Intel undermines AMD's new EPYC Server Lineup performance in its Official Xeon SP Slide Deck

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

i don't get why people are freaking out cpus are literally glued together they use a rubber silicon like glue and they also use solder to glue it

[Trixanity]

11 hours ago, raphidy said:

I have spoke to some of higher-ups in my company and they do not care about AMD at all. They think they run hot and slow, not stable enough. 

Oh dear. Senior management really is ignorant. Tech companies are in a constant state of flux. What was true even 2 or 3 years ago might not be true today. It is quite remarkable that you can get to the top and not be aware of what's going on outside your bubble. Yes, I know it's likely not their area of expertise or that they even deal with these things other than signing off on it but still: I find it ridiculous that you don't even make the attempt to be informed of these things when you have to make decisions.

 

For example, I seem to recall Ford having the reputation for being rusty buckets that drove like one as well just 10-15 years ago. By that logic, no one should be buying a Ford today because it'll rust within a couple of years and will therefore fail to pass inspection. However, today they've had multiple car of the year awards and have eliminated all of those problems (as far as I know) and drive just as well as any European car in the same segment. Yes, different markets and therefore apples and oranges but I'd say tech moves faster than the automobile industry anyway so it's applies double to the tech industry. And before someone scolds me: I'm not a car guy. Was just the best example I could think of.

 

Honestly though, outside of errata: are there any modern processors known to be unstable and/or cause downtime? I haven't heard of any but that may be my own ignorance showing. That's why I find the 'stable' argument to be odd. I mean disk drives, especially HDDs, are known to have varying MTBFs and other factors that will affect uptime so I understand why you'd use a known quantity there.

[mr moose]

29 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

 

Honestly though, outside of errata: are there any modern processors known to be unstable and/or cause downtime? I haven't heard of any but that may be my own ignorance showing. That's why I find the 'stable' argument to be odd. I mean disk drives, especially HDDs, are known to have varying MTBFs and other factors that will affect uptime so I understand why you'd use a known quantity there.

 

 

I don't know about modern, but here is some info on google data centre issues.   Given they are a data-centric company, servers are not so much a tool but their product. The thing is that it's not just the CPU that has to be considered, if you buy an AMD CPU, then you are tied to motherboards that support AMD, this means not just features but reliability also.

 

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/05/30/failure-rates-in-google-data-centers/

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Simon771 said:

As much as I want AMD to suceed, I don't think they will win on Enterprice level.

In company that  work for, we aren't going with AMD anytime soon. We are paying premium price for those 12c Xeons, but in the end we know those server are 100% stable.

After 6 months there isn't going to be any bigger risk than going with Intel, AMD CPUs are not unstable or fail at any higher rate than Intel. One of the reasons Intel keeps the enterprise platform behind the desktop platform architecture is so they can find those problem areas and fix them which leads to much more stable systems. Before Intel did this firmware issues and software problems were a bit more common but that is mostly a thing of the past.

 

Software optimization is going to be a concern for longer than that but actual stability/crashes is unlikely, just performance.

 

Even last year we ordered 20 HPE DL360 Gen9 servers with E5-2690v4 CPUs about as early as you could get those CPUs and we got hit with an ESXi PSOD issue which resulted in an emergency firmware update globally, shit happens and buying Intel or your trusted vendor doesn't make you immune from it or actually make you any more safer. You can trust a vendor but that is a different thing to actual reliability and stability of their products, that is one way trust is gained but don't take it for granted.

 

AMD might not gain much in corporate enterprise early on but they already have large partnerships with some of the largest cloud providers like Azure, they buy on a much larger scale so it could be quite reasonable for AMD to in fact not even try and gain market share in corporate enterprise, not that they are silly enough to do that.

 

The bigger reason why it's going to take a while for enterprise to start adopting AMD hardware is for thing like ESXi clusters. You can't live vMotion VMs from an Intel host to an AMD host, this was a problem back pre 2008 when AMD actually had good market share in the server space and something I actually had to live with.

 

I personally will never forget how good AMD server CPUs were, especially for virtualization so I'm not going to default to either brand and assess purely on the platform and performance. I will be able to buy an HPE DL360/380/560 etc Gen 10 server with AMD or Intel CPUs and if HPE is standing by the product then it has at least passed there quality and performance testing. Last I spoke with them they indicated there were some good use cases for going with AMD over Intel.

[Hotzeet]

45 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Honestly though, outside of errata: are there any modern processors known to be unstable and/or cause downtime? I haven't heard of any but that may be my own ignorance showing. That's why I find the 'stable' argument to be odd. I mean disk drives, especially HDDs, are known to have varying MTBFs and other factors that will affect uptime so I understand why you'd use a known quantity there.

Apart from Intels C series of Atom chips, i can't think of any. But quite a few of those were used in business related devices.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_to_link_product_warning_to_faulty_chip/
 

[Guest]

so stuck on "architected"

 

As someone in marketing - I would have never used that language. 

[leadeater]

16 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Ryzen isn't a server chip.  If it was it would be able to support more than 2S configuration and wouldn't have a ridiculous number of NUMA domains and asterisks on getting consistent performance out of it.  "oh lets just hope our software vendors optimize for a rookie platform with zero marketshare".

80% of the server market is 2 socket systems. That leaves single socket, 4 socket, 6 socket and 8 socket systems for the other 20% with each increase in socket count commanding a smaller share than the last.

 

Also can you point to anywhere in this early review of both EYPC and Purely where this supposed NUMA domains of doom is significantly impacting performance or is even visible? I can spot it in the one very specific test to show it but that doesn't actually translate across to any of the performance benchmarks or real application tests, and where EYPC does fall a reasonable amount behind Purely it is around Broadwell-EP and since when was that slow?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade

 

16 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

You're hurr-durr-ing.  That "cheaper" 24 core chip gets expensive if you all of the sudden have to pay for 24 cores worth of licensing on your enterprise software.  Then that 8 core with the performance of an equivalent AMD 12 core starts to sound like a lot better of a deal.

This is where you do have a point but you're also ignoring that those licenses already exist so it is only a worst case of slightly increasing them but there could be cases of reducing them.

 

Some things are socket licensed and some things are per core licensed. Your same argument also applies to Intel and their increasing core counts, which is being demanded by customers so buying more licenses is already an accounted for factor.

 

If you are replacing virtual hosts for instance and you currently have dual socket 12 core CPUs and you can buy a dual socket 24 core CPU AMD system or dual socket 16 core Intel CPU system that is a total difference of 16 cores/32 threads or an entire socket, and if you licensed per socket like ESXi is you've just saved money in hardware and potentially licenses as you may be able to hand a few back.

 

17 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

There's a lot of other factors brought up that are relevant if you're in the datacenter environment and doing more with your system than running cinebench.

Odd, since I'm a target customer I see no factors or technical points in those slides that are actually of any use to me at all. Also "Inconsistent supplier", I wonder what HPE has to say about that since we buy our servers from them and they have AMD Gen 10 servers.

[Simon771]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

After 6 months there isn't going to be any bigger risk than going with Intel, AMD CPUs are not unstable or fail at any higher rate than Intel. One of the reasons Intel keeps the enterprise platform behind the desktop platform architecture is so they can find those problem areas and fix them which leads to much more stable systems. Before Intel did this firmware issues and software problems were a bit more common but that is mostly a thing of the past.

 

Software optimization is going to be a concern for longer than that but actual stability/crashes is unlikely, just performance.

 

Even last year we ordered 20 HPE DL360 Gen9 servers with E5-2690v4 CPUs about as early as you could get those CPUs and we got hit with an ESXi PSOD issue which resulted in an emergency firmware update globally, shit happens and buying Intel or your trusted vendor doesn't make you immune from it or actually make you any more safer. You can trust a vendor but that is a different thing to actual reliability and stability of their products, that is one way trust is gained but don't take it for granted.

 

AMD might not gain much in corporate enterprise early on but they already have large partnerships with some of the largest cloud providers like Azure, they buy on a much larger scale so it could be quite reasonable for AMD to in fact not even try and gain market share in corporate enterprise, not that they are silly enough to do that.

 

The bigger reason why it's going to take a while for enterprise to start adopting AMD hardware is for thing like ESXi clusters. You can't live vMotion VMs from an Intel host to an AMD host, this was a problem back pre 2008 when AMD actually had good market share in the server space and something I actually had to live with.

 

I personally will never forget how good AMD server CPUs were, especially for virtualization so I'm not going to default to either brand and assess purely on the platform and performance. I will be able to buy an HPE DL360/380/560 etc Gen 10 server with AMD or Intel CPUs and if HPE is standing by the product then it has at least passed there quality and performance testing. Last I spoke with them they indicated there were some good use cases for going with AMD over Intel.

We are also buying 360 gen 9 servers  

Just bought 6 of them ... 3 for main location and 3 for DR location.

 

If HPE will start selling proliant servers with AMD CPUs ... well we might jut buy some of those in the future. 

But that will be only for needs of having new servers. Like you said, there can't be live switching clusters from intel to amd or the other way around.

 

I just started working in IT 5 months ago so I'm fairly new to this and don't even have all the access yet, so I can't say exactly what are all of the servers that we are using.  I justknow we also have some old AMD opteron CPUs in some servers. But htose are getting upgraded to Intel slowly. Once you get to constant 50% CPU usage on server, it's time to upgrade something I guess lol

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, Simon771 said:

We are also buying 360 gen 9 servers  

Just bought 6 of them ... 3 for main location and 3 for DR location.

 

If HPE will start selling proliant servers with AMD CPUs ... well we might jut buy some of those in the future. 

But that will be only for needs of having new servers. Like you said, there can't be live switching clusters from intel to amd or the other way around.

 

I just started working in IT 5 months ago so I'm fairly new to this and don't even have all the access yet, so I can't say exactly what are all of the servers that we are using.  I justknow we also have some old AMD opteron CPUs in some servers. But htose are getting upgraded to Intel slowly. Once you get to constant 50% CPU usage on server, it's time to upgrade something I guess lol

You'll likely be sticking with Intel until those 6 servers get replaced, even then it might be a case of moving the 3 from DR to Prod and extending the warranty and running the AMD systems at the DR site for a few years to confidence test.

 

Just an FYI the Intel Gen 10 systems are increasing in price across the board since Intel has increased their CPU prices by 30%, HPE is extending the sales life of Gen 9 due to that so you'll actually be able to buy both Gen 9 and Gen 10 for 6 months maybe more, I forgot to take a picture of the slide.

 

As for the CPU load yea in virtualization clusters you have to take in to account CPU load if a host fails so if all 3 are at 50% that actually means your cluster is at 75% capacity if you are doing N+1. That doesn't leave much room for peak loads and other factors, being such small clusters you notice that a bit more than say a 20 node cluster.

 

Edit:

Also don't worry about knowing what the servers do, we have about 1400 VMs and I have no idea what most of them do. A lot of them are hosted for departments and are not controlled by ITS, people ask and we just give job done 

[Simon771]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You'll likely be sticking with Intel until those 6 server get replaced, even then it might be a case of moving the 3 from DR to Prod and extending the warranty and running the AMD systems at the DR site for a few years to confidence test.

 

Just an FYI the Intel Gen 10 systems are increasing in price across the board since Intel has increased their CPU prices by 30%, HPE is extending the sales life of Gen 9 due to that so you'll actually be able to buy both Gen 9 and Gen 10 for 6 months maybe more, I forgot to take a picture of the slide.

 

As for the CPU load yea in virtualization clusters you have to take in to account CPU load if a node fails so if all 3 are at 50% that actually means your cluster is at 75% capacity if you are doing N+1. That doesn't leave much room for peak loads and other factors, being such small clusters you notice that a bit more than say a 20 node cluster.

Yeah, we won't be changing those 6 servers soon.

But we might be chaning some others soon. At least that's what I heard, because support for some servers will end in less than 1 year.

Will see how will the "boss" from IT decide about buying new servers.

 

I somtimes get the urge to run cinebench on one of those server with 48 cores lol

[Thiback]

20 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Yawnnnn you must be really bored to care about a slide.

Well no. We just don't like it when the marketing services of hardware companies bullshit us. I also believe this should go beyond fanboyism.

[WereCat]

I don't understand. Is Intel telling me to buy AMD? Because after looking on these slides I want to buy AMD

[leadeater]

15 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

Oh intel! First they try and slate Epyc for the NUMA clustering, implying it's inferior; then put out an optimization manual that says to do the same for best local latency.
 

[Jito463]

4 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Oh dear. Senior management really is ignorant. Tech companies are in a constant state of flux. What was true even 2 or 3 years ago might not be true today. It is quite remarkable that you can get to the top and not be aware of what's going on outside your bubble. Yes, I know it's likely not their area of expertise or that they even deal with these things other than signing off on it but still: I find it ridiculous that you don't even make the attempt to be informed of these things when you have to make decisions.

My boss at work is always telling business customers that they should never buy an AMD laptop, because they're prone to overheating and frying the motherboard.  Why does he tell them that?  Because his wife has (somehow) fried multiple AMD laptops, so he believes they'll all overheat and fry.  I've tried to convince him that his information is inaccurate, but he refuses to believe me.  I've finally resorted to just rolling my eyes and biting my tongue.

[Valentyn]

4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

My boss at work is always telling business customers that they should never buy an AMD laptop, because they're prone to overheating and frying the motherboard.  Why does he tell them that?  Because his wife has (somehow) fried multiple AMD laptops, so he believes they'll all overheat and fry.  I've tried to convince him that his information is inaccurate, but he refuses to believe me.  I've finally resorted to just rolling my eyes and biting my tongue.

 

That's mindshare and memes for you. The idea what AMD is hot and underperforming is still around.

Despite us seeing laptops with Ryzen 1700's in them because the CPU has a TDP of 65w.

 

AMD needs to capture not only marketshare but mindshare; it's happening on the CPU side slowly this year. The GPU department still needs to manage it.

[WereCat]

11 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

My boss at work is always telling business customers that they should never buy an AMD laptop, because they're prone to overheating and frying the motherboard.  Why does he tell them that?  Because his wife has (somehow) fried multiple AMD laptops, so he believes they'll all overheat and fry.  I've tried to convince him that his information is inaccurate, but he refuses to believe me.  I've finally resorted to just rolling my eyes and biting my tongue.

I can't even start talking about this topic with one of my friends. Even if I can prove to him the good things about AMD he always just laughs it off saying that it doesn't matter because it is AMD and he would feel embarrassed for owning an AMD CPU...

He is the only techie friend so this is pissing me off a lot.

[FinnHallqvist]

11 hours ago, Jito463 said:

Shouldn't that be finale?

Ah yes I wasnt sure if that existed so I just wrote final. Thanks for that

[yian88]

LoL seeing intel in this current state is just golden, never tought they would be so pathetic, when competition strikes you see the real resolve of companies and intel reverted to ~2000-2008 style of marketing.

[Vode]

Seeing this is just great. It's a sign of competition and seeing Intel actually worried speaks volumes.

 

I have decided to change my profile picture as a celebratory measure.

[JoostinOnline]

9 hours ago, Simon771 said:

Well i7 7700k is a gaming CPU with TIM inside.

Xeons are soldered, and I haven't seen any of server CPUs go over 50°C in our company. We get warning at 60°C, but never received any kind of warning for now.

Yeah I know it's never 100% sure ... that why we have DR location.

 

Will see how things will change in next few years. Would be fun to set up new servers on amd CPUs. We still have few servers using AMD CPUs, but those are ancient and not really used for production.

 

I can't undertand why Intel decided to not solder i7 and i9 CPUs for X299 platform. CPU die isn't too small like it's the case with 7700k. It's like they want to get roasted for it.

Intel is now using more power, and CPUs reach higher temps than AMD. I guess we have to make fun of Intel now.

On the note of soldering, where does the solder go? Is it where the adhesive is on the IHS, or is it between the die and IHS? 

[Fetzie]

On 07/12/2017 at 6:45 PM, Misanthrope said:

I know corporate suits are more succeptible to intel's arguments here but they aren't stupid: They're not gonna go "Yesh intel performs 25% better ok I will expand my budget 400% to accommodate this products instead!"

 

They're basically afraid of having to price their shit fairly and that's something that is not easy to undo with panic tactics. It's doable but come on look at the numbers and prices: they speak for themselves.

Given the way that Intel has been laying off staff in the last few years, it would not surprise me if they couldn't AFFORD to sell their processors at a lower margin.

[Misanthrope]

12 minutes ago, Fetzie said:

Given the way that Intel has been laying off staff in the last few years, it would not surprise me if they couldn't AFFORD to sell their processors at a lower margin.

AFAIK they do have the bank and their own fabs, that's an inherent advantage that's hard to fuck up. But they could squander it don't get me wrong. I just would expect a tighter race between them not a complete reversal.

[Ivo]

18 hours ago, Humbug said:

that's not what happened.

sandy bridge came out first.

and even if it hadn't you can't just come up with something like that overnight, it was in the pipeline for years.

exactly, they freaked out thats why it came out. If you remember AMD was hyping out Bulldozer like with everything they do. OFC sandy was in pipeline for years, I was not questioning that, all I am saying is that I hope that they have something else that they have in pipeline so we can have some serious performance gain next generation.

[DXMember]

When Intel has to compare Xeons to mainstream Ryzens at quarter the price, lol

[DXMember]

Their Xeon 8176 is designed to be put into 8S motherboards and they bash AMD for integrating their dies...

And we can also point at their Xeons saying it's a desktop die...

this is like... wtf... c'mon...

Unlocking a new era in marketing...