The days of 2011 is dimming?

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EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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No ATX boards with it yet, but as previously mentioned the X470D4U and X470D4U-2T are Ryzen mobos with IPMI.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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I sure won't be building any servers >32GB (maybe 64GB) that rely on UDIMM that alone makes it a no GO.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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@wildpig1234 with the AMD EPYC 7002P series, Xeon E5 V1/V2 is a very tough sell in my book. Most home labs are (frankly) not CPU bound. You get 8 memory channels/ 16 DIMMs with Rome. You also get 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4 so you can connect a ton of networking/ SAS HBAs/ NVMe SSDs and build a giant system. With the IPC and clock speed increases, the AMD EPYC 7232P at under $480 is faster than dual E5-2620 V1's, and uses less power for the system than the dual Xeons.

DDR3 is still less expensive, but DDR4 is much more reasonable than it was recently.

The real killer is if you look at things like the 7402P. At that point, you have 24 higher-speed cores that mean you can consolidate say three 2P Xeon E5 V1 systems into a single EPYC system. You have to be willing to virtualize and use nested virtualization if you want multiple nodes but you are also getting rid of extra chassis, PSUs, NICs, switch ports and etc. If you look at how many people have cable management posts for their home labs, imagine what happens when 3-6 2P nodes all go into a single chassis.

If you get a Rome platform, you can also start with an inexpensive sub $1K CPU, and then upgrade to Milan. You can use all of the new PCIe Gen4 technology that will come out next year. To me, if it is fairly close between multiple older nodes and a single newer node, the choice is fairly clear.

Later next year Intel will join the core wars with Ice Lake (Cooper is a different animal.)

If you look at the trends over time of core counts, 2019-2020 are going to see massive increases. As we move to multi-chip packages instead of monolithic dies core count increases are going to become more significant than what we saw over the last decade.
 

MortenB

Member
Jul 3, 2017
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Anyone know when the 7nm Epyc 3000 series is due? Would suit me better for a low power homelab, hopefully supporting 10GB NICs and microATX boards for more IO.
 

wildpig1234

Well-Known Member
Aug 22, 2016
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@wildpig1234

If you look at the trends over time of core counts, 2019-2020 are going to see massive increases. As we move to multi-chip packages instead of monolithic dies core count increases are going to become more significant than what we saw over the last decade.
My baseline is dual 2696 v2. so once someone release a cpu that has more multicore and single core performance for significantly lower price, then that would be the new benchmark. Significantly lower price to make up for the ddr4 premium over ddr3
 

zack$

Well-Known Member
Aug 16, 2018
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My baseline is dual 2696 v2. so once someone release a cpu that has more multicore and single core performance for significantly lower price, then that would be the new benchmark. Significantly lower price to make up for the ddr4 premium over ddr3
Agreed.

Let's not forget about those LGA 2011-3 chips that also run on ddr3 and are seeing a steady downward trend in terms of price (as opposed to the v2 chips right now).
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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My baseline is dual 2696 v2. so once someone release a cpu that has more multicore and single core performance for significantly lower price, then that would be the new benchmark. Significantly lower price to make up for the ddr4 premium over ddr3
Just to give you some perspective: this is the ~$450 AMD EPYC 7232P versus a 1P Xeon E5-2696 V2 GIGABYTE R272-Z32-00 vs To be filled by O.E.M. To be filled by O.E.M. - Geekbench Browser

That is the half cache 8C chip. You move to a 16 core 7302P for $825 and a 24 core 7402P for $1250. I see the 7232P as more of a "light the platform" part rather than one you buy for performance.

IPC has gone up a lot as have clock speeds at higher core counts.

Edit - if you want to see the EPYC 7702(P) here is one in a HPE DL325 Gen10 using DDR4-2933 since it is a Gen1 platform HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 vs To be filled by O.E.M. To be filled by O.E.M. - Geekbench Browser
 
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vladimir.mijatovic

New Member
Jan 12, 2019
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@Patrick these (and ryzen 3900x) numbers to me at least look like an anomaly. I've been looking at 2k single core and 20k multicore passmark as "ok, here it gets quite useful". Now all numbers went 50% up and left me wondering why even bother with non-AMD 3000 stuff?!

But I see memory latency of Epyc's is higher to even double on 7702. How does that reflect on ie mySQL performance?

Otherwise epyc seems to be the clear winner in everything else and I think Intel is in a deep, deep hole this time.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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So you can make the EPYC 7002 chips look bad if you have something that is super random avoiding caches.

The flip side is that anything that can hit caches is way better.

Also, memory latency is one side. The EPYC 7002 has more memory bandwidth. Putting more into one socket means less socket to socket communication. Compared to lower core count parts consolidating nodes means less node to node communication and latency.

From what we have been seeing, it is something you can look at and obsess over on a micro level, but in practical application it is less relevant for 99% of folks.
 

vladimir.mijatovic

New Member
Jan 12, 2019
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I doubt I can make Epyc look bad :)
But if I had to try to pose a challenge...

(dislaimer: I am not trying to promote our projects as most of you are not target groups, but I feel real-life examples can add value and some clicks and "animation" to discussions like this)

We run a SaaS service similar to a hybrid of Shopify & Etsy. PHP, mySQL... on a private cloud.
Its major part is invocing, real time VAT register, stock status (in-store and webshop concurrently that also have flash sales options)...
We cache what we can, but many things we can not. At least not without the expense of a much bigger app complexity.

On top of our main service we also develop & host very customized webshops i.e. personalized books for kids https://dreambookstudio.com (like LostMyName) or https://fortnitecover.com - personalized designs for T-Shirt, notebooks etc. where even PDF/JPG's are "just created" and do not even get a chance to get into ARC/L2ARC and Cloudflare CDN as they are often obtained only 1-2 times.

Puppeteer (Chrome headless) is also very important for us and since it runs on Node-JS single core perf. and RAM are very appreciated. Therefor we will probably test Ryzen 3900x before Epyc for that process/node.

So far:
We went for Intel Optane for DB as our DB is still small enough.

Optane also for SLOG & L2ARC also for our CDN (Proxmox ZoL).
We probably will not hesitate to put our next NAS/CDN on Epyc based on STH reviews and comments like
Will AMD Epyc 7351P & Supermicro H11SSL-i do FreeNAS 11?

I assume Epyc would be better than our current setups E5-2690 & E5-2640 v1's and E5-1650v4, but we try to see what is on the market or is coming up, buy couple of pieces that we believe would work for us well and set them up. We do not chase those last 1-10% performance leaders/tweaks/overclocks..., but since AMD has had quite some issues with memory latency with Zen that number stuck out for me.

Is this one of those cases where "Well, you will probably not see significant improvements with Epyc aside from lower power-bill" ?

But I agree that in general Epyc looks like a future proof choice and a very good one regardless what you do. We run couple of tests on our own, but most of time rely on (exceptional) know-how of people like @Patrick , Allyn Malventano, Wendell, some redditers... (LTT not so much anymore, but I liked Patrick's visit there :)
 

anomaly

Active Member
Jan 8, 2018
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On the same boat to substitute a dual 2630v2 system, been hitting issues with the ASUS iKVM recently and I might as well drop the cash for a EPYC based build.

The only showstopper in the past was the DDR4 price hikes. Now it seems to be coming down to sanity.