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AMD EPYC processors come to Google, and to Google Cloud
- KuiN 7y agoNot a hugely surprising development given what was discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20640148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20640148
- pankajdoharey 7y agoIf they bring a 64 Core to the desktop, Intel will have no market for yrs.
- dijit 7y agoNever underestimate the entrenched incumbent. I know plenty of people who know the Intel name and would consider AMD to be some kind of cheap knock-off (non-techs, obviously). And obviously desktop/laptop manufacturers are going to have some sweetheart deals with intel. As far as I understand it, AMD doesn't natively support thunderbolt and that's an emerging standard that people really like.
- nevi-me 7y agoBut a counter argument is that those people aren't the market for a 64-core desktop.
- pankajdoharey 7y agoYou are right, but that's not the reason not to bring it. Enthusiast level hardware helps sell commodity hardware. NVIDIA Releases RTX like cards so that their cheaper Commodity cards sell. They don't make money on High end. Same is true for Processors.
- rys 7y agoYou only have to look at Nvidia’s or Intel’s balance sheet to know that’s patently false.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pankajdoharey 7y agoPerhaps you have to use your common sense to know there are only so many enthusiasts but there are many more gamers that cannot afford 1080-Ti. Enthusiasts consists of tiny fraction of the entire GPU and CPU market if you are insisting that the majority of sales fro NVIDIA or Intel comes from that segment of the market then I think you are wrong.
- vbezhenar 7y agoOn the other hand they can put extreme margins for high-end hardware. So one high end device might be more profitable than 100 low end devices.
- rys 7y agoJust have a look at the 10-Ks. Nvidia's: "Gross margin for fiscal year 2019was 61.2%, compared with 59.9% a year earlier, which reflects our continued shift toward higher-value platforms". Datacentre is their biggest growth area today, and they have traditionally created specific high-margin products to extract value in areas with very limited competition. The same thing is true for Intel when they don't have competition. They are the company they are today due to insane gross margin on Xeon and the explosive growth of cloud computing. DCG has been Intel's top performing BU for ages until recently. Expect the same story from AMD as it eats Intel's lunch in that market. High margin semiconductors are money making machines.
- marcyb5st 7y agoIntel graciously allowed the USB consortium to use Thunderbolt 3 tech for USB 4. There will be some minor differences, but this differentiator in Intel favor should fade over time. Here's is briefly explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0W7fHJMnyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0W7fHJMnyg
- mtgx 7y ago> sweetheart deals AKA illegal rebates.
- tpetry 7y agoNever underestimate non tech savy customers. If they can buy a notebook with processors or 16 processors they will be second one because bigger numbers means better.
- swarnie_ 7y agoAt least in the consumer market in the UK this is exactly what AMD is viewed as by non-techs. If you go to an average big box store and look for laptops AMD based systems can start as little as £250 where as you can't get a mobile i3 based system anywhere close. When these pathetic CPUs are teamed with slow disks and a pile of bloatware it makes them seem cheap and awful.
- krisroadruck 7y agoThe biasing isn't just non-techs. I've hand built every PC I've ever owned for over 20 years now, in addition to building many for family and friends, and I still have to do a bit of mental gymnastics to get over my biases for certain manufacturers. When someone like Intel has consistently delivered better performing parts for as long as they have, when AMD throws up a better part it almost feels like its a trick. Hell even now on the consumer desktop parts it looks like Intel is still edging out the newest AMD offerings on single-threaded performance. Just not at a good price. People, even smart informed people, still try to avoid decisions when it seems easy to do so. Reaching for an Intel processor has meant getting the faster part for so long that its muscle memory for people. That's going to take a while to undo.
- ben-schaaf 7y ago> As far as I understand it, AMD doesn't natively support thunderbolt and that's an emerging standard that people really like. Most of the AsRock x570 motherboards support thunderbolt currently afaik
- blattimwind 7y ago> As far as I understand it, AMD doesn't natively support thunderbolt and that's an emerging standard that people really like. Thunderbolt has been an "emerging standard that people really like" for almost a decade, with virtually no installed base outside select Apple products.
- bufferoverflow 7y agoMy wife's couple years old Lenovo Yoga 720 has a thunderbolt 3 port (type-C variety). I'm sure many other laptops have it.
- krylon 7y agoThis might sound like a silly question, but what would one use a 64-code CPU on a desktop machine for? Or more precisely, in what situations is a 32-core ThreadRipper2 insufficient?
- Crinus 7y agoI don't know about others but my lightmapper will certainly benefit :-P. Perhaps compilation times, for some stuff.
- Quekid5 7y agoCompilation of C++ code is one workload. Just make sure you also have a lot of RAM!
- TheHardew 7y agoIsn't c++ compilation single-threaded and linking multi-threaded? I imagine with pre-compiled headers 64 cores would be a massive overkill. I don't know, if even my 2700x wouldn't be.
- ahartmetz 7y agoC++ compilation is massively multiprocess. Linking is mostly single-process but the gold (for little benefit) and lld (for good benefit) linkers support multithreading.
- mmrezaie 7y agoI am not sure if any c++ compiler can actually compile a single file in parallel but usually you have many small to large files in compiling a project then "make -j" or "ninja" can build in parallel, and it is quite embarrassingly parallel task (but very memory intensive too).
- noselasd 7y agoC++ compilers are normally single threaded, so you launch as many instances of the compiler as you can and make them compile different files in parallell
- TheOperator 7y agoAthlon 64 didn't kill Intel. Don't underestimate a King like Intel that's backed into a corner. Lots of dirty tricks to play and lots of time to come back.
- joosters 7y agoWow, first photo is a 2000x1489px PNG (4.5MB) and it is scaled to just 451x335px. (not even clickable to view at full size, it's just for page decoration) Nice web design, google!
- spiderfarmer 7y agoYikes. Add this to the long list of Google not following their own recommendations.
- joosters 7y agoOr maybe I've just revealed Google's secret new 5xdpi range of phones :-)
- moltensodium 7y agoIt's truly amazing how bloated and slow most of Google's products have become, you can tell that they have hired literally zero people who came from poor places with slow internet. I think they just get too caught up in their tooling and silly over-engineering and never actually think about the end product.
- tristanperry 7y agoOuch, good catch! The page loads 41 requests and 12.88 MB of data, with the page taking 2+ seconds to properly load the content (1.09s according to Chrome dev tools, but this is just the initial DOM load). For a simple webpage with white background and dark text.
- tinco 7y agoI hope they'll also attach GPU's to those machines. We switched part of our operation to local hardware because wouldn't get both the fast GPU's and the fast CPU's in the same node. A proper solution of course would be to have the CPU intensive algorithms run on different nodes, but it's an integrated solution we pay for so we don't control that.
- ImJasonH 7y agoYou can already get 1-4 GPUs on VMS with 64-96 vCPUs in a number of regions: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/#gpus-list https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/#gpus-list Is the problem that the CPU max scales with the number of GPUs, so you can't get 1 GPU with 96 vCPUs?
- tinco 7y agoNo, we were looking for the high single thread performance machines, so the new compute optimized cascade lake ones, but those you can't get gpu's on.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago> We switched part of our operation to local hardware because wouldn't get both the fast GPU's and the fast CPU's in the same node. And how did that work out? Upfront costs but should be significant savings overall right?
- tinco 7y agoNot sure yet, the machines should arrive next week. To be honest we might switch back and forth between own and cloud hardware as we scale up. Right now we process one dataset per week or so, but by December that should become multiple per day. The 3 machines we bought should put us at around 1 per 2 days, but it's more so we can do worry free experimentation. It's really annoying to be constantly worried about wasting money when experimenting. We 'wasted' thousands just experimenting with flags and rendering bad datasets, of course it might still come out as cost effective but it discourages experimentation. The big question for us is if we're going to be able to afford to do it locally, there's both the upfront cost and the cost of system administration. These 3 I could still do with my dev team amateur style, but when that becomes 30, we'll probably need some technician that has experience managing compute clusters.
- polskibus 7y agoI'd love to see a comparison of new EPYC vs Intel on database workloads. Acc. to recent anandtech article, which quotes Intel, memory access can give large edge to Intel.
- olavgg 7y agoI would love to see benchmarks with Clickhouse which scales much better than regular SQL databases on a single machine.
- zX41ZdbW 7y agoClickHouse is happy to use multiple cores if the query is heavy enough. We have tested it on AMD EPYC 7351 more than a year ago and get promising results. (I have not saved them but I'll try to reproduce and post them here.) Another case of scalability: we have also tested ClickHouse on an Aarch64 server (Cavium ThunderX2) with 224 logical cores and despite the fact that each core is 3..7 times slower than Intel E5-2650 and the code is not optimized as much as for x86_64, it was on-par in throughput of heavy queries. There are also tests of ClickHouse on Power9 if you mind...
- bhouston 7y agoWhat is the pricing? It is cheaper per core-hour than Intel? It should be. Also how many machines will they have? Will it be a token amount in a single data center or will there be a good chunk of these around in multiple data centers?
- lunchables 7y agohttps://www.extremetech.com/computing/296307-epic-win-amds-64-core-7nm-epyc-cpus-leave-xeon-lying-in-the-dirt https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296307-epic-win-amds-6... >Intel can cut its prices, to be sure. Beyond that, it has limited maneuverability. Ice Lake servers will not arrive for another year. Pricing on these cores is simply amazing, with a top-end Epyc 7742 selling for just $6950, or roughly $108 per core. An Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 has a list price of over $10,000 for a 28-core chip, just to put that in perspective. If you want a 32-core part, the Epyc 7502 packs 32 cores, 64 threads, higher IPC, and an additional 300MHz of frequency (2.5GHz base, versus 2.2GHz) for $2600 as opposed to the old price of $4200 for the 7601. AMD doesn’t segment its products the way Intel does, which means you get the full benefits of buying an Epyc part in terms of PCIe lanes and additional features. AMD also supports up to 4TB of RAM per socket. Intel tops out at 2TB per socket, and slaps a price premium on that level of RAM support.
- asdfjbuiobio 7y agoWhy should it be cheaper than Intel? The performance is similar. The fact that it's cheaper for Google to run doesn't mean it's less valuable for the end user. If anything, they should cut prices across the board. AMD just cut the price of an x86 core in half.
- bufferoverflow 7y agoBecause Intel has a better brand name / recognition. Many companies default to Intel, even when it's not the cheapest. I'm glad AMD is making such progress that these companies can't ignore them anymore. Having one CPU maker would be horrible.
- bhouston 7y agoWith 200 CPU threads (128 CPU cores), I think most startups can run a complex microservice environment on a single machine. Although Kubernetes requires 3 to start, but still, this greatly reduces the need to have a lot of separate machines. 256 threads per machine this year. 512 threads per machine 2 years from now? And then hopefully 1024 threads per machine 4-5 years from now? That would be really fun. (I will take a laptop in 4 years with just a lowly 64 cores please, leaving the heavy iron for the cloud machines.) I want Moore's law back but in parallel form. The years since 2004 with x85 machines have been quite boring from a CPU performance increase perspective.
- tazjin 7y ago> Although Kubernetes requires 3 to start It doesn't actually, and if you're running on GKE then the master is a managed service - you can have a single-node cluster (I do this occasionally for testing). Said startup might want to consider going with smaller machines in separate availability zones, though ;-) (Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud)
- brianwawok 7y ago2 is a decent number for GKE. At least some hope of staying up if a node falls over. 3 is more realistic though. If you run at 66% utilization, can deal with a single node down.
- kevinconaway 7y ago> With 200 CPU threads (128 CPU cores), I think most startups can run a complex microservice environment on a single machine. Why would you want to? Your whole environment will be down when the machine, or some component thereof, fails or is rotated out for maintenance I think this is more of a benefit for cloud providers in that they can pack more disparate customer workloads on to a single machine.
- gravypod 7y agoIt'd be great as a CI machine for doing full end-to-end integration testing.