
7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K) - areejs
https://www.techquila.co.in/7nm-amd-epyc-rome-cpu-64/
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rolleiflex
I do have an AMD Hackintosh, I don't see any reason you wouldn't be able to
use these as a dev Hackintosh machine. It's gorgeously fast with my Ryzen
2700x, eats compilation time like no one's business and it's stable. And it's
something around 1/4th the price of the same horsepower from native Intel
Macs. I can't imagine the cost delta of a EPYC Rome Hackintosh to its Intel
counterpart.

It's not like I cheaped out either, I have the same cheese-grater like
anodised dark grey aluminium case with impeccable internal structure for easy
upgrades. (Link to case:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcNsHS2U8RM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcNsHS2U8RM))

~~~
leemailll
How about those adobe applications? I heard that PS, Pr, or Ai need special
patch to run on amd machines

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rolleiflex
I'm actually a designer, but I stopped using Adobe a very long time ago for
unrelated reasons — when they switched to the subscription model. For that
reason I didn't even try to run them.

I do realise that might be an untenable position for someone in Hollywood
since FCPX is not a match for Premiere / After Effects at that level, however,
there are plenty of other things that do the job of Photoshop and Illustrator,
and they are not _alternatives_ , Sketch is genuinely vastly better than
Illustrator, and for Photoshop, there have been quite a few alternatives that
the whole class of image manipulation apps got commoditised.

~~~
leemailll
I still will use adobe apps and the main reason is my university offer them
for free. But I agree adobe’s subscription is an overkill for personal use

~~~
rolleiflex
That's Adobe's way of getting you hooked. It was the same for me at my
college. It took me a long time to port my muscle memory to Sketch.

If I had an advice to give to my college self, I would advise not even
starting with Adobe: if you're a designer and use their tools, the tools you
need to make money with isn't even available for sale, you can only rent. So
you might end up in a place where Adobe jacks up the price of Creative Suite
by 10-100x per month after becoming dominant like Oracle, and you would have
to pay your dues to their feudal fiefdom just to be able to continue your
profession - else you'll starve. Not a great place to be for anyone.

~~~
dijit
FWIW that’s exactly why Microsoft office and windows is so prolific, it’s what
people know from school so it’s not even a conversation on switching.

Even if Microsoft is gauging companies with licenses.

~~~
mrep
And exactly why Google responded with chromebooks and free gsuite for
education.

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piinbinary
I'm curious why they aren't charging more for it. Wouldn't that be free profit
margin?

Or perhaps they are trying to hurt Intel by selling it at a price where Intel
can't make a profit if they lower their prices to be competitive?

Or, maybe it has to do with trying to quickly grab market share. Maybe AWS and
other purchases of servers have a somewhat fixed budget, so cheaper chips
translates directly to more chips sold?

Both those explanations seem unlikely to me.

~~~
tmd83
Only AMD execs truly knows but I think there might be two factors involved.
They really want to attract new customers and build echo system and the second
part is hard when everyone has been buying almost entirely intel. The second
is their cost for such a cheap should be enormously cheaper than intel because
of chiplet design. A single chip die for the intel chip is way bigger and
yield and cost dramatically increases as die size gets bigger from what I
read. So at same profit margin AMD chips would be cheaper and to gain the
market share they are probably willing to lower their profit too so those two
element adds up.

~~~
metildaa
Note that this chip cost increase is due to silicon defects, a larger chip has
more defects, thus your failure rate significantly increases with each
increase in chip area.

AMD is working around this by using 8 separate CPU chips, wired together with
one interconnect chip.

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reitzensteinm
Note that the 1P variant costs only $4,955, or under $80 per core. The
consumer chips cost roughly $50/core, making this the flattest ramp I can
personally remember.

~~~
ksec
That is the brilliance of Chiplet strategy. Those 74nm 7nm Die are extremely
cost effective. ( For reference they are even smaller than the SoC used in
iPhone ) The 14nm I/O die ( 400mm2 ) seems to be most expensive part. I wonder
what cost improvement could be done in that area.

And Note: That 5K CPU has 256 _MB_ of L3 Cache. May be I could Run the OS not
in RAM, but in Cache.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Note regarding Note: It actually has 16*16MB cache. The L3 is split into 16MB
segments per CCX, and organized as a victim cache taking lines evicted from
the 4 local L2 caches. That is, a single core cannot ever write to more than
16.5MB of cache.

So there's not really any way to run system out of only cache, outside the
tiny examples of early boot where all CPUs do this.

~~~
ksec
Thanks. Didn't come to my mind when I was writing that. So I stand corrected.

I wonder if one day we put even more cache in the I/O Die. Or even Stacked
DRAM directly on top of it.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
There have been a few Intel processors with "L4 cache" (meant to be used as
iGPU memory, and only if unused work as L4 cache) as listed here [0].
Broadwell was the only generation to have desktop processors with the eDRAM
chip sitting by the side of the processor. Now it's only on a few higher end
ultrabook processors [1, 2] -- look for those listed with L4 cache.

[0]
[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/broadw...](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/broadwell_\(client\)#Memory_Hierarchy)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Mo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_\(microarchitecture\)#Mobile_processors)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake#Mobile_processors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake#Mobile_processors)

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themgt
Back in the early 2000s Apple was getting crushed because Moto/IBM's PowerPC
couldn't keep up with the 880lb gorilla Intel. Who could have predicted even a
few years ago Apple would wind up in a similar situation, yet this time for
having bet on Intel?

Could the 8 core Mac Pro have been $3650 with a $650 Rome CPU, vs. the reality
of $6k with a $3k Xeon?

~~~
leemailll
I suspect apple will release comps with amd cpus, but hackintosh with amd is
already good to go

~~~
ulzeraj
They are stuck with intel because of thunderbolt.

~~~
leemailll
actually Asrock release X570 for ryzen2 with PCIE4 and thunderbolt 3
([https://www.anandtech.com/show/14455/asrock-x570-aqua-
heavie...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14455/asrock-x570-aqua-heaviest-
flagship-motherboard-ever-with-thunderbolt)).

~~~
ulzeraj
Now that’s some great news. I want an AMD Apple system now.

~~~
leemailll
The downside is the motherboard is pretty expensive. And I don’t think many
people would buy a motherboard more expensive than the cpu on board. ASRock
might offer a few more X570 mb with tb3, but I haven’t checked

~~~
jsty
If it's baked into an iMac / Mac Pro, what proportion of the potential market
are actually going to delve that deeply into the components? I'd wager
probably single digit %.

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xvf22
Finding mainstream vendor offerings has been a bit more difficult with AMD. We
recently bought 2 E-2146G servers from Dell (preferred vendor at the org.)
because anything AMD was only offered as a 2 processor server which was
overkill for the application. I would have gladly purchased AMD based servers
instead if they were priced closely.

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kjTAB
I don't believe 64 core, 3.35GHz at 200 Watt. Previous numbers for 64 core
were around 2.2GHz.

Looks like clickbait to me.

~~~
huntie
3.35GHz is max boost frequency, they don't list the base clock speed. Last gen
was 2.7-3.2 for the high-end chip.

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gigatexal
If you need AVX/AVX2/AVX512 then go intel. Otherwise this AMD chip would be my
choice for most applications.

~~~
eisa01
What software is typically able to take advantage of these instructions?

My use case is solving large LP/MIP problems for power markets, do those
algorithms benefit?

~~~
namibj
Depends on the structure of your problem. Some lend themselves well to
vectorization, others not nearly as much. Or at least the needed vectorized
solvers are not yet available for some problem structures.

Try to use perf-tools to determine how you're currently using these execution
units, and then you can look how much it might help. Rule of thumb: double the
bitwidth of vector instructions gets you 80% more speed, instead of the
theoretical 100%.

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dis-sys
For those who might be interested for a cheaper alternative -

Intel Xeon 8280 QS is $1,800 USD each, a pair of those (56 cores) on a
supermicro mb with 12 x 16G RAM is about $5k USD. It has an impressive
Cinebench R15 score of 7,800+

~~~
fabian2k
Where do you get the $1,800 price? Intel says the recommended price is around
$10,000:

[https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/192478/...](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/192478/intel-
xeon-platinum-8280-processor-38-5m-cache-2-70-ghz.html)

~~~
chx
OP said "QS" these are grey market chips, QS means Qualification Sample, Intel
sends them to various manufacturers to test with motherboards and then they
leak into the grey market. They are not retail so frequency and other
characteristics might differ -- but even their stability might not be as high
as a retail one. Although QS is usually better at this, it's ES (Engineering
Sample) which can be very dicey.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Black market, not grey market. QS are loaned on terms that explicitly prohibit
resale. If you buy them, you are purchasing stolen goods.

~~~
FireBeyond
No, you are not.

You voiding your contract with Intel does not make me a criminal. At best this
is a civil tort.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Now that you know that they are all property of Intel, yes it does.

Trafficking in stolen property is illegal in all 50 states, although the
severity and specifics vary. If you buy them across state lines, 18 U.S. Code
§ 2315 also applies, making it a federal crime.

And taking and selling the QS/ES chips is not "voiding your contract". It is
theft, and given the value of the chips, would qualify as a felony.

