
AMD EPYC 7000 CPUs: 32 cores, 64 threads, 8 memory channels, 128 PCIe lanes - mrb
http://wccftech.com/amd-epyc-7000-series-server-cpu-family-specifications-price-performance-leak/
======
mrb
The Zen core had a pretty good (but no that _amazing_ ) success in the
consumer market, because although people admired its multi-threaded
performance, they were merely lukewarm about its single-threaded perf which
"just" almost matches Intel. But oh boy, the Zen core in the server market is
going to make a killing. Servers are all about multi-threaded performance
(hence why 80% of the server market is dual socket). And it looks like a
single socket EPYC is beating a dual socket Xeon... ouch. Finally a good kick
in Intel's resting bottom.

~~~
nodesocket
While the raw compute performance numbers of Zen may be better than Intel,
don't underestimate other economic and business factors. AMD has always played
2nd fiddle to Intel and it is hard to shake that perception. I'd love to see a
major cloud provider (AWS, Google, Azure) actively buying AMD chips and making
them available for compute. However, I am still a bit skeptical this is ever
going to happen. There is just too much risk for a cloud provider. Intel holds
market and nearly all mindshare in mainstream cloud computing.

Disclosure: $AMD shareholder

~~~
geezerjay
> AMD has always played 2nd fiddle to Intel and it is hard to shake that
> perception.

I don't know where you got that perception. Perhaps you're a kid fresh out of
highschool and are oblivious to AMD's history, but AMD's Athlon line
outperformed Intel's offering of the time by a wide margin, namely their
Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV and Pentium D lines.

IIRC, Intel only started to become competitive with AMD with the introduction
of their Core 2 line.

~~~
nodesocket
In fact I am not an oblivious "kid fresh out of highschool"... Also, I think
you are confusing performance with business success and sales. AMD may have
had better performing CPUs in the past, but that has not mattered thus far.
$INTC market cap 165 billion. $AMD market cap 10 billion.

~~~
redtuesday
Then you are probably aware that it has not mattered because of Intels shady
tactics. [0][1][2][3] etc.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2009/12/ftc-sues-intel-for-anti-
compet...](https://www.wired.com/2009/12/ftc-sues-intel-for-anti-competitive-
practices/)

[1] [http://www.silicon.co.uk/workspace/dell-pays-65million-to-
se...](http://www.silicon.co.uk/workspace/dell-pays-65million-to-settle-intel-
bribe-probe-8577)

[2] [http://techreport.com/news/8547/does-intel-compiler-
cripple-...](http://techreport.com/news/8547/does-intel-compiler-cripple-amd-
performance)

[3]
[http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49](http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49)

------
myrandomcomment
Well I know what will be in the next stack of servers my company buys (in 20RU
chunks). It's all Linux+Docker for dev & test with some KVM. Right now we use
2xCPU 48 core Intel, 2x1G and 2X10G. 1RU form factor holds two of these
servers. It's all about thread scale out for us. The more containers we can
run per server = faster build and test throughput. Pretty cool AMD. Happy to
have you back.

------
RichardHeart
TLDR: Intel's advantage of being able to clock higher gets removed because of
heat in these high density multi-core chips. 1p 32core $2k. 2p 32core $4k.

"..14% advantage of cores per rack that ship with their Naples platform
compared to Intel’s. On Intel, a singular rack will consist of 4704 cores
while AMD’s Zen based Naples Rack will ship with 5376 cores.

There’s also 14% advantage in VM (Virtual Machines) per socket. Memory
bandwidth sees a 33% advantage as AMD has 8 channels while Intel’s Purley
platform is configured for 6 channels per socket. Intel platform also supports
24 DIMMs while AMD can support up to 32 DIMMs." "release 20th of June."

------
ComputerGuru
I just posted this yesterday about Naples/Epyc already having a huge advantage
over Xeons for certain server workloads due to support for hardware-assisted
SHA calculations: [https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/will-amds-ryzen-finally-
bring...](https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/will-amds-ryzen-finally-bring-sha-
extensions-to-intels-cpus/) , already supported by the Linux kernel and many
open source crypto libraries.

I honestly had no clue this reveal was right around the corner. These numbers
really do give AMD a fighting chance here.

~~~
Scaevolus
I doubt many server workloads have SHA calculations as a significant
bottleneck. Doing SHA256 5x faster (11 cycles/byte to 2 cycles/byte [1]) isn't
_that_ groundbreaking.

[1]: [https://bench.cr.yp.to/results-
hash.html](https://bench.cr.yp.to/results-hash.html)

------
jamesfmilne
Surely these processors introduce another new level of NUMA dynamics? Each
group of 8 cores has its own memory controller, own PCIe root complex, and
then there is a crosslink between each group of 8 cores.

Up until now you would (potentially) have to consider which socket you are on,
and where your memory or IO devices (PCIe) are.

Now you have the same considerations within a socket, as well as between
sockets?

~~~
wmf
Previous Opterons were also MCMs with NUMA within the socket, although their
performance was poor enough that many people probably never noticed they
existed. If Intel makes cluster-on-die mode mandatory then they'll also have
NUMA within the socket.

~~~
sliken
Actually the opterons were pretty competitive for many years, but of course
stalled with the opteron 63xx series. They still scaled better than intel, but
often lost on single thread performance. But if you were looking at
performance per node on parallel tasks they often won by a substantial amount
on price/performance.

However since 2012 (the opteron 63xx announce) AMD dropped the ball. First
they were non-competitive on the dual sockets, and then a year or so later
they were non-competitive on quad sockets.

Not sure why it's taken them 5 years to bring out something newer, but
surprisingly the ryzen/naples/epyc looks surprisingly competitive.

------
smilekzs
Haven't been following this closely, but has the random segfault problem [1]
been addressed? I would imagine this a bigger problem for servers almost
constantly maxing out all cores and threads compared to a desktop/laptop...
Just imagine the horror when you write safe Rust code and get hit hard by
heisenbugs in production...

[1]:
[https://community.amd.com/thread/215773](https://community.amd.com/thread/215773)

~~~
examancer
While the full root cause has not yet been found or resolved the limited
issues have been pretty reliably resolved by disabling ASLR. Whatever the root
cause it is likely the issue can be fixed through BIOS/microcode updates.

The number of people affected are low. My Ryzen machine has only ever run
linux and compiles a lot and has never exhibited this behavior. Also, most new
platforms have issues, even new server platforms. These will be worked through
during substantial validation server OEMs will go through.

Lastly, look up the errata list for any Xeon CPUs. Intel releases microcode
updates for them several times a year to fix bugs. Modern CPUs are complex and
will pretty much always have bugs. Luckily some combination of BIOS or
microcode updates will almost always resolve them.

~~~
dis-sys
I am a Ryzen user, actually built my Ryzen system on its release day. For your
claims on Xeon's bugs, just wondering when was the last time Intel had to
patch the microcode to fix bugs that can continuously crashing day to day
workloads such as compiling some linux packages?

In case you don't fully understand the situation - when Ryzen was released, it
doesn't work with many memory modules on the consumer market, as of today, for
pretty high probability, you still don't get the top speed of RAM you paid
for, it crashes on day to day compilation jobs, the AMD GPIO linux module
maintained/contributed by AMD is too buggy to run on Gigabytes motherboards,
oh, let's don't forget the FMA3 bug.

Downplaying the issues causing troubles for Ryzen users do not get Ryzen
better.

~~~
jmgao
> For your claims on Xeon's bugs, just wondering when was the last time Intel
> had to patch the microcode to fix bugs that can continuously crashing day to
> day workloads such as compiling some linux packages?

Intel had an even worse one in 2014: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=762195](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=762195)

Glibc merged a patch to use Intel's shiny new TSX transactional memory
extensions when available to do hardware lock elision, except TSX was
completely busted, and any time a process used pthread_mutex_lock, there was a
chance that it would immediately crash, or corrupt memory silently. (In
practice, this would happen all the time.)

Their solution was to release microcode that just turned off TSX entirely.

~~~
smilekzs
TSX has been an experimental new feature --- disable it and all is good again,
since there is no production-quality software targeting it. On the other hand,
to me it seems that Ryzen segfault bug cannot be simply eliminated. Disabling
ucode cache _might_ help. Disabling ASLR "pretty reliably" (per grandparent)
resolves it. But I would imagine "pretty reliable", sans official
investigation report from AMD, not reliable enough for those operating server
farms, which jeopardizes the main value proposition of EPYC. By no means am I
bashing AMD's new tech though --- it's just CPUs are so critical that you want
strong guarantees on "from this ucode patch onwards, you won't get hit by this
particular problem, at least 99.9999% of the time".

------
mschuster91
So, this means a 2P system can pack 64C/128T, 256 PCIe lanes and 4 TB RAM?

What a monster. Pack this together with a couple Quadro GPU accelerators and
you got some serious allround performance.

~~~
__jal
I think a 2P system still only gets 128 lanes. But still.

For the more boring among us (like me), swap the GPUs for 24-ish NVMe SSDs and
a few 10G cards, and that is one hell of a DB server...

~~~
gigatexal
DBA here. I like where your head is at.

------
tracker1
If the Zen 2 / Rome series brings down the power/heat a bit, that will
probably be around the time I'm seriously considering another upgrade... my
i7-4790 desktop has been really good to me for a couple years, but within
another 2, may be looking around again. Though, the consumer variant will also
be up for consideration.

Nice to see AMD competing again, knew they would get some ground in the server
space looking at the Zen benchmarks on the consumer CPUs.

~~~
examancer
Kind of curious: How much lower you want them to go on the power/heat metric?
Your current CPU is an 84W TDP part. A Ryzen 7 1700 has twice the number of
cores and draws 65W with stock settings. The 1700 can get hot, but really only
if you overclock it.

Of course more performance per watt is always better and I too hope Zen 2 can
be even better. But right now, in certain scenarios, Ryzen is already leading
in both performance per watt and per dollar.

~~~
berkut
Keep in mind AMD and Intel measure TDP differently - AMD give average for a
particular workflow / scenario, and Intel give absolute maximum, so you can't
compare them apples-to-apples.

~~~
dom0
Intel's TDP is not the absolute maximum, but also a maximum-typical value,
measured differently from AMDs methodology.

------
tonyplee
It looks like this is putting 4 8 cores chips on the same package to scale up
the cores counts, etc.

What are some of the technical limit to if AMD to 2, 4, 8x this approach?

Only power/heat? IO should not be hard since pins on MCM should be able to
scale out easily, right?

~~~
sp332
There's going to be a hit to I/O when one of those modules needs to access RAM
that's on a different module's controller. The new bus seems to be really fast
though, so I'm not sure how many you get have before it's a real problem.

------
GordonS
It's interesting that the EPYC 7601 comes at a _significant_ premium to the
EPYC 7551P - double the price for a 200MHz base clock increase and dual-socket
support. Question for those more knowledgeable on data centres - is the modest
performance gain and increased density worth it for the cost?

~~~
mrb
It depends on so many factors (hosting costs, design/availability of
motherboards/servers, workload easily parallelizable across multiple servers,
etc)

But Intel does the same. The 2-socket
[http://ark.intel.com/products/91768/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-...](http://ark.intel.com/products/91768/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-2697A-v4-40M-Cache-2_60-GHz) is superior in every single aspect
to the 4-socket [https://ark.intel.com/products/93796/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5...](https://ark.intel.com/products/93796/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-4660-v4-40M-Cache-2_20-GHz) but yet the 4-socket CPU is priced
1.6× higher...

~~~
GordonS
> The 2-socket... is superior in every single aspect to the 4-socket...

Except density :) If both Intel and AMD do this, then I guess data centre
admins do see the increase in density as worth the extra cost.

Does this increase in density have yet more additional cost implications in
terms of cooling?

~~~
dom0
8S and 4S servers (or even bigger systems) have always been extremely
expensive; 2S has been the norm for many years. Being able to stuff two 2S
nodes in 1U pretty much negates the density advantage of a 4S system, without
the quadratic increase in price that a scaled-up systems have. (Also, density
is usually limited by power dissipation, so the lowered power efficiency of
bigger systems becomes an additional con there.)

------
gigatexal
This site is a rumor mill. So add some grain of salt.

~~~
shaklee3
Videocardz (the source) has been right far more often than not. Still a rumor,
but credible.

------
ksec
I have been wondering how PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 will play out for AMD. Since
changes of PCIe and DDR requires a changes of Socket.

For AMD there is no PCIe 4.0 chip in 2018. And PCie 5.0 is already out in
2019.

~~~
dom0
> Since changes of PCIe requires a changes of Socket.

No

> Since changes of DDR requires a changes of Socket.

Not necessarily, but usually done so.

------
newman314
Does anyone know if there is ARK equivalent for AMD? I would be interested in
such a dataset for comparing against Intel.

~~~
redtuesday
Kind of, but not as good/detailed [0]

[0] [http://products.amd.com/de-de](http://products.amd.com/de-de)

