Server Recommendation: Atom C3000 or Xeon D or Ryzen?

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Thomas H

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Dec 2, 2017
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Need some recommendations on a new server build.

I have read with great interest on all the new Intel Atom C3000 series articles here. In particular, the Supermicro A2SDi-H-TP4F which offers low power consumption, quad 10GbE (future proof), and great performance. I am thinking of getting this to replace my Dell T20 and Lenovo TS440 servers. My use case is virtualizing in a home lab environment. Probably Hyper-V running ubuntu web server, pfsense, plex, video surveillance, etc. Should I get this or something more powerful like Xeon D/Ryzen?
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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The C3000 may well struggle with the video surveillance software, Xeon-D cores are twice as fast, if the only issue is video surveillance then put it out on a system running regular consumer cpu.
Do you really need 4 x 10g ? Xeon-d has mostly 2 x10g and a number if 1G.

Ryzen I would say no for now and no for power usage.
 
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Thomas H

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Evan said:
The C3000 may well struggle with the video surveillance software, Xeon-D cores are twice as fast, if the only issue is video surveillance then put it out on a system running regular consumer cpu.
Do you really need 4 x 10g ? Xeon-d has mostly 2 x10g and a number if 1G.

Ryzen I would say no for now and no for power usage.
Click to expand...
You're right. I don't need 4X10g. In fact, 2X10g and a some 1G sounds perfect for pfsense and NAS. Why not Ryzen? Care to elaborate. Thanks.
 
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Evan

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Ryzen is aimed at gamers etc , it’s not intended as a server platform.
ECC memory support is not assured.
If your looking for low power it will certianly not be nearly as low power as either of the intel SOC’s.
Lack of IPMI or any kind of remote management support.
Poor support for virtualization like ESX (although this should improve)

The intel SOC’s also have inbuilt native multigigabit Ethernet support.
 
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Thomas H

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Great response! Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again.

How would compare the Xeon D vs Atom C3000?
 
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PigLover

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Even xeon-d may struggle with the surveillance depending on the number of cameras and bitrate. I've found that the higher clocks on E3-12xx systems work much better for surveillance systems.

Sent from my VS996 using Tapatalk
 
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Evan

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@PigLover suggestion is also good.

I would nearly always choose 8 fast full Xeon cores over 16 slower Atom cores.
Having said this I am only going on benchmarks and older generation C2000, I don’t own any C3000 systems yet. Price for given performance is rather similar.
 
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Evan

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E5 v3/v4, Xeon-D, C3000, new scalable Xeon all use DDR4 RDIMM
The e3 Xeon use UDIMM, harder to find generally at better prices (not that any memeor is cheap now)

Only wanted to highlight that if you started with say a cheaper C3000 or Xeon-D you can move up to the full e5/scalable Xeon and keep you memory generally.
 
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Joel

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Jan 30, 2015
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Evan said:
Ryzen is aimed at gamers etc , it’s not intended as a server platform.
ECC memory support is not assured.
If your looking for low power it will certianly not be nearly as low power as either of the intel SOC’s.
Lack of IPMI or any kind of remote management support.
Poor support for virtualization like ESX (although this should improve)

The intel SOC’s also have inbuilt native multigigabit Ethernet support.
Click to expand...
I read a review where they used some difficult timings to force memory errors with ECC on Ryzen, and they said that it mostly works, however there is one (really important) part of ECC functionality that failed.

Passed:
Single bit errors were caught and corrected.
Double bit errors were detected.

Failed:
System should halt on detecting double bit error, but it did not.

Means that you'd still be vulnerable to data corruption in a ZFS or similar environment.
 
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matt_garman

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Feb 7, 2011
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PigLover said:
Even xeon-d may struggle with the surveillance depending on the number of cameras and bitrate. I've found that the higher clocks on E3-12xx systems work much better for surveillance systems.
Click to expand...
Just as a datapoint... I'm running three surveillance cameras on a Xeon D 1541. For each camera, I'm doing motion detection on the primary stream, which is 1280x720 as 12 FPS; and constant recording on the secondary stream, 352x240 at 12 FPS. This is under Zoneminder, which converts all streams to a series of images (i.e. not CPU efficient). The load on the server is nonzero, but there is no shortage of CPU power left over.

Obviously CPU usage would go up if I had more cameras and/or ran at higher resolution and/or framerate.
 
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