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I can't help but think this will be king of Virtual Server hosting for the next couple years. At that point, who knows what comes next, I know Intel is betting

I can't help but think this will be king of Virtual Server hosting for the next couple years. At that point, who knows what comes next, I know Intel is betting on custom accelerators and NVidia is pushing for GPU-like AI parallelism. Between AMD and other ARM options, who knows in a few years, but this is a pretty great option in the near term.

rbanffy 3y ago
One thing we can be sure is that, if there's money to be made, someone will try to make it. And Intel will eventually get the process house in order, so we can expect them to come up with something. I'd also love to see software like Firefox trying to leverage these abundant puny cores, because the average corporate laptop now does 8 threads or more and that number is only going to get higher, with mixed beefy/puny cores.
- tracker1 3y ago
  AFAIK, the Zen4c are full cores, just smaller node size, not big/little per Intel. I'm not sure where the limit will hit on core utilization in most common applications, which are relatively entrenched with legacy code bases.
ksec 3y ago
> At that point, who knows what comes next, Zen 5c, although the ~25% increase in per Core improvement doesn't seems that interesting in these kind of workload. Until AMD could fit 256 Core in a Single Socket. Definitely achievable with 2nm, although we are looking at 2026+.
- tracker1 3y ago
  I mean in terms of a "best" option for many/most data center applications. Right now, these 128 Zen 4c server processors are actually really close to ARM in terms of per core power usage, so who knows if ARM will still even have that advantage in production in 3-5 years as these servers start to cycle out. Also worth noting that AMD could drop in ARM chiplets as well as x86, so there is some flexibility there as well if there's enough demand. As it stands, this will bring a lot of compute density for a lot less power draw than previous generations of servers.

rbanffy 3y ago

One thing we can be sure is that, if there's money to be made, someone will try to make it. And Intel will eventually get the process house in order, so we can expect them to come up with something. I'd also love to see software like Firefox trying to leverage these abundant puny cores, because the average corporate laptop now does 8 threads or more and that number is only going to get higher, with mixed beefy/puny cores.

tracker1 3y ago
AFAIK, the Zen4c are full cores, just smaller node size, not big/little per Intel. I'm not sure where the limit will hit on core utilization in most common applications, which are relatively entrenched with legacy code bases.

ksec 3y ago

> At that point, who knows what comes next, Zen 5c, although the ~25% increase in per Core improvement doesn't seems that interesting in these kind of workload. Until AMD could fit 256 Core in a Single Socket. Definitely achievable with 2nm, although we are looking at 2026+.

tracker1 3y ago
I mean in terms of a "best" option for many/most data center applications. Right now, these 128 Zen 4c server processors are actually really close to ARM in terms of per core power usage, so who knows if ARM will still even have that advantage in production in 3-5 years as these servers start to cycle out. Also worth noting that AMD could drop in ARM chiplets as well as x86, so there is some flexibility there as well if there's enough demand. As it stands, this will bring a lot of compute density for a lot less power draw than previous generations of servers.