DELL had only wonderful things to say about AMD's EPYC and DELL not considers AMD EPYC to be the top performing solution they have, with Xeon being "the regular offering" .
When are they gonna announce availability of higher clock speed? Even the 8 core epyc has abysmal clocks. It is not like they ran out of thermal or power budget, and obviously the core can do a lot better. WTF amd?
Remember, usually the lower core count EPYC (and Ryzen/Threadripper CPUs) have errors in some of their cores so they may not be exactly 'the best' silicon overall. This might also limit their clockspeed. It could also be that they're aimed at a particular TDP for smaller enclosures, and as such - they could be clocked down somewhat for design reasons.
Also - the Zen (v1) cores aren't really capable of going over 4.0/4.1 ghz anyhow without significant cooling and power delivery, which is something not really available in a server environment.
Some chips reach lower clock with perfect stability so they're badged with lower model numbers.
If some cores don't work fast enough (or some transistors don't work reliably), those cores are disabled and the CPU is sold as a model with less than 32 cores.
limit of the design seems like, just because Intel can do 4.5Ghz+ does not automatically mean AMD should be able to do it or outright failure on their part, completely different design from completely different company results in a completely different, well, result. even with their "limited clock speed" there is a lot of performance in them, at least they are built VERY well at a reasonable to excellent price not using a crap ton of power.
When target clock speed first you get something like Bulldozer or Pentium 4, the advantage of raw clock speed is useful in SOME things, but, not EVERYTHING, they addressed many of the shortcomings they had coming from previous designs, better IMC, better HT speeds, lower latencies, reduced temperature, reduced average power (when considering they are powering 4 to 8x more cores and threads not easy to achieve)
All in all, keep in mind AMD is a much much smaller company with limited funding trying to do what they can, IMO are doing an amazing job "keeping up" with 2 of the major companies in the tech world where other companies out there simply have no chance to compete with (cpu-gpu are incredibly hard to design and massively expensive)
be happy they made EPYC in first place you knucklehead ^.^
You didn't get the obvious - 16 core TR has 3.4 ghz base clock and boosts to 4 ghz, 8 core epyc has 2.1 ghz base clocks and boosts to 2.9 ghz.
Clearly that doesn't go anywhere near the uarch maximum.
I am not asking where is the 5 ghz 8 core epyc, I am asking where is the 3.4 ghz epyc, 2.1 is quite a bit lower. And for the 8 core sku, it definitely is not out of thermal or power budget.
In fact, even the 24 core epyc has higher clocks - 2.3 base and 3.2 boost. The 8 core seems pathetically underclocked. Obviously it should be able to do a lot higher than 2.1.
No higher clock speeds. Look at Intel and it's LCC/HCC/XCC dies. The power usage with in a 100mhz or so are generally pretty close across the range of offerings. Meaning the 6c SL-X is penalized power usage wise because it's a 10c CPU. The 12C suffers because it's a 18c die.
For that reason even an 8c EPYC while using less power than a 32c EPYC is still going to use significantly more power than a 8c Ryzen. It will produce more heat and require more cooling. EPYC is limited because of the use of 4 Dies and not because of limitations of the dies.
That is why AMD doesn't aim the 8c or 16c EPYC for those types of use cases. Those CPU's are really for High Bandwidth or Extreme attachment configurations. It's about the Memory channels and PCIe lanes and not about the core count or clock speed.
Obviously an epyc chip will have 4 times the IO transistors - memory controllers, pcie and whatnot.
However, those don't use anywhere nearly as much power as even a single cpu core at load.
The power and heat of an 8 core epyc will be a tad higher than those of a 8 core ryzen, but then again, an 8 core ryzen is bellow 100 watts.
Clearly there is far more headroom, as I mentioned above, even the 24 core epyc is clocked higher, with the same number of IO as the 8 core and with three times the active cores.
It is not about power. It is not about cooling. Probably some half mad, half insane internal segmentation strategy by amd.
IMO it is a big miss of opportunity. An 8 core 3.5 Ghz epyc will be quite the nice deal and fill a significant and currently gaping hole in their portfolio. Currently amd has nothing in that space that offers decent performance for workloads that don't require or scale to a high thread count. It is a popular market and amd is simply not addressing it, even thou it easily can.
1 - some software licenses per core, so having more but slower cores is not an attractive prospect
2 - some software doesn't scale that well, defeating the purpose of having many cores as you don't get any extra performance
As I mentioned, that is actually a significant market, which amd is currently leaving to intel, even thou it can easily address it. Makes no sense for such a cash starved company. Makes no sense for any company when you think about it.
AMD has a very step curve to go in their AI / Deep learning endevour. Same can be said about Intel but intel theoretical would have the needed resources. The thing is software. In my field of work, everything is very CUDA oriented. Some stuff supposedly also works with OpenCL but if you look deeper it really doesn't or requires an esoteric setup. Even if AMD has the much better offer with their cards, it's a no brainer that we buy NV. And whether the card costs 2k or 10k doesn't matter if the cheaper one doesn't work with your software.
"Even if AMD has the much better offer with their cards, it's a no brainer that we buy NV."
That's the reason why everyone who isn't invested in nvda should be hopeful when amd, or whomever, attempts to port frameworks to something like ocl/sycl.
Hello Ian Cutress. One correction in your article, "In partnership with AMAX, 47 of these systems were put together into a single rack, capable of one PetaFLOP of single precision in a turnkey solution." That should be 20x P47 servers, not 47.
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IGTrading - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
I wonder where are DELL's AMD EPYC servers.DELL had only wonderful things to say about AMD's EPYC and DELL not considers AMD EPYC to be the top performing solution they have, with Xeon being "the regular offering" .
DELL : "AMD's new processors are epic!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6y5NfHffw
"Storage is key! AMD's competitors don't have the necessary IO."
DELL : "AMD's EPYC bring the best x3" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-1WgL2Jas
Although they apparently keep those "best x3" a secret / surprise.
It is bizarre to not see DELL and EMC in AMD's announcement.
Sinister1 - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
Stay tuned... Should hear something any day now.vanilla_gorilla - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
Not much of an announcement at all, don't know why you would expect to see partners involved.ddriver - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
When are they gonna announce availability of higher clock speed? Even the 8 core epyc has abysmal clocks. It is not like they ran out of thermal or power budget, and obviously the core can do a lot better. WTF amd?bill.rookard - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
Remember, usually the lower core count EPYC (and Ryzen/Threadripper CPUs) have errors in some of their cores so they may not be exactly 'the best' silicon overall. This might also limit their clockspeed. It could also be that they're aimed at a particular TDP for smaller enclosures, and as such - they could be clocked down somewhat for design reasons.Also - the Zen (v1) cores aren't really capable of going over 4.0/4.1 ghz anyhow without significant cooling and power delivery, which is something not really available in a server environment.
IGTrading - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
" errors in some of their cores " ?!?!?!What nonsense is this ?!
Some chips reach lower clock with perfect stability so they're badged with lower model numbers.
If some cores don't work fast enough (or some transistors don't work reliably), those cores are disabled and the CPU is sold as a model with less than 32 cores.
There are no chips "with errors" being sold.
Dragonstongue - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
limit of the design seems like, just because Intel can do 4.5Ghz+ does not automatically mean AMD should be able to do it or outright failure on their part, completely different design from completely different company results in a completely different, well, result. even with their "limited clock speed" there is a lot of performance in them, at least they are built VERY well at a reasonable to excellent price not using a crap ton of power.When target clock speed first you get something like Bulldozer or Pentium 4, the advantage of raw clock speed is useful in SOME things, but, not EVERYTHING, they addressed many of the shortcomings they had coming from previous designs, better IMC, better HT speeds, lower latencies, reduced temperature, reduced average power (when considering they are powering 4 to 8x more cores and threads not easy to achieve)
All in all, keep in mind AMD is a much much smaller company with limited funding trying to do what they can, IMO are doing an amazing job "keeping up" with 2 of the major companies in the tech world where other companies out there simply have no chance to compete with (cpu-gpu are incredibly hard to design and massively expensive)
be happy they made EPYC in first place you knucklehead ^.^
ddriver - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
You didn't get the obvious - 16 core TR has 3.4 ghz base clock and boosts to 4 ghz, 8 core epyc has 2.1 ghz base clocks and boosts to 2.9 ghz.Clearly that doesn't go anywhere near the uarch maximum.
I am not asking where is the 5 ghz 8 core epyc, I am asking where is the 3.4 ghz epyc, 2.1 is quite a bit lower. And for the 8 core sku, it definitely is not out of thermal or power budget.
ddriver - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
In fact, even the 24 core epyc has higher clocks - 2.3 base and 3.2 boost. The 8 core seems pathetically underclocked. Obviously it should be able to do a lot higher than 2.1.PixyMisa - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
They could do a 3.6 - 4.0GHz EPYC, but it would be a 400W monster. They're going for efficiency rather than clock speeds.Topweasel - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
No higher clock speeds. Look at Intel and it's LCC/HCC/XCC dies. The power usage with in a 100mhz or so are generally pretty close across the range of offerings. Meaning the 6c SL-X is penalized power usage wise because it's a 10c CPU. The 12C suffers because it's a 18c die.For that reason even an 8c EPYC while using less power than a 32c EPYC is still going to use significantly more power than a 8c Ryzen. It will produce more heat and require more cooling. EPYC is limited because of the use of 4 Dies and not because of limitations of the dies.
That is why AMD doesn't aim the 8c or 16c EPYC for those types of use cases. Those CPU's are really for High Bandwidth or Extreme attachment configurations. It's about the Memory channels and PCIe lanes and not about the core count or clock speed.
ddriver - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
Obviously an epyc chip will have 4 times the IO transistors - memory controllers, pcie and whatnot.However, those don't use anywhere nearly as much power as even a single cpu core at load.
The power and heat of an 8 core epyc will be a tad higher than those of a 8 core ryzen, but then again, an 8 core ryzen is bellow 100 watts.
Clearly there is far more headroom, as I mentioned above, even the 24 core epyc is clocked higher, with the same number of IO as the 8 core and with three times the active cores.
It is not about power. It is not about cooling. Probably some half mad, half insane internal segmentation strategy by amd.
IMO it is a big miss of opportunity. An 8 core 3.5 Ghz epyc will be quite the nice deal and fill a significant and currently gaping hole in their portfolio. Currently amd has nothing in that space that offers decent performance for workloads that don't require or scale to a high thread count. It is a popular market and amd is simply not addressing it, even thou it easily can.
msroadkill612 - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
Its a cheap entry level to their range. I am sure they would rather sell you more cores & better clocks thrown in with the deal.Considering the total likely spend on an epyc, it seems a false economy not to spend at least $US1000 on the cpu.
As I recall, the 24 core 1P looked good at ~$1050.
msroadkill612 - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
PS - I bet the 8 core OCs ell, but who OCs a server, right? :)It could still appeal to some smart cheapskate sys admins.
Some apps are mainly concerned with lanes rather than performance.
Ram is actually cheaper cos you can use more (up to 16x) of the cheaper, smaller capacity sticks on 8 channel epyc.
ddriver - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
There are a couple of good reasons:1 - some software licenses per core, so having more but slower cores is not an attractive prospect
2 - some software doesn't scale that well, defeating the purpose of having many cores as you don't get any extra performance
As I mentioned, that is actually a significant market, which amd is currently leaving to intel, even thou it can easily address it. Makes no sense for such a cash starved company. Makes no sense for any company when you think about it.
beginner99 - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
AMD has a very step curve to go in their AI / Deep learning endevour. Same can be said about Intel but intel theoretical would have the needed resources. The thing is software. In my field of work, everything is very CUDA oriented. Some stuff supposedly also works with OpenCL but if you look deeper it really doesn't or requires an esoteric setup. Even if AMD has the much better offer with their cards, it's a no brainer that we buy NV. And whether the card costs 2k or 10k doesn't matter if the cheaper one doesn't work with your software.tuxRoller - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
"Even if AMD has the much better offer with their cards, it's a no brainer that we buy NV."That's the reason why everyone who isn't invested in nvda should be hopeful when amd, or whomever, attempts to port frameworks to something like ocl/sycl.
mdriftmeyer - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
ROCm already has Multi-GPU Support. They've just extended that to TensorFlow and Caffe.dynamis31 - Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - link
Coincidence ? HPE has gen10 DL385 upcoming. GoodBye Opteron, Hello Epychttps://www.servethehome.com/hpe-proliant-dl385-ge...
Kon21 - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
Hello Ian Cutress. One correction in your article, "In partnership with AMAX, 47 of these systems were put together into a single rack, capable of one PetaFLOP of single precision in a turnkey solution." That should be 20x P47 servers, not 47.