance. But it has to be the same type of processor... or at least the same feature set. "Close" is not good enough, it needs to be a 1:1 match. You can manually disable features until you have found the lowest common denominator between the feature sets of the different processors. But obviously the more types of processors you have in your cluster, the more problematic this is. In very few clusters will you find servers of mixed types, you buy 10,000 of the same server and operate them as a "unit". You don't just add in servers after the fact, sometimes you don't even replace failed servers. And that hardware decision will have been made years ago, very often. The server market is hugely inertial, it's nothing like you putting together a build one evening and then going out and buying parts and putting it together.
  - Nyandalized 7y ago
    >You can't physically swap out a processor while the system is booted and you can't swap a virtual processor either. I think you can do that on multisocket systems: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/core-api/cpu_hotplug.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/core-api/cpu_hotplug.h...

brandmeyer 7y ago

There is momentum in the computing industry. The laptops and pre-assembled desktops being sold today are based on the OEM decisions that were made 1-2 years ago. Most corporate client computing machines are on a similar timeline. IT departments don't want to support a wide variety of hardware, so they standardize on a single model or variations within that model for years. Warehouse-scale computing has similar budgets and timeframes. You don't decide how to re-build this month's 10k machines based on this month's benchmarks. You made the decision as far back as the supply chain required you to do it, maybe a year or more. I'm sure that AMD's sales team has been telling their big customers about this generation's performance improvements for a while. But with their history, decision makers are going to discount the story a bit until they can see it in production silicon. So the next few month's movements in AWS and the like will all depend on the extent that their decision makers were convinced many months ago.

ken47 7y ago
Exactly right. AMD has not only been telling their big customers about it -- they've been letting their customers test it. Google has been testing Rome for months, and have decided to move forward with a full-scale deployment, not only for their own data centers, but for their public cloud. They are using Rome in their production servers today. Like it or not, Google's stamp of approval carries a tremendous weight in this industry. And if that's not good enough for you, Microsoft and AWS are stepping up their deployments of EPYC as well. As a result, a lot of smaller companies will now require a much lower standard of due diligence when approving an EPYC Rome deployment.
chx 7y ago
Not only that but the Ryzen 3 3300U and friends are Zen+ and not Zen 2. It won't be until next year when the IT department even can buy a Zen 2 U laptop. The signs are there, Lenovo has called them T480 and A480 last year, T490 and T495 this year, indicating these are very close.

blihp 7y ago

People are creatures of habit. There are people still using Yahoo! for no reason other than it's what they are used to. For many people, buying Intel is the same thing. It takes years to win those people over. (and usually the argument that ultimately wins them over is 'everyone else is using it', rather than the economic one) Those of us who are early adopters jump ship as soon as it's obvious there's a better option, the masses move at a much more glacial pace.

ken47 7y ago
Sure, people are creatures of habit. But this isn't Yahoo vs Google we're talking about. People are going to be throwing down hundreds or thousands of dollars per CPU, and the differences are not remotely subjective.
- TomVDB 7y ago
  As other have already noted: those hundreds or thousands per CPU are often just a blip on the radar compared to other costs. Your comments in this discussion are very small scale, retail oriented.

magashna 7y ago

Mobo compatibility and resource heavy enterprise applications that have been built around Intel's chips are not things that you can change overnight.