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AMD Intel Software Hardware Technology

AMD Offers Full Details and Performance of Zen-Based Naples Server Platform (hothardware.com) 138

MojoKid writes: AMD lifted the veil this morning on architecture details and performance expectations of its next generation Zen-based server platform, codenamed Naples. Naples is an up to 32-core, 64-thread variant of Zen, targeted at enterprise and data center applications. The processors will feature eight-channel DDR4 memory controllers (with up to 16 DIMMs attached per CPU), with support for up to 4TB of memory and 128 lanes of on-chip PCI Express connectivity. In a 2P (dual processor/dual socket) configuration, Naples offers up to 64 physical cores (128 threads), access to 32 DIMM slots, and aggregate 16 memory channels. Versus a 2P Intel Xeon E5-2699A V4 based server, the 2P Naples setup ends up with double the memory channels, a higher total memory capacity, more cores (20 more physical cores, 40 more threads), and 48 more available PCI Express lanes. AMD's performance comparisons at its tech day event pit a 2P Naples server with 512GB of DDR4 RAM up against a 2P Intel Xeon E4-2699A V4 configuration with 384GB of RAM. The Naples system had a higher memory capacity and that memory was clocked much higher too -- 2400MHz versus 1866MHz. The Naples system has more cores, and with SMT on, can ultimately process more threads as a result. The AMD Naples system also has double the memory channels, further improving peak memory bandwidth. In its demos, AMD used a seismic analysis workload, which involved multiple iterations of 3D wave equations. According to AMD, the test taxes the entire system, including CPU cores, memory and I/O. In this demo, the AMD server system completed equations roughly 2.5x faster than the dual-socket Intel Xeon server. Expected price points weren't given, but Naples processors and servers should be available in Q2 this year.
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AMD Offers Full Details and Performance of Zen-Based Naples Server Platform

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  • I'm going to go ahead and guess that yes, this can run Crysis?
  • The article states you can run dual sockets, but will this be supported in quad sockets (provided someone makes a board to support it), or are you also limited by the way it used PCI Express lanes?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Fun fact: Quad sockets are SUPER-RARE.

      Go ahead. Try and Google for a quad motherboard. They haven't made them since like... the Athlon 64-era Opterons. The boards are MASSIVE. You can't fit 128 DRAM slots on a single board. (And who wants to BUY that many?) There's too many traces and the board becomes super expensive from the extra routing layers. The board is also going to flex under any kind of weight, and the larger the footprint the more important the mounting becomes (going from casual "bolt it to the

      • Fun fact: Quad sockets are SUPER-RARE.

        Go ahead. Try and Google for a quad motherboard. They haven't made them since like... the Athlon 64-era Opterons.

        Really? You should tell all the people that are making quad socket servers today.

        Maybe you should try following your own advice.

        • Re: Quad Sockets: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by tigersha ( 151319 )

          Still rare, still expensive, still fragile, still hard to service and upgrade, still not worth it except for some edge cases.

          Quad (and octa) core servers are the moon rockets of IT. Yes, they do exist. No they are not common. Only for very, very special missions.

          He said 'rare' not 'nonexistent'

          • OP specifically said quad socket motherboards hadn't been made since the Athlon 64 era (10+ years ago). I provided two examples of current generation quad socket servers that are on sale today.

            Sure, Google and Facebook probably don't run quad socket servers (they're not built for that kind of thing), but your bank probably does.

          • Still rare, still expensive, still fragile, still hard to service and upgrade, still not worth it except for some edge cases.

            I bought a bunch about 6 years ago (not the 10 the OP claimed). They were quad socket Opterons with a quarter terabyte of RAM. Rarer than 2P, but available from a well known manufacturer (SuperMicro) via vendors already on our systems. Not rare. They weren't expensive either, well, not in terms of bang for buck doubly so considering the space taken up (they're about double the density

            • Knock yourself out:
              http://www.thinkmate.com/syste... [thinkmate.com]

              Got one of their dual Opteron 16-core (2.8ghz) machines right now, the performance is ~20% better than our dual 8-core (16 thread) Intel machine for our workloads. I'm dying to grab a 64 core machine that can handle 128 threads. 2x that? It would be awesome if we could afford it.

              Sam

          • by cdrudge ( 68377 )

            Quad (and octa) core servers are the moon rockets of IT. Yes, they do exist. No they are not common. Only for very, very special missions.

            Cores or sockets? If you actually mean cores just about every Xeon processor made this decade is quad core or better. Most i5 and i7s are quad or better as well. On the AMD side has there been a model this decade that's not quad core or better?

            He said 'rare' not 'nonexistent'

            He actually said "SUPER-RARE". Having boards/servers readily available from Dell, Supermicro, HP,

        • HP DL370 - industry standard 2S Xeon socket server
          HP DL570 - industry standard 4S Xeon socket server

          Sure, getting hold of a mass produced 4S motherboard is difficult, and these 4S servers aren't cheap but if you are intending on buying $20k of processors to run on it, the difficulties can also be solved by throwing money at the problem.

      • wow better tell the guys where I work that at least 400 of our HP servers are Super Rare!
      • IIRC, one reason behind the invention of integrated circuits was the constant unreliability of interconnects. Imagine all the wiring in a room-sized computer made of vacuum tubes or discrete transistors; to replace it all with a single block of silicon would make a technician's life a lot easier. So with multi-socket mobos it's the same problem all over again, with the same solution.
      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        The biggest cost is being hit with per core licensing, I'd love to throw more hardware at our system if it'd stay constant. But a doubling in cores deals a doubling in license costs and rarely a doubling in real world performance so unless you really need it all in one package.... no.

        • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          That all depends on what software you're running, only certain things are licensed per core... Some things are licensed per socket, while a lot of licenses are per machine or entirely unrestricted.

  • now a 1s system with 16 core 32 threads with 64 lanes + more for storage? is better then what Intel has can make for a killer 3-4 way SLI system with room for 10-GIG-e more then 1 pci-e storage disk / etc.

  • The mac pro should move the this give it the lanes needed for 2 storage cards + 2 video cards + 6-10 TB 3 buses + dual 10 GIG-E.

    • While we're dreaming, I'd ask for a Mac Pro in a standard tower chassis that can handle standard PCIe cards. And a pony. But instead we'll keep using Linux boxes.

  • just has to get these and rent some cheap AMD boxes. I'll take one to run my Xonotic server...

  • It runs slow for games.Everyone knows at 800 X 600 resolution gaming is the most important thing when evaluating a CPU.

  • by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Wednesday March 08, 2017 @12:04AM (#53997731)

    The Xeon line has been pretty lame for the last couple of years. It's nice to see some competition.

    • by Khyber ( 864651 )

      The Xeon line has been gimped forever. Can't do a 2S 4GPU config. Memory architecture limitations makes it impossible. AMD, OTOH, could handle it no problem.

      • Not perfectly comparable, but I had (still have, but reconfigured) a dual Xeon E5 machine with 3 GPUs in it; admittedly they were not being used for graphics, and were individually dual GPU cards. Never seemed to have any difficulties (aside from the insane amount of heat it put out). Enabling/disabling NUMA did not seem to have any noticeable impact on the performance.
  • by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Wednesday March 08, 2017 @12:15AM (#53997777) Homepage

    Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these processors!

  • Anyone?

  • I think AMD have really done a good job here. They release their 1800X, 1700X and 1700 to prove their IPC, power consumption and multithread performance improvements so that the server OEMs have already seen the architecture potential in a consumer marketplace.
  • A proper comparison would be between AMD's 2017 cpu Naples against Intel's 2017 cpu E5 V5 not 2016 E5 V4, as is done here.

  • Based off of what we saw in the Ryzen benchmarks, the new Zen CPU architecture is really good at handling multi-threaded workloads. That doesn't help Joe Sixpack much when he's surfing the web or playing Call Of Duty, but it will help with highly threaded server applications like Java application servers and databases.

    Maybe AMD should have done the server CPU's first and then did the desktop models. There is probably more profit margin in the Enterprise market anyway.

    • by Hydrian ( 183536 )

      The problem is that AMD never had great adoption in the enterprise market. Before dropping out of the performance market, AMD's enterprise offerings were slim. While the Opteron CPUs (x86_64) were considered decent and worth their money at the time, the bigger issues were the motherboard and chipsets. They had a couple of bad server chipset releases and the number of compatible and available motherboards decreased. This maked it hard to find servers that used AMD server CPUs. This lead to poor adoption rate

      • AFAIK they did ok with the K8 servers and their derivatives. The issue is they released the high power consumption K10 processors around the time server people started taking notice about power consumption. Other than some HPC applications like supercomputers the K10 it wasn't that popular and eventually not even there.

  • So let me get this straight, in order to show competing platforms they put it up against a 22 core E5-2699A but then hobbled the Xeon with both LESS RAM and SLOWER RAM? Um... that's not really a very fair comparison now, is it?

    Don't get me wrong, I like AMD as much as the next guy and I am very interested in probably making my next home-server build a Ryzen with ECC... but at least compete on a level playing field. The E5-2699A supports DDR4-2400 as well but instead they decided to hobble it with DDR4-1866?

  • There are moments when I understand what other people are griping about.

    AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2 [anandtech.com]

    Launching an enterprise product that gains even a few points of market share from the very large blue incumbent can implement billions of dollars to the bottom line, as well as provided some innovation as there are now two big players '''on the field.

    Sad, Ian, sad.

    While not specifically mentioned in the announcement today, we do know that Naples is not a single monolit

    • No. It's four chips, with 8-cores per chip (i.e. 16 threads per chip), per processor. I assume they're going to use a multi-chip module for that. The thing with multi-chip modules is that you can use a lot faster interconnect than you would otherwise because of the smaller traces and more specialized packaging.

  • "The processors will feature eight-channel DDR4 memory controllers (with up to 16 DIMMs attached per CPU), with support for up to 4TB of memory and 128 lanes of on-chip PCI Express connectivity."

    Meanwhile, Ryzen on the Desktop has a shitty 16 lanes of PCI-E with an additional 8 possible with the mobo manufacturer adding another bridge. Meanwhile, my FX-9350 has over 30 lanes of PCI-E connectivity, for SLI, multiple M.2 drives, and multiple USB connectivity ports and dual gigabit ethernet.

    Ryzen is gimped so

  • It is long overdue that Intel got some real competition.
    Their CPUs are way overpriced. Note their 2016 company profits hit $7.5B on $17.5B revenue! REALLY?!

    AMD has priced Ryzen, their answer to the i7, at less than half the price with higher performance.
    This surely shows that Intel is likely gouging the market; which is unethical monopolistic antitrust behavior.

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