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AMD Launches Ultra-Low-Power Ryzen Embedded APUs
- Zenst 7y agoI read about this the other day and still somewhat supprised it has two 10 GbE ports. I say supprised, and wonder if it has the horsepower to drive them at that speed. Thinking along the lines of a firewall type application. Be very interesting in tests when they come out and what kinda thruput you can sustain. [EDIT ADD] My surprise/excitement stems from the aspect that to get that kinda feature on mainstream motherboard, you're always looking at the higher end of the offerings.
- a012 7y agoIt has controller for 10GbE port, but still depends on PC manufacturer to actually implement a (or two) PHY 10Gbase-T port(s). I doubt many would do, though I wish the manufaturers would deliver 2.5G or 5G in transition for less expensive and lower power parts.
- blacklion 7y agoTo be honest, optic is soooo much cheaper than 10G-T. I've upgraded my home network to 10G in parts (not each link, but critical ones: for NAS and for my workstation) and everything is a lot cheaper with optics. Switch are much cheaper per port, transceivers are dirt-cheap on eBay, Intel X520-DA is cheaper (even if you add price of transceivers) than -T variant, not to mention old Mellanox cards. If distance allows DAC patchcords are cheap too, and single-mod fiber cables with LC2 connectors cost almost as good twisted pair, only slightly more. One disadvantage is that LC2 connectors are rather bulky and you could not install them yourself as easy as RJ45 ones, so if you need to route cable through very confined space, it could be a problem.
- rkagerer 7y agoI've been using second hand Mellanox for about a decade or so and it's been phenomenal. Great speed, latency and stability.
- nullc 7y agoDitto. A few times I've had issues where I had compatibility issues until I upgraded the firmware on the card. For a long time I used infiniband between fast systems just because the cards were available so cheaply, but now 40gbe is really cheap (and 100gbe is getting there). I'm really not that fond of 10G-T, it's picky about cables and power hungry. Give me fiber or a dac cable any day.
- StillBored 7y agoCheaper used, and not cheaper if you have to to actually pull and terminate OM4 cable. Plus, the long term costs tend to be higher, because optical SFPs are the modern equivalent of spinning rust when it comes to failure rates. And the prices of 10GbaseT parts are falling too. And for home use, it runs just fine on quality cat5e.
- tjoff 7y agoI'd be perfectly happy with the performance boost if it only managed 3 Gbit. Now we also gave 2.5/5 GbE which might be sensible as well. Ethernet has been stuck at 1 GbE for far too long and have skewed everything a bit.
- mrweasel 7y agoEven the AMD specs just says two 10GbE ports, but nothing about it being an AMD design, or some third party controllers that are just included in the package. AMD has previously made their own network controller chips, but in last 10 - 15 years or more, so I would be a little surprised if they now have a 10Gb design. Maybe I just haven't paid enough attention to AMD.
- wmf 7y agoZen has built-in AMD 10G NICs (using the amd-xgbe driver) but they're usually disabled so nobody talks about them.
- samcrawford 7y agoWe use the Marvell Armada 8k SOC (quad core ARMv8, clocked at 1.6GHz) in an embedded board. We can sustain 10Gbps TCP throughout to the CPU on that with around 60% CPU usage on a single core. Bear in mind that these are all large packets (1500 bytes), and it's much harder to achieve this will small packets. I'd be pretty surprised if at the 1.5GHz part couldn't handle the same.
- GordonS 7y agoOut of interest, can I ask what you're using that kind of throughput for with a SOC?
- samcrawford 7y agoOur company provides network measurement devices and services (typically used on the internet). We benchmark internet connections, effectively. With some internet connections exceeding 1Gbps these days, we need hardware capable of measuring above 1Gbps. Here's an article that describes our use of this 10Gbps SOC in a little more detail: https://samknows.com/blog/arris-and-virgin-media-test-new-10gbps-speeds https://samknows.com/blog/arris-and-virgin-media-test-new-10...
- 1000units 7y agoAh, yes, "measuring."
- jotm 7y agoI don't see why it wouldn't be able to drive them at full speed. Zen cores (even at that TDP) plus the standard Ethernet hardware offloading should be able to handle that and a lot of extra processing without trouble.
- fulafel 7y agoIt's been 20+ years since 1 GbE came around, 10 GbE came in 2006, but for some reason the adoption has lagged hugely in SMB/consumer gear.
- Cyph0n 7y agoNow that I’ve been working on service provider routers for a bit, anything lower than 100G sounds slow. All about perspective, I suppose.
- c2h5oh 7y ago1 Gbe is just marginally slower than consumer grade HDD and matches the fastest residential/SME internet connections. For most 1Gbe was a noticeable upgrade while 10Gbe isn't, while cost of hardware is noticeably higher. 10Gbe has decent adoption where it makes sense.
- icedchai 7y agoModern systems have NVME SSDs which can easily fill a 10 gig connection, both read and write speed. It would be nice to see higher speed ethernet on more hardware. I have some 10 gig equipment but it's a couple generations old ebay special.
- smueller1234 7y agoDisaggregated home SSD? Err, wow!
- fulafel 7y agoWhat do you mean by disaggregated? SSD is certainly cheap enough for home NAS now.
- pdimitar 7y agoOne of my external HHDs can work at 250MB/s which means 2GbE. I'd like my home NAS to have at least a 2.5GbE NIC and my router/switch have to be 10GbE so as I don't saturate them while transferring from/to the NAS. I also plan on adding a few 1080p@30fps security cameras and a centralised LAN host for all the video streams/backups. It will all add up quite quickly and I'm not even sure a home 10GbE setup will hold its own well in such conditions. I plan my buy an expensive switch/router combo with up to 320GbE bandwidth though, so it might work. I believe 10GbE will be with us for as the de-facto prosumer setup for quite a while since 1.25GB/s is going to work for 99% of what's needed out there. (Although uncompressed 4k@60fps is almost 2GB/s...)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ink_13 7y agoHopefully this means passively-cooled SoC Mini-ITX boards that don't cost an arm and a leg. I've been speccing out a new home NAS and had hopes for something along those lines, but both the SuperMicro (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F, ~$350) and ASRock (EPYC3251D4I-2T, ~$880) options I found struck me as overpriced. For comparison, when I did this five years ago, I was able to get an Athlon 5250+motherboard for $137. It's a little surprising that I can't seem to do any better after all this time.
- RijilV 7y agoYeah.... I really wish AMD packaged these for their AM2 socket so we could use commodity boards for them. Sure at that TDP your run of the mill mainboard is a significant power draw, but the other all system is still less than the 35w CPU I ended up with. (I just finally replaced my core2duo with a low power AMD because the price was so wildly better than the intel open and I could actually order the AMD one from retailers rather than shady eBay second hand cpus)
- anonsivalley652 7y agoI already went far, far down that rabbit-hole for a max capacity 3.5" HDD + ZIL SSDs + L2ARC SSDs FreeNas 4U 10 GbE NAS on Supermicro/ASRock Rack DIY and Dell, HP, Lenovo and iXSystems. For home use, you're better off buying a used 2U-4U Supermicro or Dell box with an old Xeon or two. They're so cheap, buying new is like throwing money away on a new car with instant depreciation. In the Bay Area, you can even order up and swing by UNIX Surplus for some deals, although sometimes they're higher than the usual sources. I was going to get some of the WD HGST HC530 14 TB self-encrypting drives until they came out to ~$600 each. (Ouch.) The regular ones are <$400, similar to the ones BackBlaze uses.
- anonsivalley652 7y agoAs long FreeBSD plays nice* and hw components are chosen to have drivers, it seems like the perfect chip to put on a SBC for a compact, solid-state pfSense box. * iXSystems mentioned to avoid AMD for FreeNAS, although maybe it is obsolete advice or doesn't apply to pfSense.
- nicolaslem 7y agoAMD APUs are quite popular as passively cooled routers running pfSense or OPNsense.
- anonsivalley652 7y agoAfter looking at specs and prices, I think I'll just get a used SFF ECC workstation and slot in a quad 10 GbE copper card and a cryptographic accelerator. I can't see the point in paying more for new *sense-specific gear. It might have a fan, but I can always throw in a Noctua if I'm worried about it.
- fierarul 7y ago> iXSystems mentioned to avoid AMD for FreeNAS This seems odd. Long ago FreeNAS on the N54L microserver was a nice setup and it had some AMD chip. I suspect it might apply only to some bleeding edge stuff...
- acd 7y agoThis will be very nice CPU in a home media Kodi server consuming very little power!
- mister_hn 7y agoThis is also a good time for HPE to make a Proliant Gen11 with Ryzen..the Gen10 is really inefficient in terms of speed and power consumption
- baybal2 7y agoI think you wanted to say a Proliant microserver? Though, I would suggest them to throw 3rd gen Ryzen into their rack mounted servers as well. I was to Embedded World few days ago, and I saw that Acer, Quanta, MSI, Gigabyte are all quietly showing Ryzen based U1 servers.
- sigio 7y agoThey just released a microserver gen10+ .... and that one just switched from opterons back to xeon's. I'd like to see EPYC's and Ryzens, but i'm not holding my breath
- chiefsucker 7y agoI have a Gen8 and it has a Xeon. I just want to put some perspective to “switched from”, because HP _used_ Xeon processors in its prosumer servers, so I don’t really see switching them back.
- baybal2 7y agoI was at embedded world this week, and Asrock, Gigabytes, MSI were all showing rack mounted servers with consumer grade Ryzens. Just by looking at revision numbers at their boards, it seems clear that they already went through quite a number of iterations, just as usually happens with more proper server mobos. There must be a demand for them.
- wil421 7y agoWho do you think is wanting them? Small-Medium business or enthusiasts/prosumers? I can’t see enterprise vendors selling them and I doubt the support is great.
- newsclues 7y agoPfsense router or Server/NAS for home or small office
- Filligree 7y agoFor reference, I use a trio of 3700 servers to run Sufficient Velocity -- a fairly large webforum. That's already overkill. It's nice having the spare capacity, but it would be absolutely foolish to lease a full-blown EPYC trio.
- baybal2 7y ago> I can’t see enterprise vendors selling them and I doubt the support is great. Hosting companies don't end with enterprise cloud stuff. The availability of consumer grade hardware chips has always been much better than server ones for anybody, but tier 1 vendors. Just before there was little incentive to chase that market for anything as even the best consumer grade CPUs still were not contenders on core count, ECC, IPMI support, and cache size to compete with Xeons. But now, even very cheap 3rd gen Ryzens can easily beat mid-tier Xeons: more cores, more cache, ECC support, support for Aspeed remote management. And they are way more power efficient, so making a twin or even a quad system in U1 is possible.
- wazoox 7y agoThere is definitely. Particularly for some applications requiring the highest possible frequency (Ryzens are available in higher frequencies than Epycs). Plus Ryzens support ECC so there are fine server CPUs.
- philliphaydon 7y agoI wonder if the R1102G can playback 4k video, would be awesome for a small media pc passively cooled with a snes emulator.
- jotm 7y agoI've recommended this before - you don't need a special/low power processor for that! Technically, any processor with a hardware video decoder will work fine as long as you limit the TDP to something your cooling can manage. Especially mobile processors. You can easily limit TDP on any major OS - now if you'd use some custom software, you'd need to implement it yourself, it's rather easy to do via MSR editing, Intel has their list of processor MSR's freely available.
- hundunpao 7y agohow does this compare to a raspberry pi?
- NortySpock 7y agoI believe these Ryzen APUs will run much faster than a Raspberry Pi, and they run x86 software as is commonly used by Windows. Glancing at the ~4,000 Passmark score I think these Ryzen APUs could even keep up with a single 1080p software video transcode, which I doubt is possible on a Raspberry Pi. Disclaimer: I only have an RPi 2 running a home server at the moment and have not tried these new. Ryzen chips.
- hedora 7y agoIn addition to being faster CPUs, these have much faster I/O buses. The RPi 3 could only talk to its 1GBit card at ~300MBit. The 4 can max out 1GBit. These have 2x10GBit in the CPU package. Put another way, these can be a high performance NAS/router, and simultaneously run the equivalent of a few RPis in VMs. Previously, AMD built an APU without embedded video. Hopefully they will continue to do so, and those will sell well into the embedded/appliance space.
- StillBored 7y agoAnd ram capacity, which makes a huge difference with modern software stacks.
- shmerl 7y agoA lot more powerful. Example: https://www.smachz.com https://www.smachz.com
- lukeh 7y agohttps://www.techradar.com/au/news/apple-macs-could-ditch-intel-cpus-and-switch-to-amd-going-by-clues-in-macos https://www.techradar.com/au/news/apple-macs-could-ditch-int...
- egberts1 7y agoAMD is now riding ahead of Intel in the hardware security arena, by like a mile. Today’s Flush-Flush KASLR vulnerability http://cc0x1f.net/publications/kaslr.pdf http://cc0x1f.net/publications/kaslr.pdf
- StavrosK 7y agoThis makes me wonder, do companies spend resources trying to find flaws in competitors' products and publicize them? It would make sense.
- pearjuice 7y agoHonestly if you are not long on AMD by now, you are missing out. AMD will defeat Intel. It's just a matter of time.
- unwind 7y agoI work in (way smaller) embedded development, so I was curious about the low-level I/O capabilities. If you say "this SoC is for embedded", I am going to wonder about the SPIs, I2Cs, UARTs, and GPIOs. I surfed up the "product brief" [1] which states: • Up to 4x USB 3.1 (10Gb/s) / 2x Type-C® with ALT. DP power delivery capable • 1x USB 3.1 (5Gb/s) • 1x USB 2.0 • Up to 2x SATA ports • NVMe support • eMMC5.0, SD3, or LPC • Up to 16L of PCIe® Gen3 (8 lane GFX, 8 lane GPP) and 7 link max • 2x 10 Gigabit Ethernet • 2x UART, 4x I2C, 2x SMBus, SPI/eSPI, I2S/HDA/SW, GPIO So ... that's pretty good, then. No clear number on the GPIOs but I guess it will be at least "a handful" since these are no small packages. [1] https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/v1000-family-product-brief.pdf https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/v1000-family-prod...
- jandrese 7y agoIs there any clue what the MSRP is going to be for these chips? I'd like to get a sense of how much a SBC mounting one of these is going to cost.
- alberth 7y agoThe threadripper 3970x seems the the ultimate sweet spot on perf & cost. It has 32-cores all operating at an amazing 3.7Ghz (a solid 40% freq faster than most cpu in market and especially at that core count) I’d love to have a rack mounted server with a 3970x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3970x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...
- moondev 7y agoI just built one last week! Love it so far. Running esxi and virtualizing everything I can think of. The pcie 4.0 nvme speeds are incredible
- zelienople 7y agoIf you are going to use a marketing buzzword like "APU" in the title, please do us a favour and explain what it means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni... APU = "the marketing term for a series of 64-bit microprocessors from AMD..." Excuse me for not keeping up with the latest corporate-speak made-up BS.
- washadjeffmad 7y agoForgiven! And here's an explanation for others that doesn't require a new tab: APU = CPU + iGPU (on the same die) AMD CPUs contain no integrated graphics, so this makes the function of AMD's APU (c. 2011) branding similar to Intel's historical i-series (c. 2008). Don't ask me to explain Intel's current i-series branding, though. Apparently as of 2018, not all i3/i5/i7/i9s contain integrated graphics, so it's not quite as clear as AMD's "APU means on-die iGPU" is today.