AMD launches its Epyc server chip to take on Intel in the data center - Sensationalist Headlines

[QUOTE][IMG]http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/05/amd-epyc-100722951-large.jpg[/IMG] Though AMD has been teasing Epyc's features for some time, and leaks of spec sheets have been circulating this past week, Tuesday's launch is the first official public unveiling of details for the whole product stack. The bottom rung features the Epyc 7251, which offers eight cores supporting 16 simultaneous threads, and a base frequency of 2.1GHz that tops out at 2.9GHz at maximum boost. The top of the line Epyc 7601 has a whopping 32 cores, 64 threads and a base frequency of 2.2GHz, with maximum boost at 3.2GHz. Intel's Xeon chips, meanwhile, have up to 24 cores. [IMG]http://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2017/06/epyc-range-100726501-large.jpg[/IMG] All the processors, up and down the product range, offer eight memory channels supporting up to 2666MHz DDR4 DRAM, 2TB of memory and 128 PCIe lanes. TDP (thermal design power), the maximum amount of heat expected to be generated by a chip, ranges from 120W at the low end of the range up to 180W for the monster 32-core model. To top it off, all of this is offered in a single-socket chip, which can be paired with another Epyc chip in a two-socket system. At the high end, in approximately the $4,000 range, AMD internal benchmarks show the Epyc 7601 single-socket package offering 75 percent higher floating point performance (for spreadsheets, graphics and games, for instance) and 47 percent higher integer processing performance (for whole-number and text processing, for example) than Intel's E5-2699A v4. Interestingly, AMD benchmarks show 70 percent higher integer performance over Intel in the mid-range, $800 price point level, with the Epyc 7301 facing off against the Intel E5-7630. [/QUOTE] Source: [URL="http://www.pcworld.com/article/3201950/cpu-processors/amd-launches-its-epyc-server-chip-to-take-on-intel-in-the-data-center.html"]PCWorld[/URL]

It's a shame you can only get 2 EPYC cpu's on a motherboard right now.

Wonder how these will do on Cinebench

Can't wait to grab one or two when some rendering benchmarks are released

Those things are fucking huge

[QUOTE=someguyihate;52385402]Can't wait to grab one or two when some rendering benchmarks are released[/QUOTE] Threadripper will be for you, not epyc

[I]Jeeeeez[/I] dual socket mobo with [I]128 threads[/I] and 2 [I]TB[/I] of DDR4 memory. Cry some more Intel, cry some more.

[QUOTE=S31-Syntax;52385510][I]Jeeeeez[/I] dual socket mobo with [I]128 threads[/I] and 2 [I]TB[/I] of DDR4 memory. Cry some more Intel, cry some more.[/QUOTE] They already have their platinum series Xeon chips that can be put in a quad socket mobo. They've had AMD beat to this at least 3 months ago. The specific chip is the Xeon Platinum 8180 and has 28 cores/56 threads and in quad-CPU configuration has 112 physical cores and 224 threads, plus a shitload of L3 cache and supports the same amount of RAM as this AMD chip. The issue is the price, you'd drop $12,000 on just ONE 8180 chip, so that's $48,000 on just the 4 processors a quad board could use. If the AMD chip could support quad-CPU, it would have the 8180 beat though. At least as far as manufacturer specs go, actual performance could be very different.

[QUOTE=someguyihate;52385402]Can't wait to grab one or two when some rendering benchmarks are released[/QUOTE] I didn't think anyone still used CPUs for rendering.

[QUOTE=Aide;52385355]It's a shame you can only get 2 EPYC cpu's on a motherboard right now.[/QUOTE] Wonder what the fuck would you want to do with 64 cores in a single machine, apart from datamining/heavy calculative purposes?

[QUOTE=CruelAddict;52385585]Wonder what the fuck would you want to do with 64 cores in a single machine, apart from datamining/heavy calculative purposes?[/QUOTE] A boatload of virtuals.

[QUOTE=CruelAddict;52385585]Wonder what the fuck would you want to do with 64 cores in a single machine, apart from datamining/heavy calculative purposes?[/QUOTE] Web and especially app servers love high core counts. When you have dozens if not hundreds of people running remote desktop sessions on the same server you need a shit load or it runs like ass. [editline]21st June 2017[/editline] Really I just wish we'd upgrade the app server at work so we can use the old one as a dev server instead of the piece of shit dual core 1.8 GHz xeon shit box we have now.

[QUOTE=download;52385553]I didn't think anyone still used CPUs for rendering.[/QUOTE] Many renderers (including Pixar's RenderMan) are still CPU-only or in experimental stage of GPU support. I think this is due to CPU-based servers/compute nodes being more space/heat efficient when you need thousands of them in renderfarm.

anyone know how expensive the servers are? I found a site that sells some of the servers offered on supermico, but I have to contact them to know about the price range.

[QUOTE=Ithon;52386168]anyone know how expensive the servers are? I found a site that sells some of the servers offered on supermico, but I have to contact them to know about the price range.[/QUOTE] It really depends on it being new or used and the hardware in it. If you are going for a real server (I mean server cpu, ecc ram etc) then you're looking at somewhere around 800-1500$ for an entry-level supermicro server. Each of our IBM Servers at work cost somewhere around 5-7k$.

That infinity fabric was a genius design. 4 basically ryzen 7s in 1 epyc CPU all interconnected nearly flawlessly (it's not perfect of course). and they even have infinity fabric between two sockets. so 32 cores, 64 threads (edit: 64 cores 128 threads for two sockets!) all connected together extremely well. AMD really played to their strengths here, they developed this modular system while intel literally has to make whole dies to get more cores. bigger dies = more expensive and more chance for manufacturing failure.

[QUOTE=CruelAddict;52385585]Wonder what the fuck would you want to do with 64 cores in a single machine, apart from datamining/heavy calculative purposes?[/QUOTE] Being able to keep VS, discord, IDA, etc. running in the background wile gaming and recording.

[QUOTE=Megalan;52385657]I think this is due to CPU-based servers/compute nodes being more space/heat efficient when you need thousands of them in renderfarm.[/QUOTE] Not neccesarily. If you would compare price/operations/second a gpu farm would outweigh a cpu farm. Gpu's are extremely good at bulk operations, the problem is that the operations required for rendering a video are waaay more complicated compared to your average AAA game. Gpu's are fast because they have a (semi) fixed pipeline. Almost all the information needs to be in the gpu memory before it can actually start drawing. This gives a terrible problem: they are very unflexible with memory, which brings a lot of limitations. For example, realistic lighting requires ray tracing (simply said, checking how light bounces in a scene on multiple objects). To do that properly, a gpu would have to know all the geometry of that particular scene, while a cpu could just ask the ssd/hdd to load it into the ram. Most of you probably know that the memory of a gpu isn't that big either, a titanX 'only' having 12 gb. Although computing languages such as openCL and CUDA being more flexible on that department, they are way slower (~100 fold). There are many more reasons why cpu's are used instead of gpu's, but TL;DR Gpu's are not suited for rendering high quality stuff, only low quality on a high framerate (which is not needed since a movie is only rendered once).

so who is going to try playing games on it [sp]and then drop it[/sp]

[QUOTE=Megalan;52385657]Many renderers (including Pixar's RenderMan) are still CPU-only or in experimental stage of GPU support. I think this is due to CPU-based servers/compute nodes being more space/heat efficient when you need thousands of them in renderfarm.[/QUOTE] Honestly I'd say these high core count CPUs are almost directly designed for thin client host machines. They're a godsend for companies moving over to a similar infrastructure.

[QUOTE=CruelAddict;52385585]Wonder what the fuck would you want to do with 64 cores in a single machine, apart from datamining/heavy calculative purposes?[/QUOTE] The days of single-operating-system server machines are pretty long gone, at least for enterprise and high-capacity operations. Everything is about nested virtual machines nowadays, as they are much more flexible, deployable, cheaper, more resilient and more manageable. A special kind of CPU is almost a necessity if you want to deploy a ton of Windows Server operating systems in one physical machine.

I'm extremely happy that AMD's finally back in the server block, but am I the only one who thinks 'Epyc' is a really fucking stupid name for a product aimed towards the professional market?

[QUOTE=Rixxz2;52387057]I'm extremely happy that AMD's finally back in the server block, but am I the only one who thinks 'Epyc' is a really fucking stupid name for a product aimed towards the professional market?[/QUOTE] Well, said professionals don't seem to care too much, big hitters such as Dell, HPE, Supermicro have announced Epyc servers

[QUOTE=Rixxz2;52387057]I'm extremely happy that AMD's finally back in the server block, but am I the only one who thinks 'Epyc' is a really fucking stupid name for a product aimed towards the professional market?[/QUOTE] Honestly Epyc is kind of a stupid name in general. Sounds like something a stereotypical gamer would come up with.

What are the technical limitations of only supporting 2 CPUs on a mobo as opposed to Intel's maximum of 4?

[QUOTE=zombini;52385523]They already have their platinum series Xeon chips that can be put in a quad socket mobo. They've had AMD beat to this at least 3 months ago. The specific chip is the Xeon Platinum 8180 and has 28 cores/56 threads and in quad-CPU configuration has 112 physical cores and 224 threads, plus a shitload of L3 cache and supports the same amount of RAM as this AMD chip. The issue is the price, you'd drop $12,000 on just ONE 8180 chip, so that's $48,000 on just the 4 processors a quad board could use. If the AMD chip could support quad-CPU, it would have the 8180 beat though. At least as far as manufacturer specs go, actual performance could be very different.[/QUOTE] Intel's new platform isn't out yet either, meaning epyc and it will be going head to head, not that Intel beat them there. Also I haven't seen anywhere suggesting that CPU supports quad socket, that's actually a fairly rare feature in Intel's line up.

Since this announcement AMD stocks soared today. I have a few stocks invested, I hope this momentum keeps them going throughout the year. [url]http://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-now-the-time-to-buy-advanced-micro-devices-amd-stock-cm806453?i10c[/url].

Yeah I went back in the black after buying at $13.45 which is really nice.

[QUOTE=Rixxz2;52387057]I'm extremely happy that AMD's finally back in the server block, but am I the only one who thinks 'Epyc' is a really fucking stupid name for a product aimed towards the professional market?[/QUOTE] They have a 12 year old at the office for all of their naming conventions I think

Between Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc I feel like AMD is just awful at naming things.