AMD Unveils 'EPYC' Server CPUs, Ryzen Mobile, Threadripper CPU and Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPU (hothardware.com) 76
MojoKid writes: Today, at its financial analyst day, AMD lifted the veil on a number of new products based on the company's Zen CPU architecture and next generation Vega GPU architecture. AMD CEO Lisa Su lifted a very large server chip in the air that the company now has branded EPYC. AMD is going for the jugular when it comes to comparisons with Intel's Xeon family, providing up to 128 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, which Su says "allows you to connect more GPUs directly to the CPU than any other solution in the industry." EPYC currently scales to 32 cores/64 threads per socket and supports up to 8-channel DDR4 memory (16 DIMMs per CPU, up to 4TB total memory support). AMD also confirmed the previously rumored Threadripper CPU, a 16-core/32-thread beast of a chip for the enthusiast desktop PC space. AMD's Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Radeon Technologies Group, also unveiled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a workstation and pro graphics card targeted at VR content creation, visualization and machine learning. Radeon Vega Frontier Edition offers 13 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, 25 TFLOPS of FP16 performance and is powered by 64 computer units and 16GB of HMB2 memory for about 480GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The cards are expected to ship in June but there was no word just yet on when consumer versions of Vega will hit. Finally, AMD also shared info on Ryzen Mobile, which will incorporate both the Zen CPU architecture and an integrated Vega GPU core. Compared to AMD's 7th generation APUs, AMD claims Ryzen Mobile will up CPU performance by 50 percent while offering 40 percent better graphics performance. AMD also claimed those gains will not come at the expense of battery life, with a 50 percent reduction in power consumption, which reportedly will pave the way for faster, longer lasting premium notebooks and 2-in-1 devices.
As long as you can turn... (Score:1)
...all of these security holes off, it's all good
I hope (Score:5, Funny)
it's not an epyc fayl.
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It's an answer to Intel's EPIC end of life. (EPIC was one of the acronyms used to describe Itanium's instruction set).
And yes, Itanic is an EPIC fail, literally.
it had to be done (Score:5, Funny)
http://totally.mofo.sexy/mofo/... [mofo.sexy]
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That is an epic fail. All I get back when I try to load that PNG is nothing.
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sure is, its my xonotic game server box
MoFo with a shutgun
MoFo running with rifles
MoFo gear grinder
MoFo gun fu hustle
Core Wars (Score:3, Insightful)
Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.
I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.
Re:Core Wars (Score:5, Informative)
don't run windows on bare metal and hyper-v sucks (Score:2)
don't run windows on bare metal and hyper-v sucks.
Why does your backup system need to run bare metal windows?
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If you need large amounts of memory, depending on how the lower-end Ryzen 9 are priced, getting one of them may actually work out cheaper. With the 8 core Ryzen 7 chip you're stuck with 4 DIMM slots due to being only dual channel as opposed to the Ryzen 9 that supports quad-channel configurations. For a fixed amount of RAM you can therefore get away with buying cheaper lower capacity modules. Of course the price of the motherboard is likely going to be higher for the Ryzen 9, so that has to be factored in t
Re:Core Wars (Score:4, Informative)
Then you need to listen to different people. Virtualization for example, needs as much cores as you can get. Transcoding media streams would be another example.
12 Core (2x due to HT) and the four sockets isn't unheard of.
I've seen servers like that basically running each core at 100% 24/7.
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Intel's higher-end Xeons can have as many as 22 cores (E5-2699 Broadwell) with 44 threads per socket. All they cost is money.
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Re: Core Wars (Score:2)
Not necessarily. I know this not for production but I just assembled a dual 14 core machine with 128 GB of DDR4 ECC for about 1100 $. That would be a 56 thread machine. Dead quiet too. Done parts off EBay some BWare but it makes a killer workstation
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Was the RAM from eBay as well? I just built a dual xeon (e5-26xx v4) and putting in 128GB of DDR4 ECC ram alone would have been over $1k.
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I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.
A "server" might only require 4 cores, but nowadays most of them run on hypervisor which runs on top of a cluster of multiple 32 - 80 cores boxes. So yeah, definitely not niche.
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I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.
Bullshit, such a huge portion of hardware now runs a virtualisation layer and that makes use of whatever you can throw at it.
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I guess the definition of server is important here. For example. I don't think there is any hardware left in our VMWare clusters at work with only 4 cores.
On the other hand I don't think there are more than a two or three database server VMs that have more than 4 virtual cores. Most VMs have two or four cores, even Exchange.
So if server is a logical host, than I bet the GPP is correct most have only 4 cores or fewer. If server means the metal and glass, not so much
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Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.
I'm quite sure the "enthusiast" line of CPUs only exists because all the work is pretty much done for servers. Even paired with extreme high-end graphics cards it's completely unnecessary and people who do the kind of photo / video / rendering / simulation work that can saturate 8+ cores are more prosumers than consumers. But it's a lot better for AMD to offer good value for some than to offer poor value for everyone and it's easier to justify buying something good you might not strictly need. I bought an 1
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Also most programmers are finally dragging themselves into the 1990s and becoming capable of writing stuff for more than one core. We are finally getting to the point where single core speed versus price is no longer what people are looking for in a home PC.
For tiny virtual
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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well sandbox games with lots and lots of NPCs are one of the few consumer work loads that simply can't get enough threads and really enjoy hardware with full cores and shared memory.
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It will be interesting to see what motherboards area available for this socket. Hopefully some workstation/gamer oriented ones.
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It seems nice to do kernel compiles or any other compilation of large applications. So it could be nice if you are a developer.
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People are doing more home editing of family videos, most people won't have 800 dollar gpu's for hardware encoding.
So low end cpu's with lots of cores are needed.
For high end, nobody wants to spend 3-5k on a high core cpu, then 2x for a server. CPUs are too expensive right now because Intel has the monopoly.
Most my servers run around 8 to 12 core as blades, around 6 core for 1U to keep costs down. Both are 2 sockets.
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> I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.
????
Maybe if this was 1999 that would be true. For certain server tasks threading between more than a few cores isn't that important. However the server world has largely shifted to virtualization and in virtualization every core you can get your hands on is better. My builds for basic ESX servers at our datacenter for low intensity VMs are a pair of 6 core 12 thread CPUs loaded wit
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If you think I want to pay $1600 for a Xeon, plus the surplus of price for the motherboard and half the other components, you're insane.
There has ALWAYS been a market for high-end "prosumer" products. We might as well be saying "Nobody would ever want $600 a 4K camcorder. A PROFESSIONAL will buy a $30,000 one."
I can say it (Score:1)
THIS is a game changer
Nice to see AMD coming good again (Score:2)
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Do we have any independent evidence that this new architecture is any good or just AMDs marketing?
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It also means that as a home user you can develop for one of these server architectures on your own workstation and expect it to run pretty much the same way on the server. Seems nice to me.
gamers / enthusiasts cpus are workstions / serv (Score:2)
gamers / enthusiasts cpus are really based workstations / servers needs.
Even on the desktop AMD was good to add pci-e for storage and USB 3.1 to cpu die vs putting that on the DMI bus. The 16 for video is a little bit to much for 1 card other then maybe an very high end one. And spitting that to X8 X8 for dual GPU works.
Intel's Skylake-X with lower pci-e on some cpu's on boards setup for the full pci-e lane count is just raping you and it stated when AMD as not doing so good!
and Kaby Lake-X with dual channe
Boggled and Blown (Score:2)
Four (4) terabytes of RAM, ohhhhhh...I need a nap now.
Also consider the thread count as you nap (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
More PCI-E then intel! it makes Kaby Lake-X joke (Score:2)
More PCI-E then intel! with and quad channel for all cpus it makes Kaby Lake-X look like an sad joke.
Intel is likely stuck dumping Kaby Lake-X and maybe the lower end Kaby Lake-X with limited pci-e.
Re: More PCI-E then intel! it makes Kaby Lake-X jo (Score:1)
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Yes, they call it the PSP. Platform Security Processor, I believe. I think there's some ARM core at it's... core.
The recently committed to taking a serious look at the calls for them to either offer a way to verifiably disable it or to open source it. This was before the AMT fiasco hit, so I imagine they're motivated to actually do so to capitalize on the matter (assuming they are actually free to do so).
AMD needs an imaginative proofreader (Score:2)
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Yes, you are correct. All you need to do is throw out all language convention and then it will become 3dripper.
You should get a medal for participation.
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Therapist or the rapist. You decide.
I'll take The Rapists for $200! (Score:2)
I'll take The Rapists for $200!
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Analrapist?
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intel has taken the Gold and Platinum medal for na (Score:2)
intel has taken the Gold and Platinum medal for nameing new cpus.
Not enough PCI-E in consumer Threadripper (Score:2)
Sorry, I want to be able to actually saturate all three of my GPUs while still having enough PCI-E lanes for my M.2 drives and have some room left for expansion (additional USB 3.0 add-on cards, etc.)
80 lanes minimum, please.
Competition is great . . . for us. (Score:2)
The non-typical* consumer may not need it today, but a processor like this is good for many years. Especially since the only thing really pushing hardware in the non-server department these days is VR. ( As long as Zenimax doesn't destroy everything with litigation greed )
Give me a motherboard where I can put two ( or more ) of these into play and things will really get interesting.
*non-typical = your 3D artists, gamers, video production and the like.
While watching Adobe Premiere Pro chew on resizing hal