7 ms·

I am wondering if we are not pushing too far the core count. Do we need all those cores in a single machine? Do we know how to use them? Beside some scientific

• api 6y ago
  Prices are so high because cloud vendors have no incentive to lower them. It’s even worse with bandwidth. Cloud bandwidth prices are rape.
  • IntelMiner 6y ago
    Please don't use graphic terms like that to describe mundane activities
• calinet6 6y ago
  I think you're exactly right. These cores are designed to be sold en masse to the cloud providers, who are looking for density in the rack, lowest total cost of operation (up front cost is nearly irrelevant), and above all power and thermal efficiency. AMD knows they have some serious advantages there, especially on the efficiency front, with Zen3, and they're going pedal to the metal.
• ksec 6y ago
  >and I don't understand what it is. The prices felt off mostly because CPU are not the only cost, and in many cases it isn't even the most expensive cost on Server. Memory is, especially ECC Memory. Memory price per GB hasn't fall at all. And in many cases they are even more expensive. And it is only in recent few years you start seeing "High CPU Instances" because it is cheaper to include a Higher Core Count in the plan than to increase the Memory. And because of the increase in VM / Core Count and Tenant, the server are now equipped with multiple High Speed Network connection. And if you look at it from a Cost Per Network Card / Port / Bandwidth / Server / Tenant. Price hasn't fallen much either. Adding in your cloud / VPS instance are paying Electricity, Co-Location and Networking charges, none of these have an Moore's Law and are part of the TCO. And if you include the continuous raise of wages, things doesn't look all so good. But Zen 2 is barely deployed so its effect on the industry is not here yet. Linode already use Zen 2 and they are already offering better price plan than DO or other Medium Cloud vendors. I expect Zen 3 to be big with many of the Cloud Vendors. And you should see those reflected on pricing.
• kllrnohj 6y ago
  It's easier to scale to multiple cores than to multiple machines, and cloud services have been doing multiple machines for decades. If this wasn't needed or wasn't useful then we also wouldn't ever see companies buying more than a single rack (still want redundancy and hot spares ofc), but they do. So yes we know how to use all these cores. You take what's currently 4 machines and consolidate it to a single machine. Or similarly 40 machines to 10 machines, etc...
• jeffbee 6y ago
  No we don’t know how to use them. The abilities of single systems have far outstripped our ability to manage all those resources. It takes a lot of work to drive a system like this to the rails, and very few people even bother trying. The closest most people come to exploiting a machine this large is by carving it up into normal-sized virtual machines with independent operating systems. This makes the utilization look acceptable but in reality much of the resources are just being squandered.
• hedora 6y ago
  Disks have gotten ridiculously fast. One NVMe card can move 5GB of data or 1,000,000 IOPS over 4 PCIe lanes. With 128 cores, you need to parse 39MB/sec per core, or dispatch 7.8 thousand I/Os per second for each drive in the system. This processor has 64 PCIe lanes, and a drive uses 4. If you use half the lanes for disks, you’d need to multiply my numbers by 8. So, in addition to running application logic and talking to the network, each core needs to parse 312MB or dispatch 62K IOs per second. Those numbers are certainly achievable, but hitting them requires some care. So, this processor is fairly well-balanced for moderately compute intensive workloads, such as query processing, or maybe frontend logic (which would probably want a machine with more network and less disk). Note that the 128 cores are just to keep up with storage that easily fits in 1U or a fairly compact desktop tower case. If you measure speed as the IO to compute density, these CPUs are actually slow and bulky by historical standards.
• djsumdog 6y ago
  VM data centers. One of these machines can be loaded up with ram and host tons and tons of instances without over provisioning. Some of those VMs will be mostly idle, but others will be at full workloads, depending on the tenants. Also, there are sites like Source Hut or Travis that run thousands upon thousands of CI jobs every minute. I worked at a place where we were resizing thousands of photos and hundreds of incoming videos ever minute. One of these could easily replace 10~20 nodes in a transcoding farm for companies that do these types of workloads on physical servers. There are tons of commercial applications that would keep these things busy during business hours, and some that would also keep them busy 24/7.
• vbezhenar 6y ago
  Some workloads can utilize almost all the power. Some workloads can not. Server workloads usually can scale almost infinitely. And we don't really have a choice, single-core workloads usually don't scale (most of the recent advancements are from implicit parallelization using speculative execution).
• gameswithgo 6y ago
  databases and webservers can use more cores no problemo