What Epyc hardware equals Threadripper 2 Generation?

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eduncan911

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My mental capacity is at its limit knowing Xeon E5 V1-V4 and ThreadRipper 1-3 + Pro, X58, X79x X99 Intel's, etc.

I have no clue what Epycs are what. LOL I do know they have 8 channel memory over 4 channel of the Threadripper.

Basically, I'm about to post up a WTT thread for some new 2950X and would like to know what is around the $500-700 range for Epycs, with a motherboard around the $300 mark.

Is dual low-core count Epycs cheaper than one large core Epyc? I see some single CPU mobos for Epyc as well.
 

uldise

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Jul 2, 2020
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Is dual low-core count Epycs cheaper than one large core Epyc?
it depends on how much Cores do you want and for what purpose - less cores but higher single core performance or much more cores but no that fast each one.. so, what will be your use-case for a planned server?
 

bayleyw

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A retail 7551 is $400-600, for strictly server uses it is better than a 2950X (twice the cores, RDIMM support, octal channel). Unfortunately, it doesn't really have turbo, and a 3GHz Zen1 with <Haswell IPC gives you the single-threaded performance of a laptop from 2011. The 2950X pushes hard and gives you one good core, but it only supports 2DPC UDIMMs which may be problematic depending on your habits.

I'd go with the Epyc for virtualization since you are less likely to be sufficiently idle on a VM host to really take advantage of the one good core on a 2950X. Right now, I would not buy a 2950X except in very specialized situations, the 2950X performs like a V4 Xeon, costs more, and suffers from pathological performance anomalies. A 2690V4 will get you close in both single-thread and multi-threaded performance for half the money, with good PCIe lanes and RDIMM support.
 
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eduncan911

The New James Dean
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1st gen = threadripper 1000 series
1st gen+ = threadripper 2000 series
2nd gen zen = threadripper 3000 series

7001 seies = 1st gen zen
7002 series = 2nd gen zen
7003 series = 3rd gen zen
:D
Thanks for this! It's exactly what I was looking for.

it depends on how much Cores do you want and for what purpose - less cores but higher single core performance or much more cores but no that fast each one.. so, what will be your use-case for a planned server?
It will replace my main server (which currently has an E5-2660 V3 ES 12C/24T) w/18 HDD/SSDs, running Proxmox w/about 13 containers and VMs, k8s, Ceph, etc. So, more than a quad core. ;)

A retail 7551 is $400-600, for strictly server uses it is better than a 2950X (twice the cores, RDIMM support, octal channel). Unfortunately, it doesn't really have turbo, and a 3GHz Zen1 with <Haswell IPC gives you the single-threaded performance of a laptop from 2011. The 2950X pushes hard and gives you one good core, but it only supports 2DPC UDIMMs which may be problematic depending on your habits.

I'd go with the Epyc for virtualization since you are less likely to be sufficiently idle on a VM host to really take advantage of the one good core on a 2950X. Right now, I would not buy a 2950X except in very specialized situations, the 2950X performs like a V4 Xeon, costs more, and suffers from pathological performance anomalies. A 2690V4 will get you close in both single-thread and multi-threaded performance for half the money, with good PCIe lanes and RDIMM support.
A bit of a performance penalty I may accept. Because I want to switch to 100% AMD on the server side, even at a higher cost. I have several E5 V1, V2, V3, and V4s and know their performance well. E5-2670 V2s are the sweet spot for me in price-vs-performance (10 cores @ 2.5Ghz w/22nm) and you can get them usually around $80/pair if you make enough offers, plus an $200 mobo and there ya go. However, I have $1000 in an X399 and Threadripper CPU (plus mem) that I could trade for an Epyc.

I'm just wondering if the prices of Epycs, even Gen 1 7001, has come down enough to warrant a switch. It's why I bought the Asrock X399 and 2950Xs to begin with, to switch over to AMD. And I would be if I could find an Asrock Rack X399D8A-2T at a reasonable price!!! (It's a Threadripper server mobo with IPMI).

Thing is, I have 64GB of UDIMM ECC. That's right, Unbuffered ECC - not Registered ECC (RDIMM). The ThreadRipper 2 takes UDIMM ECC in the Asrock Tachi X399 motherboard.

That's a good point you hit on though: I was wondering if Epycs took the same Unbuffered ECC ram as the Threadripper, or more "normal" RDIMM ECC like the Xeons. If they take just RDIMM, well hell I guess I have to trade the ram off as well.
 
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uldise

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I was wondering if Epycs took the same Unbuffered ECC ram as the Threadripper, or more "normal" RDIMM ECC like the Xeons. If they take just RDIMM, well hell I guess I have to trade the ram off as well.
as far as i know - Epyc's uses RDIMM only..
 
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Chozo4

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as far as i know - Epyc's uses RDIMM only..
Can confirm - EPYC depending on the board handles RDIMM/LRDIMM/NVDIMM accordingly but will not boot with UDIMM. I have already tried testing with UDIMM to no avail.
 

eduncan911

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Just to follow up on this post...

I've ended up scrapping all of my Supermicro mobos for:

AsRock Rack EPYCD8T, ThreadRipper 2 2950X + PBO + XTR thingy, 256GB (8x32GB) ECC UDIMM @ 3200Mhz CAS 20 (Auto SPD picked up 3200mhz!), Supermicro SC846 chassis with loud fans, has PBO boosting to 4.0/3.9 Ghz on all cores all the damn time. CPU sits around 40-60% all the time and under heavy tasks maybe around 90% across the 9 VMs and dozens and dozens of Docker/Pods (including 3x gaming VMs on a Vega64 SR-IOV, I am still working on...).

AsRock Rack X399D8A-2T runs the 2nd backup-for-now server with an Epyc 7551 I got dirt cheap, and 128GB RDIMM 8 @ 2666Mhz sticks.

With the Epyc Gen 1 overclocker, I get a solid 3.4 Ghz across all 32 cores (64T) at 100% load - with a whopping 450 Watts spike from the APC battery backup when I max out all cores. It has 24x HDDs, an Octane and an Samsung 1725. So idle and load Watts don't mean anything. But the jump of 450 Watts when going from idle to max CPU cores is concerning.

For the record, I'm not looking to overclock at all. 100% stability is well worth it over any performance tweaks. But these boosts seem perfectly stable.

The multiple NUMA nodes are ok for all workloads, as they never really exceed 8 cores. However, I do some have Linux tuning to do for both procs to make sure Numa nodes are properly being assigned to processes. Any anything else that would tweak Epyc/TR for Linux.

Thanks to everyone!
 
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