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AMD Claims World’s Fastest Per-Core Performance with New EPYC Rome 7Fx2 CPUs
- xvector 7y agoThe rise of AMD has been like a dream come true. I only wish Intel could get their cards straight and compete in the prosumer space. It used to be that Intel was a good choice of money wasn’t really an object, but as time has gone on it has become harder to justify Intel chips regardless of the pricing.
- agumonkey 7y agoFair point, in these days of economic turmoil, intel premium will feel pointless
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoBut that's just the thing - for a while, you could spend extra in Intel for a premium system. It wasn't a good $/performance tradeoff, but at the upper end it was there. What's wild about this moment in time is that Intel has lost even the high end; there isn't an Intel premium, because they are not the best product at all.
- swsieber 7y agoNot performance wise, but I've heard they have better tooling. Hopefully that's just a matter of time.
- notJim 7y agoI thought I read a few months ago that Intel still does well in the video editing space (especially with 4k), because their chips have onboard decoding hardware. Is this still true?
- wmf 7y agoDiscrete GPUs have the same hardware although there may be some driver pickiness with certain apps.
- notJim 7y agoPremiere Pro apparently doesn't use the GPU for h.264/5, so sadly if you want that, you have to use an Intel CPU: https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Premiere-Pro-143/Hardware-Recommendations https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems...
- xxpor 7y agoMy understanding is that GPU rendering for h26{4,5} is a lot faster, but the image quality is nowhere close to CPU based rendering. Given that Premiere Pro isn't in the business of real time rendering or transcoding, the business case isn't there for full rendering support. If you really need the speed, maybe render into a fast but large lossless format, then use ffmpeg gpu transcoding?
- kllrnohj 7y agoIt's not that Premiere Pro cares about image quality above all else, because it does use GPU-accelerated decoding. It's that Premiere only uses Intel's integrated GPU for decoding and not with Nvidia's or AMD's GPU decoder. Quick Sync's quality is worse than NVENC's these days so it's likely more along the lines of Intel contributed the patches than Adobe not wanting it out of purity reasons.
- xxpor 7y ago
- systemvoltage 7y ago> regardless of the pricing If Intel sells $5 CPUs, will you change your mind? I don't understand the obsessive praise of AMD. Keep in mind that Jim Keller, an Intel ex-chip architect lead the AMD Zen platform when he was hired in 2013 (after working at Apple on the A4/A5 SOCs). It is the same dude competing against himself. Btw, he is back at Intel since 2018 to help Intel out.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoI'm not sure how this relates to the parent comment. They stated that no matter what your budget is, Intel is always the worse option currently. Their chips cost more and do less when they used to cost more and do more.
- sixothree 7y agoI got the fastest CPU my motherboard could handle. But looking at the performance charts, there were AMD CPUs with 25% and 50% more performance costing hundreds of dollars less than what I spent. I could have spent that money on a motherboard and some extra RAM, but didn't feel like doing the work. Meaning this was an upgrade from an under powered CPU to a newer chip that was not available when I did the build originally.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoThe vast majority of users would find a 50% performance improvement and a huge price reduction to be worth the extra effort of replacing the mobo, especially since they already have to replace the cpu and likely put the mobo in to start with.
- toast0 7y agoI mean, it's nice to see that after years of stagnation, AMD is now able to hit best IPC, more cores/chip, best perf/watt, and close enough singlethreaded perf. And AMD $/perf is better too. An Intel chip at the right price is probably fine -- although, they've lost a lot of perf to mitigate security issues, so I dunno. Intel has also been pretty stagnated the last several years (what are we on, the 5th respin of Skylake?) Jim Keller's work at Intel should probably start showing up in 2021 or 2022... Could be pretty exciting, or Intel corporate politics could bury it all.
- DeathArrow 7y agoI also hope that VIA and other x86 license holders step up their game and start to compete like in early '90s.
- kllrnohj 7y agoVIA is out of the western market for the foreseeable future. They are currently manufacturing x86 CPUs for the Chinese government to break the government's reliance on western technology. They do still make CPUs though. Just incredibly slow ones currently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DanhnASClQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DanhnASClQ (although with guaranteed government funding TBD how much that changes)
- grenoire 7y agoHas the rise of AMD led to a shift in talent going their way as well? Not sure how the loyalty dynamics are in the chip engineering industry.
- mc32 7y agoIf I were an EE I’d wait it out, at least for the CPU biz. AMD has been feat or famine, so a bit too unpredictable, though of late they have been crushing it.
- Retric 7y agoFeast or famine works really well if you’re selling stock options as soon as they vest. Well assuming the cycle time is fast enough and you’re staying through multiple cycles. It’s like x every year vs cycling between 0 and 4x.
- mchristen 7y agoCheck out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) to answer your question about loyalty. He's had his hand in all kinds of chips you use.
- api 7y agoI don't think him jumping back and forth is a bad thing. I'd prefer if Intel and AMD (and others) were at each others throats constantly. We're the winners in that scenario, with more and faster and cheaper chips to choose from.
- starpilot 7y agoAMD/Intel make incredible products, but there's mostly bitching about workplace environment at those places on Blind.
- code_biologist 7y agoIt already sounds like the environment in Intel isn't great, and a lot of the staff dynamics are very driven by cost-cutting. Great video on youtube posted in the last week with a bunch of leaks from Intel employees: https://youtu.be/agxSclh27uo https://youtu.be/agxSclh27uo
- m0zg 7y agoIt's just bizarre to watch how once unassailable Intel is totally floundering in multiple aspects of their main business. I wanted to upgrade my aging Core i7 workstation and looked into the current Intel HEDT lineup. Only 14nm, and even without Spectre/Meltdown mitigations the chips are way slower unless you can use AVX512. Ended up buying Threadripper 3970X with a quad-GPU capable board, even though the CPU is _more_ expensive than anything HEDT that Intel currently sells.
- dmux 7y ago>It's just bizarre to watch how once unassailable Intel is totally floundering in multiple aspects of their main business. Isn't this just history repeating itself though? We could easily replace "Intel" with any number of previous market leaders that have fallen by the wayside.
- m0zg 7y agoI don't remember any company flubbing their unassailable lead quite this badly. I sense there might still be some complacency behind it. Sales are probably doing well enough to not worry about it quite yet. But it's much like C19: if AMD gets the mindshare (which it is in the process of acquiring), with some lag those sales will start to die, and it'll be too late to do much about them then. Any countermeasures have to be preemptive, and I just don't see anything exciting being announced by Intel until at least 2021, whereas AMD keeps releasing bombshell products every quarter like clockwork.
- derision 7y agoSears is another famous example
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago> I don't remember any company flubbing their unassailable lead quite this badly. GM's Electro Motive Division losing to General Electric (in railroad locomotives) is probably about at the same level.
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- jl6 7y ago256MB of L3 cache is incredible. There must be useful classes of application that can fit entirely within that, OS and data included.
- api 7y agoInstall an old version of Linux, limit it to 256MB with a kernel code hack or kernel command line option, and you'd be running entirely in L3. I also think there might be a niche for unikernels here to compile number crunching and other CPU-heavy tasks down to sizes that would run almost 100% from L3 cache. Wow.
- buckminster 7y agoMy website runs contemporary Debian on a 128MB VM. You don't need special measures to run in 256MB.
- KMag 7y agoIf the kernel sees 32 GB of RAM at boot time, you do need special measures to make sure the kernel doesn't utilize all of the visible RAM.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoWhy an old version? I would expect them to run with much less if you remove stuff that you don't need like a bloated GUI or a browser...
- gameswithgo 7y agoremember that with ryzen that is split up between chunks of cores, so its not entirely flexible. that gets better with the upcoming generation though, its more unified.
- admax88q 7y agoThe L3 is split per core? I thought it was only typically L1 cache that was per core, with L2 and L3 being shared across the entire die.
- com2kid 7y agoThe 7F52 has 16MB of cache per core. I'd love to see what is possible with a tiny runtime/OS in the kilobyte size and running a microservice written in a native language off of each core, everything out of the L3 cache. I imagine the throughput would be amazing. Single thread per core, e.g. cooperative multitasking. Do this for stream orientated workflows, or even for processing data that is in reasonable sized chunks, it might be screaming fast!
- bgirard 7y agoI'm not sure with cache aliasing you'd be guaranteed that it would stay all in L3.
- com2kid 7y agoIt's have to be a special setup for sure, a board with no memory even hanging off of it. In theory all you'd need is some tight integration with the NIC (or a few of em!) and tiny driver that knows how to DMA to the NIC. Larger problem of course is that L3 isn't addressable. I wonder how much money a cloud provider would have to pony up to AMD to get an exception to that? :) A huge # of workloads would fit in 16MB with no storage hanging off. Heck I think every microservice I've ever written could manage that. There have been some efforts of late to make a cloud first OS, honestly once you remove everything except for "talk to network controller" and "parse JSON", well so long as you don't mind writing in a language that isn't JS, a few MB is plenty for lots of workloads.
- gpderetta 7y agoApparently there are ways to treat the cache as a static scratch pad. It is used by BIOSes during early startup, but I'm not sure whether the magic incantations are publicly known. It is second hand knowledge though, so it might just be folklore.
- Dylan16807 7y agoIf you allocate one big block it would fit even in a 1-way cache. Modern chips appear to have 16-way L3, so you'd have to be trying to spill.
- cced 7y agoFor someone considering their next build with a usecase of: - programming, docker, golang - gaming can anyone recommend a resource for determining the relative performance of processors? With all the new of how well AMD is doing, I’m still not sure how to look at a given task, and determine which processor would perform better. Does anyone know of such a source?
- jstanley 7y agoI don't know about specific tasks, but I've been using https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/ https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/ to compare CPUs.
- lupire 6y agobeware of submitting data to UB: UB stores passwords in plaintext, and emails them around. https://plaintextoffenders.com/post/183587319928/userbenchmarkcom-software-popular-pc-performance https://plaintextoffenders.com/post/183587319928/userbenchma... https://github.com/plaintextoffenders/plaintextoffenders/blob/master/offenders.csv#L8 https://github.com/plaintextoffenders/plaintextoffenders/blo...
- yoodenvranx 7y agoIf you go to /r/amd you will see that basically everybody over there hates userbenchmark.com because it's intel-biased garbage. Just one of many threads from the last few weeks: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/fyhl1g/tim_from_hardware_unboxed_comments_on_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/fyhl1g/tim_from_hardwa...
- kllrnohj 7y agoThe specific issue is how userbenchmark weights CPUs seems to be very coupled to Intel's specific ideas on how many CPU cores there should be, or at least very firmly stuck in the 5 years ago. So last year the weights were 40% for single-core performance, 58% for quad-core, and 2% for "multi-core". The idea was this was supposed to be what games care about, but it isn't. Modern games have issues with even 6c/6t CPUs, such as the horrible 1% lows on the 9600K in Far Cry 5: https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3407-intel-i5-9600k-cpu-review-vs-2700-2600-8700k https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3407-intel-i5-9600k-cp... It looks like Userbench has since adjusted to weight up to 8 threads of performance? Which is maaaaybe less trash if all you care about is gaming. But the Core i5 series still tops charts on userbench despite reviewers no longer recommending the i5's due to performance inconsistency. They even make ludicrous claims like that the 9100F is perfectly fine for gaming, and is even 10% better than a 2700X. They seem to be basing this decision entirely on older games or games specifically built for as broad a userbase as possible (eg, CSGO, Fortnite & Overwatch). Meanwhile actual reviews say things like "The quad-core Core i3-9100F was hopeless in Battlefield V, pretty bad in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, fairly useless in The Division 2, and weak in Shadow of the Tomb Raider." https://www.techspot.com/review/1983-intel-vs-amd-budget-cpu-battle-2020/ https://www.techspot.com/review/1983-intel-vs-amd-budget-cpu... So even if you're an Intel fan, userbench is still a terrible way to pick a CPU.
- shantara 7y agoServeTheHome goes into much greater detail when it comes to reviewing server oriented hardware, its position on the market and enterprise specifics: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7f52-benchmarks-review-and-market-perspective/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7f52-benchmarks-review...
- leoh 7y agoCould someone comment on how this compares with Ryzen Threadripper (e.g. 3990X)?
- Robotbeat 7y agoWhat’s interesting and surprising to me is that the new Epyc 2 chips by AMD have about the same cost per double precision teraflop as a GPU, even the ones with good floating point hardware support. I assume the cost for these accelerators is probably a little cheaper for high performance computing folk able to buy in bulk, but still I was very surprised. I expected there to be an order of magnitude difference is cost per flop, even with doubles. Once AMD introduces AVX512, the cost per flop should improve even more. Also, in the same vein, I was surprised that double and single floating point cost per flop has stayed fairly stagnant the last couple years as NVIDIA seems focused on improving lower precision performance (ie for machine learning inference).
- einpoklum 7y agoThis is probably because you're comparing them to consumer GPUs, which are designed this way - favoring integer and single-precision functional units on the SM cores. That's a sort of a marketing/tiering strategy by nVIDIA. The Teslas have good double-precision performance - but they are priced waaaay higher than the consumer cards.
- Robotbeat 7y agoI looked at both. Recent consumer cards have terrible double performance (with exception of Titan series) of course, but the extreme cost of the non-consumer cards offsets their double flop performance to be approximately no better[1] than Epyc 2 per dollar. [1]EDIT: Tesla v100s are still about 40% lower cost per Gflop than Epyc 7742, but still definitely the same order of magnitude, unlike my expectation.
- kllrnohj 7y ago> The Teslas have good double-precision performance - but they are priced waaaay higher than the consumer cards. Yup - the Tesla V100 is 7 TFLOPs of double-precision at around ~$9000 A huge split between consumer & HPC happened in the aftermath of the Fermi (2010) architecture. Fermi was really bad in the consumer space from all the wasted die spent on unused double-precision. It was late, hot, and loud. And barely even faster than the competition. With Maxwell Nvidia basically removed all the FP64 support from the architecture itself ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/9059/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-x-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9059/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-t... - native FP64 rate is 1/32'd the FP32 rate) - the result was a huge boost to gaming performance. But it also meant that HPC users who want double-precision had to use Tesla cards. The actual architectures between GeForce & Tesla are different now, it's not "just" a lockout anymore.
- Robotbeat 7y agoOne of the most impressive things about these Epyc 2 chips is the very high PCIe bandwidth. A LOT of lanes, plus support for PCIe 4 (doubles the per-lane bandwidth). Interesting options for extreme SSD storage speed &capacity (in a single node) if you combine it with a PCIe expansion box. (And Potentially other single-node performance metrics for accelerator cards supporting PCIe 4, which NVIDIA doesn’t yet.)
- chx 7y agoAnd the lanes are cheap. https://www.avadirect.com/Tomcat-HX-S8030-S8030GM2NE-AMD-SoC-SP3-DDR4-3200-2TB-3DS-LRDIMM-8-VGA-GbLAN-2-ATX-Retail/Product/13225593 https://www.avadirect.com/Tomcat-HX-S8030-S8030GM2NE-AMD-SoC... this is a $400 standard ATX board with 80 PCIe lanes (+ 16 more via risers). That's the equivalent of 160 3.0 PCIe lanes.
- kllrnohj 7y agoThe lanes come from the CPU you put into the board, not the board itself. Although yes they are still cheap, at least if you go with something like the EPYC 7252 at ~$500 (which still has the full 128 PCI-E 4.0 lanes) That said I have no idea how you would actually feed that many PCI-E lanes with an EPYC 7252, but if you can pull it off it's an insane $/lane value.
- chx 7y agoI know it's the CPU but the board I linked is a very rare standard ATX board, almost all boards are proprietary. I presume you could build an insane fast fileserver with a real lot of M.2 disks and multiple 100GbE ports?
- Robotbeat 7y agoThat's right. You can also use a PCIe expansion chassis (there are already ones supporting PCIe 4.0), giving you plenty of space for dual-slot-width cards.
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- cletus 7y agoSo after years of an effective Intel monopoly I'm really glad to see AMD is back in a way that I don't think I've seen since the Athlon64/Opteron days. Back then it was AMD who pushed the x86-64 instruction set when Intel was claiming EPIC was the future (ha). At this point, Intel's move to 10nm processes is an embarrassment. I'm sure it's a difficult problem but historically Intel has been reasonably good at planning process advancements but in the case of 10nm they've been off by years. I believe the original goal was 2017? And we're still not there yet. I would dearly love to see an honest postmortem of this and see what went wrong. Who made promises they'd miss by so much, why, what the issues were and so on. The last PC I built (because apparently I still do that, even though it annoys me no end) has an Intel 9700 in it. At the time that was probably the best choice. 6 months later and it would no doubt have been a Ryzen. I hope AMD keeps this up as we need the competition.
- lend000 7y agoThey got comfortable with Moore's Law, which in fairness, had held for a long time, and continued to use the model that increasing feature density quadratically was a linear problem. Now, it turns out that once you get near the 10nm gate size range, the difficulty diverges from linear to exponential (and perhaps even higher eventually as some hard limit is approached). That, and Intel isn't an innovative company anymore. Now they are a process company riding on their manufacturing dominance and x86 market share. It looks a lot like Apple under Tim Cook, except add another decade since there was innovative leadership (Andy Grove). They are a few consultants removed from IBM at this point.
- thethethethe 7y ago> It looks a lot like Apple under Tim Cook, except add another decade since there was innovative leadership (Andy Grove) Ehh this is debatable. Apple has put out a few products that have completely changed the market under Cook's tenure. AirPods have introduced a new head phone paradigm. Apple Watch is waaaay ahead of the competition. The iPhone X made full screen phones mainstream and introduced UI gestures that were copied by Android. Sure there have been some missteps cough butterfly keyboard cough but I’d say overall, they are still producing interesting products that define a large part of the consumer tech market
- ssutch3 7y agoAnandtech Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15715/amds-new-epyc-7f52-reviewed-the-f-is-for-frequency https://www.anandtech.com/show/15715/amds-new-epyc-7f52-revi...
- ksec 7y agoI thought it is worth pointing out, Intel already sell a HEDT CPU that is faster and cheaper than these AMD Counterpart, the 10980xe with 18 Core and higher Clock speed. All it takes is Intel to bin them with ECC Memory and renamed them to Xeon to compete. And it seems AMD is in no hurry to release their Zen 3. Giving plenty of time for he market to digest their Zen 2. I just hope their Enterprise and Server Sales Department do better. Because right now, while on paper / benchmarks they are doing great, their sales figure aren't showing all the enthusiasm many sites and comments are claiming. And that is speaking from an AMD shareholders.
- lliamander 7y agoThe appropriate comparison here is probably either the recent Xeon Gold refresh, or Xeon W 3200 series.
- erulabs 7y agoBigCo's move slowly. It'll take some time before sales cycles close. I'd give a quarter or two lag between now and really promising sales numbers to account for how slowly things in a large data-center change. A human, somewhere, has to rack each of those things :P
- sudosysgen 7y agoThe 10980XE uses an incredible amount of power though.
- chunsj 7y agoYet, there’s no official, ready to use BLAS/LAPACK.