19 ms·

I'm sort of amazed they haven't dropped prices more; I guess they can still charge a premium to anyone who wants their AVX512 (? I think that's it) performance

I'm sort of amazed they haven't dropped prices more; I guess they can still charge a premium to anyone who wants their AVX512 (? I think that's it) performance to be as high as it can be. Otherwise, most of these processors have already had an epyc shit taken on them. I was just again pricing processors and if that 7302 isn't the real killer in the Epyc lineup I dunno what is. It craps on pretty much anything and everything Intel has, and is only about $1100 right now (pricing is inflated, but meh). It's pretty crazy how cheap hardware is compared to the cloud these days; sure, it's not in a data center or if it is that's a headache of its own... but it is really fucking cheap. I personally think a lot of mid-sized orgs could benefit from moving a lot of their non-production environments to an on-prem server. The VPN is probably already locking people out, causing connection headaches anyway, so it's not like you're gonna have less connectivity than you did ;-)

thedance 7y ago
Isn’t the intel 6208U a strong competitor to the AMD 7302? At the same price and TDP it has higher clock speeds and a unified memory domain, compared to the AMD 4-way NUMA architecture. It seems like you can make a case for either, depending on your workload.
- rubyn00bie 7y ago
  It would be for me, but it's a single socket only processor. I like the 7302 specifically for the non-P variant. If I was going to stick to just one socket, I'd probably spend a bit more and go with the entry level Threadripper 3960x... It's a nice looking processor though and probably the only one worth a damn in that line up.
- consp 7y ago
  The AMD Rome chips (including the 7302) behave as one numa node I thought (and can find online). You also get quite a lot of PCIe4 as a bonus and a higher all core base frequency. Though your mileage may vary depending on workload as you already stated.
  - thedance 7y ago
    You can configure it in different ways in a BIOS but the physical reality remains that it is NUMA and some accesses take longer than others.
    - wtallis 7y ago
      You're either talking about cache latency, or still talking about first-gen EPYC/Threadripper rather than the current generation codenamed Rome. On a cache miss, all chiplets on a single-socket Rome system have roughly equal latency for a DRAM fetch, regardless of which physical address is being fetched. Any differences are insignificant compared to inter-socket memory access or fetching from a different chiplet's DRAM on first-gen EPYC. And even if you wanted to treat each chiplet as a separate NUMA node, 4 isn't the right number for Rome.
      - therealcamino 7y ago
        "And even if you wanted to treat each chiplet as a separate NUMA node, 4 isn't the right number for Rome." You can configure Rome systems with 1, 2, or 4 NUMA domains per socket (NPS1, NPS2, or NPS4, where NPS == "NUMA per socket".) Memory bandwidth is higher if you configure as NPS4, but it exposes different latencies to memory based on its location. It's really impressive that you can get uniform latency to memory for 64 cores on the 7702 chips (when configured as NPS1). https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln319015/amd-rome-is-it-for-real-architecture-and-initial-hpc-performance?lang=en https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln319015/amd-rom...
        wtallis 7y ago
        The underlying hardware reality is that the IO die is organized into quadrants instead of being a full crossbar switch between 8 CCXs and an 8-channel DRAM controller. Whether to enumerate it as 1, 2 or 4 NUMA domains per socket depends very much on what kind of software you plan to run. Saying that memory bandwidth is higher when configured as NPS4 probably isn't universally true, because that setting will constrain the bandwidth a single core can use to just effectively dual-channel. For a benchmark with the appropriate thread count and sufficiently low core-to-core communication, NPS4 probably makes it easiest to maximize aggregate memory bandwidth utilization (this seems to be what Dell's STREAM Triad results show, with NPS4 and 1 thread per CCX as optimal settings for that benchmark).
- matja 7y ago
  I haven't seen a single review of the 6208U/6209U/6210U or anywhere that has them in stock, they might as well not exist.
  - wtallis 7y ago
    Launch-day reviews are pretty uncommon for server processors, especially mid-cycle refreshes that don't introduce any fundamentally new tech. And retail stock the same week as the announcement is also not how this market segment usually works.
crazyjncsu 7y ago
> It's pretty crazy how cheap hardware is compared to the cloud these days By “the cloud” I’m assuming you mean aws/gcp/azure, and comparing them simply with on-prem is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other cloud and bare metal hosting providers who actually pass on the savings as hardware value improves.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > There are plenty of other cloud and bare metal hosting providers who actually pass on the savings as hardware value improves. It would help them and us if you would list them. :)
  - freedomben 7y ago
    Not GP, but OVH Cloud is really cheap. Some people have had issues with OVH reliability, but I've only had success. I use AWS for prod, and a mix of Digital Ocean and OVH for non-prod.
    - crazyjncsu 7y ago
      OVH bare metal is what we use when we need cheap raw horsepower. Mentioning them is usually controversial, which is why I refrained in my parent comment, but we’ve had nothing but success.
  - snovv_crash 7y ago
    OVH, DigitalOcean, Hetzner (for EU). Currently renting a dedicated 48-core + HT (so 96 virtual cores), 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 10Gb WAN right this moment for ~$500/month as a buildserver. That would cost 10x on AWS/Azure/GCP.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
scottLobster 7y ago
They could benefit if they looked at infrastructure as a profit center instead of a cost center, and paid/outfitted their IT staff appropriately. But most won't, and AWS/Azure/Gcloud/etc is a way of offshoaring infrastructure to those that do view it as a profit center. In some ways it's positive, as non-technical leadership is coming around to the fact that they don't do technology that well, and can still look modern/ahead of the curve at conferences by using "the cloud".
zelcon 7y ago
Public cloud is a giant scam to make sure 80% of VC money trickles back up to the big three. Most of these startups in Soma could run their product on a single threaded C++ server. But that's not cool and trendy. You're supposed to pretend that you could suddenly become Google overnight, so you need The Cloud(TM), microservices, and all kinds of redundant garbage.
- lordofgibbons 7y ago
  Great. Show me how fast you go to market with a web application and mobile backend written as a single threaded C++ application. Also please tell me how long it took to secure and set up and maintain the server. Startups do, and always should, focus on getting to market faster so they can get feedback from real customers. I will take going to market faster over saving a few dollars on server costs everytime I'm given the choice. Mature products' and companies' use cases are more nuanced.
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    Where does snap's $3 billion cloud spend land on this spectrum?
    - dna_polymerase 7y ago
      A lost bet. Their user growth stalled in the past years, they could have moved at least some parts of Google Cloud without losing scalability. On the other hand, it could have gone the other way around and they could have been actually in need of all the scalability Cloud Services offer. From what I have heard they messed up their interface some time after their IPO and that really hit them in the guts.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I’d be interested to see the startup that’s spending 80% of its budget on cloud. I’m my experience most of the startup budget goes to payroll, which seems like the sort of thing an anti-large-business person should appreciate.
  - 7y ago
fortran77 7y ago
AMD doesn't support 4 way, nor do they support (well) ECC. Intel still has a huge advantage for serious/critical use cases.
- astrodust 7y ago
  It doesn't because it's not necessary when you can get 128 physical cores with two sockets. Do you really need 256 cores on a single board? If you do, wait a year or so and there will be 128-core packages available. They also support ECC. What's not "well" about EYPC?
  - thedance 7y ago
    Also sort of interested in this comment. It can be difficult to make ECC useful. There's chipkill vs SECDED, for starters. On paper, EPYC Rome has chipkill. More important than paper features is integration with the board firmware and the OS kernel ... Linux RAS features are quite useless if the kernel fails to notice the errors. Whether this stuff is well-integrated depends a lot on your vendors.
    - greglindahl 7y ago
      An occasional 1 bit correction is very common compared to chipkill, so there is a huge benefit to ECC without chipkill. In fact, with 1000s of servers, I've never had chipkill give me any benefit. I guess I'm too small to see the effect from chipkill. But yes, I do see 1-bit corrections.
      - thedance 7y ago
        Yeah, not advocating for chipkill, but the OS has to know how to interpret the machine check syndromes, is all I was getting at. This has been a problem for me on Skylake-SP with Linux, to name one.
        greglindahl 7y ago
ksec 7y ago
Using the current AMD inflated price, you could get an Intel Gold 5218R 20 for $1273. Even with the official pricing of 7302 closer to $900, you are paying only ~$370 for Intel's 4 More Cores and higher Turbos. Not to mention you still get overall higher IPC on Intel's part. And once you factor in the price of the whole system with ECC RAM, SSD, Network Adaptor etc ( Which you get discount from Intel's part ). The whole package cost isn't so much in flavour of AMD. So I dont see what is the real killer here. Intel ( And arguably AMD ) are still selling as many as they could make. The EPYC 2 was announced Mid 2019, and it has been 6+ months since it was launched, and yet Intel is still making record Datacenter revenue. With EPYC making minimal gains on a already dismally small base number. I.e Even If they had 100% increase in shipment from a Base Market Share of 1%, it would still only represent 2% of the market. With the launch of a competitive Notebook APU, where Notebook represent 70% of today's PC market shipment, the assumption of more EPYC Orders with four HyperScaler, launch of two new console, Ray Tracing GPU, new GPGPU, AMD is forecasting 30% YoY revenue growth. Different people may have different perspective on this number. But I really dont see any "Real Killer" here. And that is speaking as someone who really wants to see AMD to grow a lot more, but the Data suggest otherwise.
- moonbas3 7y ago
  You need to also take into account that datacenters won't change hardware every cycle release, so Epyc needs more time to gain market share. If you're doubting the value and performance, you must be blind.
  - ksec 7y ago
    >You need to also take into account that datacenters won't change hardware every cycle release, so Epyc needs more time to gain market share. Define Change? EPYC has been sampling to all HyperScaler since early 2019. And Google has only just released an EPYC instance days ago. >If you're doubting the value and performance, you must be blind. I already gave a value analysis, including AMD's own projected growth. I will leave others to comment on other aspect of your comment.
    - 7y ago
bluedino 7y ago
$1,000 in CPU is nothing when in one server you are spending $32,000 on RAM and even more on disks. Plus, if I have 16 more cores I'm just going to buy even more of the two, sometimes I can't fit any more in the server so I can't increase my density if I wanted to.
- imtringued 7y ago
  I'm not sure why you need 3 Terabytes of RAM in every server. Even if you were to replace every single application on your OS with a JVM based one (including things like bash) you wouldn't meaningfully hit that limit. If you have an application that does indeed need many Terabytes in the same address space then you probably have a very small number of servers. No one runs a 1000 node cluster where each node has 3TB RAM.
  - SomeHacker44 7y ago
    Look at some of the supercomputers coming out with even more RAM than your 1000x3TB (3PB) mentioned recently here on HN, as a counterpoint.
ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
>have already had an epyc shit taken on them I hope to be able to come up with amazing wordplay like this one day.

thedance 7y ago

Isn’t the intel 6208U a strong competitor to the AMD 7302? At the same price and TDP it has higher clock speeds and a unified memory domain, compared to the AMD 4-way NUMA architecture. It seems like you can make a case for either, depending on your workload.

rubyn00bie 7y ago
It would be for me, but it's a single socket only processor. I like the 7302 specifically for the non-P variant. If I was going to stick to just one socket, I'd probably spend a bit more and go with the entry level Threadripper 3960x... It's a nice looking processor though and probably the only one worth a damn in that line up.
consp 7y ago
The AMD Rome chips (including the 7302) behave as one numa node I thought (and can find online). You also get quite a lot of PCIe4 as a bonus and a higher all core base frequency. Though your mileage may vary depending on workload as you already stated.
- thedance 7y ago
  You can configure it in different ways in a BIOS but the physical reality remains that it is NUMA and some accesses take longer than others.
  - wtallis 7y ago
    You're either talking about cache latency, or still talking about first-gen EPYC/Threadripper rather than the current generation codenamed Rome. On a cache miss, all chiplets on a single-socket Rome system have roughly equal latency for a DRAM fetch, regardless of which physical address is being fetched. Any differences are insignificant compared to inter-socket memory access or fetching from a different chiplet's DRAM on first-gen EPYC. And even if you wanted to treat each chiplet as a separate NUMA node, 4 isn't the right number for Rome.
    - therealcamino 7y ago
      "And even if you wanted to treat each chiplet as a separate NUMA node, 4 isn't the right number for Rome." You can configure Rome systems with 1, 2, or 4 NUMA domains per socket (NPS1, NPS2, or NPS4, where NPS == "NUMA per socket".) Memory bandwidth is higher if you configure as NPS4, but it exposes different latencies to memory based on its location. It's really impressive that you can get uniform latency to memory for 64 cores on the 7702 chips (when configured as NPS1). https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln319015/amd-rome-is-it-for-real-architecture-and-initial-hpc-performance?lang=en https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln319015/amd-rom...
      - wtallis 7y ago
        The underlying hardware reality is that the IO die is organized into quadrants instead of being a full crossbar switch between 8 CCXs and an 8-channel DRAM controller. Whether to enumerate it as 1, 2 or 4 NUMA domains per socket depends very much on what kind of software you plan to run. Saying that memory bandwidth is higher when configured as NPS4 probably isn't universally true, because that setting will constrain the bandwidth a single core can use to just effectively dual-channel. For a benchmark with the appropriate thread count and sufficiently low core-to-core communication, NPS4 probably makes it easiest to maximize aggregate memory bandwidth utilization (this seems to be what Dell's STREAM Triad results show, with NPS4 and 1 thread per CCX as optimal settings for that benchmark).
matja 7y ago
I haven't seen a single review of the 6208U/6209U/6210U or anywhere that has them in stock, they might as well not exist.
- wtallis 7y ago
  Launch-day reviews are pretty uncommon for server processors, especially mid-cycle refreshes that don't introduce any fundamentally new tech. And retail stock the same week as the announcement is also not how this market segment usually works.

crazyjncsu 7y ago

> It's pretty crazy how cheap hardware is compared to the cloud these days By “the cloud” I’m assuming you mean aws/gcp/azure, and comparing them simply with on-prem is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other cloud and bare metal hosting providers who actually pass on the savings as hardware value improves.

Razengan 7y ago
> There are plenty of other cloud and bare metal hosting providers who actually pass on the savings as hardware value improves. It would help them and us if you would list them. :)
- freedomben 7y ago
  Not GP, but OVH Cloud is really cheap. Some people have had issues with OVH reliability, but I've only had success. I use AWS for prod, and a mix of Digital Ocean and OVH for non-prod.
  - crazyjncsu 7y ago
    OVH bare metal is what we use when we need cheap raw horsepower. Mentioning them is usually controversial, which is why I refrained in my parent comment, but we’ve had nothing but success.
- snovv_crash 7y ago
  OVH, DigitalOcean, Hetzner (for EU). Currently renting a dedicated 48-core + HT (so 96 virtual cores), 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 10Gb WAN right this moment for ~$500/month as a buildserver. That would cost 10x on AWS/Azure/GCP.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

scottLobster 7y ago

They could benefit if they looked at infrastructure as a profit center instead of a cost center, and paid/outfitted their IT staff appropriately. But most won't, and AWS/Azure/Gcloud/etc is a way of offshoaring infrastructure to those that do view it as a profit center. In some ways it's positive, as non-technical leadership is coming around to the fact that they don't do technology that well, and can still look modern/ahead of the curve at conferences by using "the cloud".

zelcon 7y ago

Public cloud is a giant scam to make sure 80% of VC money trickles back up to the big three. Most of these startups in Soma could run their product on a single threaded C++ server. But that's not cool and trendy. You're supposed to pretend that you could suddenly become Google overnight, so you need The Cloud(TM), microservices, and all kinds of redundant garbage.

lordofgibbons 7y ago
Great. Show me how fast you go to market with a web application and mobile backend written as a single threaded C++ application. Also please tell me how long it took to secure and set up and maintain the server. Startups do, and always should, focus on getting to market faster so they can get feedback from real customers. I will take going to market faster over saving a few dollars on server costs everytime I'm given the choice. Mature products' and companies' use cases are more nuanced.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  Where does snap's $3 billion cloud spend land on this spectrum?
  - dna_polymerase 7y ago
    A lost bet. Their user growth stalled in the past years, they could have moved at least some parts of Google Cloud without losing scalability. On the other hand, it could have gone the other way around and they could have been actually in need of all the scalability Cloud Services offer. From what I have heard they messed up their interface some time after their IPO and that really hit them in the guts.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  I’d be interested to see the startup that’s spending 80% of its budget on cloud. I’m my experience most of the startup budget goes to payroll, which seems like the sort of thing an anti-large-business person should appreciate.
- 7y ago

fortran77 7y ago

AMD doesn't support 4 way, nor do they support (well) ECC. Intel still has a huge advantage for serious/critical use cases.

astrodust 7y ago
It doesn't because it's not necessary when you can get 128 physical cores with two sockets. Do you really need 256 cores on a single board? If you do, wait a year or so and there will be 128-core packages available. They also support ECC. What's not "well" about EYPC?
- thedance 7y ago
  Also sort of interested in this comment. It can be difficult to make ECC useful. There's chipkill vs SECDED, for starters. On paper, EPYC Rome has chipkill. More important than paper features is integration with the board firmware and the OS kernel ... Linux RAS features are quite useless if the kernel fails to notice the errors. Whether this stuff is well-integrated depends a lot on your vendors.
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    An occasional 1 bit correction is very common compared to chipkill, so there is a huge benefit to ECC without chipkill. In fact, with 1000s of servers, I've never had chipkill give me any benefit. I guess I'm too small to see the effect from chipkill. But yes, I do see 1-bit corrections.
    - thedance 7y ago
      Yeah, not advocating for chipkill, but the OS has to know how to interpret the machine check syndromes, is all I was getting at. This has been a problem for me on Skylake-SP with Linux, to name one.
      - greglindahl 7y ago

ksec 7y ago

Using the current AMD inflated price, you could get an Intel Gold 5218R 20 for $1273. Even with the official pricing of 7302 closer to $900, you are paying only ~$370 for Intel's 4 More Cores and higher Turbos. Not to mention you still get overall higher IPC on Intel's part. And once you factor in the price of the whole system with ECC RAM, SSD, Network Adaptor etc ( Which you get discount from Intel's part ). The whole package cost isn't so much in flavour of AMD. So I dont see what is the real killer here. Intel ( And arguably AMD ) are still selling as many as they could make. The EPYC 2 was announced Mid 2019, and it has been 6+ months since it was launched, and yet Intel is still making record Datacenter revenue. With EPYC making minimal gains on a already dismally small base number. I.e Even If they had 100% increase in shipment from a Base Market Share of 1%, it would still only represent 2% of the market. With the launch of a competitive Notebook APU, where Notebook represent 70% of today's PC market shipment, the assumption of more EPYC Orders with four HyperScaler, launch of two new console, Ray Tracing GPU, new GPGPU, AMD is forecasting 30% YoY revenue growth. Different people may have different perspective on this number. But I really dont see any "Real Killer" here. And that is speaking as someone who really wants to see AMD to grow a lot more, but the Data suggest otherwise.

moonbas3 7y ago
You need to also take into account that datacenters won't change hardware every cycle release, so Epyc needs more time to gain market share. If you're doubting the value and performance, you must be blind.
- ksec 7y ago
  >You need to also take into account that datacenters won't change hardware every cycle release, so Epyc needs more time to gain market share. Define Change? EPYC has been sampling to all HyperScaler since early 2019. And Google has only just released an EPYC instance days ago. >If you're doubting the value and performance, you must be blind. I already gave a value analysis, including AMD's own projected growth. I will leave others to comment on other aspect of your comment.
  - 7y ago

bluedino 7y ago

$1,000 in CPU is nothing when in one server you are spending $32,000 on RAM and even more on disks. Plus, if I have 16 more cores I'm just going to buy even more of the two, sometimes I can't fit any more in the server so I can't increase my density if I wanted to.

imtringued 7y ago
I'm not sure why you need 3 Terabytes of RAM in every server. Even if you were to replace every single application on your OS with a JVM based one (including things like bash) you wouldn't meaningfully hit that limit. If you have an application that does indeed need many Terabytes in the same address space then you probably have a very small number of servers. No one runs a 1000 node cluster where each node has 3TB RAM.
- SomeHacker44 7y ago
  Look at some of the supercomputers coming out with even more RAM than your 1000x3TB (3PB) mentioned recently here on HN, as a counterpoint.

ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago

>have already had an epyc shit taken on them I hope to be able to come up with amazing wordplay like this one day.