5 ms·
Just bought three Dell 7xxx series with Epyc 7402s. Our IT consultant recommended against AMD in favor of Intel. I didn’t like their reasoning. Side take... I
by SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Just bought three Dell 7xxx series with Epyc 7402s. Our IT consultant recommended against AMD in favor of Intel. I didn’t like their reasoning.
Side take... I sized our servers to be adequate with the idea virtual cores won’t be turned on. Just assuming more specter and meltdown discoveries, and while AMD has fairer better it’s not impossible they have their own demons.
- Aperocky 7y agoCurious, what are their reasoning?
- rburhum 7y agoyou get more for less money and their commission is smaller
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoI didn’t press but it was along the lines of “everyone uses Intel” and surely would have ended with “no one was ever fired for choosing IBM”. In reality with AMD, the cost was better, the ram/bus was faster, I liked the specs and options of the 7xxx vs the 7xx series better. They couldn’t give me a reason not to chose AMD, only that “Dell always uses Intel for a reason”
- simonh 7y ago>“Dell always uses Intel for a reason” Which is just as likely to be more to do with commercial arm twisting and incentives from Intel than anything technical.
- redis_mlc 7y agoThere's 2 main valid reasons larger companies won't touch AMD for servers: 1) You don't know if a given linux kernel/other software will work unless you test it ... for each future version 2) The firmware updates for Intel and AMD are different. Additionally, the excellent Intel C compiler focuses on their own processors. The above doesn't mean you can't choose AMD, but don't assume they're interchangeable CPUs. Disclosure: I worked for Transmeta, whose entire DC was based an AMD servers. The reason was that Intel was a larger competitor for their code-morphing CPUs than AMD was. Coincidentally, Linus Torvalds entered the USA on a work visa from Transmeta after DEC bailed on his job offer. I bought CS22 at Transmeta's wind-down auction, which I will donate to the Computer Museum. Several large CPU designs during that era were verified on it because it was a 4 CPU Opteron with 64 GB RAM, and 32 GB RAM wasn't enough. Aside from Apple's A-series, that was the end of Silicon Valley being about silicon. (Many of the chip engineers on my last project ended up at Apple on the A-series.)
- lonelappde 7y agoDoes Intel work without testing?
- cookiecaper 7y agoMost kernel devs have Intel processors, and anecdotally, it does seem like you see more AMD-specific patches coming in the changelogs as people with the chips get new kernel versions and find new breakages. Another side effect of Intel's market penetration is that the Intel implementation of any given featureset is targeted first. Things like nested virtualization may work mostly-OK on Intel by now but are still in their infancy on AMD; for example, it appears that MS still blacklists AMD from nested virtualization. [0] [0] https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/Virtualization-Documentation/issues/1276 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/Virtualization-Documentatio...
- wtallis 7y ago> and anecdotally, it does seem like you see more AMD-specific patches coming in the changelogs as people with the chips get new kernel versions and find new breakages. You have to factor in how stagnant Intel's chips have been for many years. There's simply not much new stuff showing up on Intel platforms, and half of the new features are fundamentally incompatible with Linux anyways and thus will never lead to upstreamable patches. AMD catching up to Intel on feature support also necessarily means AMD is adding features at a faster rate that requires more feature enablement patches over the same time span.
- jhasse 7y agoThat will change though.
- harry8 7y ago>Additionally, the excellent Intel C compiler focuses on their own processors This is a new and creative use of the word "excellent" to mean Intel are so dishonest they have been caught out using their compiler as malware delivery to make /your/ compiled binary test for an Intel cpu when being run by /your/ customer and if it finds your executable binary being run on a competitor, eg amd, makes the code run every slow path despite the optimised code running fast on that cpu. Wildly dishonest. Malware delivery mechanism are somewhat more traditional uses of the English language to describe the Intel compiler. You cannot trust Intel. They've earned that reputation all by themselves.
- maccam94 7y ago> “Dell always uses Intel for a reason” That reason sometimes being that Intel paid them off to block AMD from competing in the market: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/business/23dell.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/business/23dell.html https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-with-1-45-billion-fine-in-europe-for-unfair-and-damaging-practices-against-amd https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-wit...
- lonelappde 7y agoIf Dell went all in on AMD, could they produce enough chips to satisfy demand?
- jhasse 7y agoThe chips are actually produced by TSMC. So my guess would be yes.
- wtallis 7y agoDepends on what kind of pricing and lead time Dell gives AMD, because TSMC 7nm production capacity is definitely limited and their required lead time for wafer orders hit 6 months as of last fall. AMD has already experienced some shortages due to their supply being relatively unresponsive.
- tracker1 7y agoIn fairness, so has Intel themselves.
- wtallis 7y agoSure, but people expect that of Intel because they own their fabs and have to build a new fab if they want more capacity. AMD's only buying a slice of TSMC output, but that doesn't mean they're able to suddenly buy a much larger share of that output.
- apodysophilia 7y agoShouldn't be a huge problem right now since Apple is moving to 5nm.
- Aperocky 7y agoAnother question.. what exactly are IT consultant's job description?
- alfiedotwtf 7y agoFor one, AMD killed OpenCL support for Ryzen. Like wtf... I've got 24 hyperthreads and OpenCL doesn't work!!
- reacharavindh 7y agoNot OP. I purchased 8 Cascade lake servers for HPC after testing AMD EPYC latest. One of the reasons is Intel compiler! - we use it in scientific software to get extra performance, and it shits over AMD processors. I saw the same software take approx. 30 times longer to run because it was not an intel CPU(worst case. Other GCC compiler not so much). This is not AMD’s fault. Just saying there are some of us who are stuck with the devil that is Intel.
- wtallis 7y agoDoesn't the Intel compiler let you disable the runtime CPU detection and generate an executable that unconditionally uses the instruction sets you explicitly enable? I know they also provide environment variable overrides for at least some of their numerical libraries.
- faeyanpiraat 7y agoThere was a HN discussion a couple of weeks ago about whether the intel cpu detection “feature” is an evil money grab, or a legitimate way to prevent unexpected runtime behavior on AMD CPUs.
- wtallis 7y agoI'm not sure which discussion you're referring to; I've seen the topic come up many times. But I haven't seen a reasonably non-evil explanation for why the compiler should preemptively assume that AMD's CPU feature flags cannot be trusted, while Intel's can. Detecting known-buggy CPU models is fine, but assuming that future AMD CPUs are more likely to introduce bugs to AVX-whatever than future Intel CPUs is not something that I have seen justified.
- faeyanpiraat 7y agoOkay so there was another article recently which talked about a new fuzzing tool implemented by google that revealed thousands of bugs in safari and open source projects. I assume the exploitable edge cases are so numerous and so hard to have 100% test coverage on (is it even possible?) that it is hard enough for Intel to deal with correct execution on their own platform.