Real high end options only. Apart from the 1920X, that is a steal right now, but the board it needs is not cheap, it's a legacy platform, and Threadripper 1 did not work well for some workloads.
I'd not ignore Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9. If you can work with 128GB ram (and especially if you just want a regular strong system with the usual 16GB) 3700X, 3900X and 3950X are really strong processor and apart from the last one a lot cheaper. Most developers don't even need to go that high, not even on a workstation, one based on the Ryzen 5 3600 would not be weak.
It's not quite fair to just extrapolate numbers for 256MB of RAM up to a modern system. If this was true you'd be seeing OS crashes daily (if you run hundreds of servers with no ECC you will see mysterious crashes every day, but for one server it might be once a year).
Ultimately these flips are caused by charged particles hitting the memory module (a so called 'single event upset' or SEU), and the number of charged particles hitting the modules has not increased with density (although the modules are more sensitive to SEU, it's a smaller effect).
Well it depends what you're doing, if your memory is full of hash tables and linked lists then you'll likely get a crash (say a web backend). If you're a fileserver and it's all cache then you won't.
This does not seem to be true in practice.
I use ECC on my systems and they are configured to log any ECC error. And I see ECC erros almost never. Mostly ECC errors start appearing on very old systems when something in hardware becomes bad because of the age (even if just oxidized contacts). I am not sure if I've ever seen a truly random ECC error.
What do you mean by "very old"? This study, which is the only comprehensive public data of which I am aware, says that onset of DRAM errors occurs after 10-18 months.
I've read such studies with great interest, and i prefer ECC whenever possible, but i think these don't necessarily apply to desktops, at least partially.
I think the environment in racks for nodes in whichever formfactor in racks is toxic. Be it EMF interference, power distribution issues, vibrations, and/or temperature. You don't have that in a single system at home, when it is built
in a good way, and has stable power. Or at least to a lesser
degree.
It prevents corruption from bit flips caused by cosmic rays and other sources. More important for scientific/business purposes and at higher altitudes where there is less atmosphere to block cosmic rays.
It‘s usefull for everyone but bit errors happen far far seldom than people do expect. But you should have it just in case. You dont want e.g. a corrupt database file just because the low probability of a bitceroor happened and you have been in bad lick it was on a very critical operation.
> ...bit errors happen far far seldom than people do expect.
Until they happen more often that expected. It's something that varies based on building, temperature, etc. environmental factors. And of course on your luck with memory module lottery.
According to this paper, 8% of DIMMs and 32% of machines suffered from at least one correctable error per year. Without ECC, that's an undetected and uncorrected error. The average machine in the study had over 22,000 corrected errors per year. The paper observes that "memory errors are not rare
events". If you're running without ECC, you are quite likely to have some undetected corruption, which could range from a single erroneous bit over the lifetime of the machine all the way up to constant unexplained crashes and file or filesystem corruption. There are plenty of use cases where it doesn't matter but for workstation use you presumably care about the results.
I have a Ryzen 9 3900X. Officially it doesn't support ECC memory. In practice unregistered ECC DIMMs work fine, and ECC functions properly (single-bit correction, dual-bit detection).
I assume the 3950X is the same way. The hardware is there, the official blessing is not.
They seem to cast doubt on if the bios and software all work together and are really performing the ECC checks even in cases where support might be possible they say things can stop it from working and fixing memory bits. I've no reason to doubt them and this is probably the reason for the lack of official support. Anyone know of a way to validate if it's working correctly?
By opening the case and holding your smartphone near and nearer into it, while having it search for networks. Until it crashes, and then checking the logs, if any :)
edit: I mean near the DIMMs.
Don't try this if you are afraid, or need your hardware. This is a test i'm doing with every build, or any system i have to fix. And it crashes every system, though not at the same places and in the same ways. So far it didn't damage anything permanently, but no guaranties it won't.
Are you serious? How very interesting. Really would like to hear from someone with experience in inducing errors that can say what the risks for permanent damage would be, save for data loss in case of flushing corrupted data to disk for course.
I am. This worked for me since the GSM-era. Imagine slowly pointing it like a wand, sweeping up and down, left, right, going nearer...into, searching. Until it ZAPS. Doesn't need touching. Or less than an inch distance. About 3 to 2 inches it usually is, but i also had crashs/freezes at maybe 10 to 5 inches, just outside the case when it was open.
edit: By searching for networks i mean for the telcos, not wifi. Then it uses all bands it is capable of.
I meant this as a figure of speech, not literally. There are no sparks flying, or something like that. "Zapping/tazing" it by applying some EMF, nothing more :)
Another option is to overclock the ram. Mine is rated for 2400 MHz and works fine up to 2666. It still 'runs' at 2800, but I get maybe 2-3 correctable ECC errors in an hour.
But I'm of course not suggesting to run it in this state whil doing anything important.
Interesting. I guess the DIMMs came blank, without heat sink/spreader on the chips, since ECC and therefore "non-gaming"? In that case i'd try some thin aftermarket clip-on.
Nothing hilarious like "HyperRacerMegaBlingMarkVII" would come with. To see if the ECC-errors occur because of running out of specification frequency wise in general, or if they just occur because of running at too high temperature because running at a too high frequency (and maybe voltage) without cooling.
Because vendor didn't plan/produce/verify for that use-case.
So I'd verify that, and enjoy in case of the latter.
AFAIK, Ryzen 9 3900X do support ECC memory, but it's up to motherboard whether to officially support it or not. There are X570 boards out there with official ECC support, e.g. ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE[1].
One other reason is that ECC is not binned for super high clocks like gaming RAM (even though there is nothing technically preventing it from doing so - it is one extra chip per stick, that's basically it). The fastest you can get is like 2666, where you can readily get gaming RAM in the 3600 range and premium bins go to 4400+.
Ryzen has always been very "sensitive" to low-clocked RAM and shows some pretty good scaling as you increase frequency and tighten timings and the ECC UDIMMs on the market are just not binned to do that.
I still am impressed though, didn't know about that one. Kinda trash CAS latency but I guess that might be because it's registered (I've never seen registered that fast so I guess I don't really have a good perspective on what "good CAS latency" would be for a registered memory).
I wonder if those would run on my Haswell-E xeons. They support RDIMMs, and they are unlocked so nominally they should support higher RAM clocks too (although I've never tried it with RDIMMs, only UDIMMs).
More recently, the W-3175X (Threadripper's real competitor) supports RDIMM as well. So Threadripper actually offers less features than the competition here.
I really would like to see the Threadripper series merged with the 7002P series though. Right now there is no option that gives you both Threadripper-level clocks and large quantities of RAM, the frequency-optimized parts are still a large compromise in performance and aren't widely supported. There is no part that gets you to 4 GHZ on 64 cores with 512+ GB of RAM, despite all of these capabilities existing in their respective segments.
When you are shipping a 64C HEDT processor there is really no longer any meaningful distinction between that and a server processor. And 256GB simply is not enough RAM for a 64C processor. AMD could still upcharge on the multi-socket models, but they are drawing lines between product segments that no longer make sense now that they have pushed core counts so high.
Basically, give us a modern successor to the Intel X5670 series. It's the top of the line, you're paying $4000 for a workstation processor, you should get the whole processor and not have a bunch of disabled features.
The really funny thing is, it's not even a money thing, Epyc isn't even priced significantly higher. 7702P is $4150 at Provantage (HPE p/n P16660-B21) vs $3990 for the 3990X. The 7402P (HPE p/n P16664-B21) is actually $250 cheaper than the 3960X. AMD is no longer using the "traditional" model where workstation is cheaper than server. Workstation is now just as expensive as server. So it's not like giving you Epyc capabilities would mean AMD foregoing any money.
AMD is just drawing arbitrary lines between these product segments because they can.
> I really would like to see the Threadripper series merged with the 7002P series though.
They should've done that when they changed the socket for the latest generation. Just admit that the existence of Socket TR4 was a mistake and release the new Threadrippers on Socket SP3.
I suspect there are even some people interested in dual socket workstations with 2TB of memory that nonetheless have a 4.5GHz boost clock, because workstations often have mixed workloads. And there is no point in doing market segmentation when all the prices are the same anyway, it's just incompatibility for no reason.
Epycs should be readily overclockable. It's the same silicon as Threadripper. AMD does not, to my knowledge, restrict overclocking in server parts.
Cooling would become a big issue, though. Air cooling a 280W 3970X in a big tower with sufficient airflow to maintain ambient temperature internally is difficult. I cannot maintain max turbo on all cores.
Putting this in 1 or 2 Us in a server would likely be impossible without water cooling (requiring piping to external liquid coolers (whether radiators or chillers)). There's only so much that increasing air velocity can do in cooling.
I don't know if this is the primary thing holding back Epyc specs, but I know it will be an issue.
Technically Ryzen 9 CPUs aren't HEDT, but between their high core counts, the amount of PCIE bandwidth on X570 (with PCIE 4), and the ability to (unofficially) use ECC RAM, the boundary between mainstream and HEDT is awfully blurry.
> Currently the super sharp line has to do with PCIe lanes and support for 8 DIMMs.
That's exactly the area where I argue there is some fuzziness.
For PCIE lanes, it's true that AMD only has 24 lanes (4 of which dedicated for the chipset) but it has the equivalent of 48 PCIE gen3 lanes in terms of raw bandwidth. Now, it's still not as flexible as having that many actual PCIE gen3 lanes, but high-end x570 motherboards do support some level of bifurcation. You also need compatible devices, but we already compatible storage. There are a couple GPUs out now, but given the upcoming launches of RDNA2 and Ampere GPUs, I expect there will be plenty more compatible GPUs. X570 is somewhat limited now, but as more gen4 devices are released that chipset will only become more versatile.
For RAM, there you have another fuzzy spot. I mean sure, HEDT usually has 4 channels, but what does that mean in terms of memory capacity and bandwidth? Only within the last year or so have 32GB UDIMMs been available (iirc) so HEDT was limited to 128GB until very recently. And if you really need more, you can use an Optane storage device as a swap partition (It's been done before, it's fine). As for bandwidth, 2 channels is a bit of a limitation, but Ryzen does support faster memory, which can help bridge the gap a little bit to quad channel Intel parts running at lower RAM speeds.
I'm not saying that Ryzen + X570 is HEDT, but it's so darn close that I can understand why AMD chose not to produce low-end TR 3000 parts. Between Ryzen 9, TR 2000, Epyc 7002P, and limited use of TSMCs fabs, I think the move they made was smart.
> HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.
I don't think it's a bad value prop overall. We have a $4000 CPU that's beating out two $10,000 CPUs (dual Xeon Platinums), which is a phenomenal improvement in value. I think we are in this weird space where, when trying to buy the system capabilities you need (in terms of cores, clock speeds, memory capacity, and expansion slots) you sometimes have to pay a bit extra for capabilities that you don't need. That's unfortunate and I hope next gen fixes that. However, it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel will have new HEDT parts for at least a year.
Just built myself a home dev server based around a R9 3900X. Paired it with 64G of RAM, a 1TB NVMe and an RTX 2060, running CentOS 8. Whole build cost me a little under $1400. It sits, headless, in the corner of my office crunching away.
I ssh in from my XPS 13 running Fedora and use X forwarding to do work on it. It's so much faster than trying to do everything on an ultrabook. Not to mention quite a bit cheaper than a high-end laptop.
It's not really clear that that would be faster... sshfs would load the file once (maybe slow, but it's usually a tiny text file) and then do all editing locally in memory. If the editing process is remote, every edit you make is going to involve round trips over the network? That sounds awful?
If you're doing C++ in VSCode the C++ extension will use ripgrep to index your project. When using sshfs, rg runs on the local machine, causing sshfs to load your entire project which if it's large can really slow you down.
The VSCode remote extension installs extensions onto a VSCode remote client installed on the remote machine. So the C++ extensions spawns rg processes on the remote which is a lot faster.
sshfs (and samba for that matter, even more so) can cause odd kernel behavior and crashes, unfortunately. They're great when network is 100% perfect, if you never suspend laptops, etc. If any of those assumptions go away, you've got a mess.
you may want to try parsec for remoting if you have good connectivity. It's meant for gaming but I've been using it on my LAN as a replacement for VNC and it's fanastic
Yea, X Forwarding works fine for home LAN usage, but when I'm away from the house I probably ought to find something better (more performant). Was thinking of setting up VNC, but will have to check out parsec (hadn't heard of it) as well.
How do you find the battery life on you XPS 13 with Fedora? I have a pretty old ThinkPad X1 running Ubuntu and while it works reasonably well I still find the battery life lacking (I am sure the age of the battery is a contributing factor here).
The XPS 13 I've found is pretty easy on the battery. However, I did opt for the 1080p screen. My understanding is that the 4k screen (which would be unreadable to my 40 year old eyes in any case) uses significantly more power.
I've been using VS Code's SSH Extension for the code that is deployed on a laptop running Ubuntu that's older than my 2017 macbook air but sufficiently powerful. Thanks for mentioning the X forwarding.
Please write a blog post detailing this full setup! I have been trying to do some form of this between macos and a linux host for some time now (to try and move as much compute off my MBP as possible) but it has never really worked well.
over years i started to use vnc instead of X as it works better over WAN. Super simple setup. On linux host one just runs an in-memory Xvnc server. The session and running applications are all stay there no matter whether client connects or not. The client runs on any platform.
An XPS 13 isn't a high end laptop? What are you doing that requires that kind of power?
It sounds like an amazing build, but definitely not needed for most tasks. The XPS 13 seems a little wasteful in the setup. You could practically do it with a chromebook.
Any XPS 13 will be running a -U series low-power CPU. I would not consider any laptop high-end with regard to compute, unless it is using a -H series part, at least.
-U series (somehow, magically the same designation between AMD and Intel) will typically run ~15W, though this is configurable by the OEM (sometimes in BIOS?).
-H series (also, magically the same designation) will typically run ~45W, and this is also configurable by the OEM.
The increased power envelope of -H series typically allows higher base clocks. Turbo can sometimes be close between a 15W and a 45W chip, but a -H series will be able to maintain higher frequencies for longer, thanks to a superior thermal solution.
I love your setup. This was my setup at my first software job. I would never actually use the keyboard and mouse of the machine but I would remote into it and forward X to my Windows PC.
That's pretty much my dream setup (except for the 2060, I have no need for anything more than a low-end GPU).
I think some may discount Ryzen 9 because it's technically not "HEDT", but the market boundaries have changed over time.
HEDT used to include all CPUs more $400 dollars, all of which shared the same socket (for a given generation). Mainstream was on a separate socket and all below $400.
However, Broadwell-E and Skylake-X moved the top end of the HEDT from $1K to $2K, which meant that HEDT spanned a huge segment.
What AMD did with Ryzen 9 and X570 was to take the middle segment of that HEDT market and make it it's own segment.
> What AMD did with Ryzen 9 and X570 was to take the middle segment of that HEDT market and make it it's own segment.
It did carve out a pricing segment there, but the really cool thing is that it's so compatible, backward and forward with other CPUs in the Ryzen family. There is huge upgrade potential.
It would be entirely reasonable to build a system around an R7, with the expectation that its workload will grow, and throw in a discounted 3950X in a year when Zen3 hits.
This is the way to go. Get something comfortable and with good battery life, these should be your only must haves. Then dump the rest into the server or some monthly bill for some compute nodes for all your heavy lifting. Use the right tools for the job, not a swiss army knife full of compromises.
I'm in a similar boat. I planned to swap out my 1950x with the 39xxx series threadrippers and got bit by the socket change. The older i7 3930k was swapped out with a 3900x while we sorted the new hardware... and I'll be damned, but that AM4 CPU, paired with 4x16G sticks of RAM and an M2 drive has been a wonderful Linux workstation for development.
Eh, depends on what you want out of a motherboard. I just bought a Threadripper platform yesterday (though this discussion is making me regret it), and the board I bought is the same price as the board I would have bought for the 3900X build I was considering ($500).
If I was going to go the AM4 route, I wanted a board that supported the full 128GB of RAM the processor does and has an X570 chipset. I also wanted a board that has at least 5 PCIe slots (of any type) and 6 SATA ports. While there are a number of boards in the $200 - $300 range that satisfy these requirements, I can't find anywhere that actually has them[1]. If my home workstation hadn't just died I would just wait until the pandemic-related supply issues abate.
[1] Well, has them for a reasonable price. Newegg as third-party sellers offering a few of them for 60%+ markups, but I feel better paying $500 for a $500 board than I do paying $275 for a $160 board.
Yes!, a higher-end motherboard can certainly be worth paying for. Conversely, I paid $150 an Asus X470-F that checks mostly the same boxes except it only takes 64GB RAM and doesn't have PCIe 4.0. I put a 3900x in it. It's pretty great. - But it was bought before the pandemic so idk if it's still available.
If only 12-16 cores with 64GB of RAM are enough to be useful, then the Ryzen 9 gets A LOT of work done for an unprecedented low price. But if the work being done can make use of 128GB quad-channel RAM and 24-32-64 cores, then the $350 extra for a Threadripper motherboard is nothing. Doesn't take many billable hours to pay for it :)
I won't go for AMD CPUs for workstations. They are unstable. QA is bad, gets weird errors in programs (probably programs' fault but I don't care) and if the machine fails to function in any way it becomes my fault for choosing it. That's why my company buys an Intel workstation every time.
Yeah. Downvote as much as you like fanboys. Can't dilute the truth.
AMD's QA is bad. My friend runs a company that churns about >400 computers per month with AS guarantee mostly for office use. The ratio of initial failure confirmed by manufacturers was 15:1 and the ratio of failing within 2 years (cpu and motherboard failure) was 4:1. Those numbers does not reflect the fact that Intel systems sold more than AMD systems.
People dealing with professional softwares also have problems that are magically solved when they use Intel. Have no statistics on that tho.
Freezing, not booting, certain applications not working, failing to pass stress tests, and other misc problems that the user reports.
When those things happen they just send them back to the distributor without testing further because they're not sure. They tell them that a)it's not their fault and returns the cpu or say b)it's their fault and sends a replacement.
Could be that AMD is blindly replacing CPUs rather than test them like Intel does.
Yes, we had got 6 AMD first gen Ryzen CPUs at my old job. Some of them were super instable on Linux. I tried a few magic solution and tricks but they always crashed eventually.
In my new job, I have a co-worker who is an AMD fan boy. He also had a first gen Razen CPU on his workstation. He got an Intel CPU after one crash and everything is fine since. He is still upset about it. Though he got a new Ryzen CPU at home and he says it's stable.
I assume that you got hit by the issue that was present in the early 1st gen Ryzen CPU-s. It did get resolved later on and AMD started a replacement program to address that particular issue.
What issues have you had on the first Gen ryzen cpus? I have been running 6 of them on my home lab (true a small sample size) and I have had no issues with them
Some were stable. Some were crashing after a random amount of time. Usually days. No kernel panic, just nothing. It didn't depend on the load, and whatever option you put on the kernel. We changed power supply and ram, and we eventually gave up.
I changed job since. I guess they still crash or have been disposed. I think it was both hardware and software, since some were working well and the crashing ones were working better on Windows.
1st gen Ryzen had a poor memory controller that was very finicky with memory. I had to swap out RAM a few times to get my 1st Gen Ryzen stable, but it's been rock solid since then. CPU / Motherboard compatibility with RAM is hard.
IIRC, there was a brief 2nd gen Ryzen glitch for crashing, which was resolved with some BIOS updates.
I've repurposed a R5 1600AE in a FreeBSD storage server, and I was frustrated by near-daily lockups after running it stably for the past few years on Linux.
After a BIOS update, an option for power supply idle control appeared, and selecting the "typical" over "low" option resolved the hangups. No C-state or C'n'Q changes required.
I did have to RMA the CPU initially when it wouldn't post with DIMMs in 2/4 slots, but later revisions seem to have quickly overcome the memory controller issues.
>They are unstable. QA is bad, gets weird errors in programs (probably programs' fault but I don't care) and if the machine fails to function in any way it becomes my fault for choosing it. That's why my company buys an Intel workstation every time.
Could you please elaborate? I have 3 amd systems at home gen2 - gen3 and they are performing well under windows and linux.
I use the win machine for gaming on tv while I work on linux with gen3. I have yet to experience any problem which caused by the cpu. And I did not encounter big issues other than the first generation ryzens in gaming.
Actually POWER won’t die, because it has IBM behind it and the POWER architecture forms the backbone of their highly profitable mainframe and high-end server business.
What I was referring to as possibly dying was POWER on the desktop generally, and Raptor/Talos specifically.
I don't have first-hand experience, but I saw a screenshot on Twitter of a Fedora system running on a Raptor workstation. The owner said he had no issues.
POWER9 and talos were interesting before the launch of ryzen, but now you can get 32 faster cores vs 8 slower cores for around the same price, its no contest whatsoever for the vast majority of people.
I am sorry to be so blunt, but you clearly have no understanding of the importance of having a fully open and auditable high performance system without any remote management devices or dark corners in the hardware or the firmware for backdoors to lurk in.
The talos II absolutely has a remote management openBMC controller, second 99.9% of people absolutely do not care about this sorta thing, for better or worse, it has nothing to do with me.
Not really. iMac Pro is Intel chips, and there's pretty much no Intel chip that beats AMD on price/performance.
Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)
> Not really. iMac Pro is Intel chips, and there's pretty much no Intel chip that beats AMD on price/performance.
Well, now this is the case, yes. Wasn't when I bought the iMac Pro. It's a very respectable machine and it has the same drawbacks as the Threadripper -- only 4 channels of memory (with 10c/20t CPU).
> Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)
Heard about that, it's quite embarrassing for Intel. As for SIMD itself, it's a sad story. Most, if not 99%, of the compilers out there don't utilise it. Makes me want to contribute to a compiler but I can't seem to find such a job, especially having never done it before.
This is quite a disappointment indeed. Turns out that compilers only use like 10% of the instructions in x86. While there are some efforts to fix this (at least for SIMD) with better heuristics, I fear that the best way to solve this might be to go with simpler ISAs and drive up the clock speed.
Absolutely. I feel that all the ~7.7k opcodes for x86_64 aren't helping things at all.
I had high hopes for RISC-V but I already heard the usual BS about "extensions that vendors may choose to implement or not" and I kind of lost hope. :(
Judging people for not sharing your non-mainstream preferences is not a great way to earn points.
POWER9 is very interesting, especially with it's open licensing. It's even in the relative price and performance category as Intel Xeons, and I'm hopeful that POWER10 on Samsung 7nm will also be competitive.
But POWER9 doesn't have the software compatibility that x86 does, nor is it remotely close in price or performance to AMD. At best, POWER9 might receive a special mention as a niche product (along with the Arm Ampere workstation[0]).
Also, RaptorCS has had problems with their support process. I know they've been working on it, but that doesn't mean they've worked through all of the teething issues.
I have a very cpu intensive application in Rust, that is able to use all cores given to it.
I am thinking about going for the Epyc 7502p with 32 cores but having a hard time knowing if the Threadripper counterpart with 32 cores would be better given its higher frequency.
Guess it is very hard to answer but which one would you go for? Will the threadripper perform much better?
I sort of figure that got put in there for context, because Rust code so commonly gets multi-threaded in a serious way because of the borrow checker and drop-in parallel libraries. It makes it a little bit more clear that, yes, this person probably will benefit a lot from having those extra cores/threads, rather than focusing on processors where they could improve performance more with better memory or clock speed options instead.
Depends on how memory intensive workload you have. AFAIK, Epyc supports 8 memory channels, while Threadripper supports only 4. So TR has effectively only 50% memory bandwidth available.
Go with the 3970X. Threadripper will be both cheaper and faster. It has between a 30%-50% clockspeed advantage, which should be fairly noticeable.
The 7502p is better in situations where you need more memory (either bandwidth or capacity) or you need to to consume less power (such as in a server deployment or a fanless case).
> The 7502p is better in situations ... (such as in a server deployment or a fanless case).
There are almost no cooling solutions that can passively dissipate the heat from a 180W TDP CPU. I am not aware of any commercially available at present. Fanless is not really in the cards for any of these CPUs.
Neato! I had seen a demo of one of their cases, but didn't realize they were actually in production, and covered up to 180W.
Thanks for sharing!
Ninja edit: Ooof $700-$1400 for the chassis and custom fab for the CPU block. If I'm going for silence, I'd probably just spring for the radiator case instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfbcD248n4Y&t=361s
Ninja edit 2: Looks like there's a retailer (rather than going through the manufacturer to Taobao) in the US selling it for $1090. Unsure where to price out a custom CPU heat spreader to integrate with this (per the Anandtech article, that was a custom component Turemetal made for one customer). Either way this is awesome to see available.
Unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to have a validation by someone trustworthy that it actually works. If you really want ECC, going with a workstation from Dell/HP/Lenovo/Apple seems still the better choice. Shame, would love to upgrade to one of these.
Depends on what you do. You'd gain 4 cores and 8 threads and also the single core performance is higher. If have some direct benchmark comparisons under https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/apps/cpu/compare?ids%5.... The blender benchmarks do not show a big difference, but things like 7zip and AES-Encoding do, so it really depends on the workload.
The 3900X has 50% more cores and Blender is embarrassingly parallel, so it's more than 50% faster, as expected.
That's the real question for whether it's worth it. For single threads the 3900X will be 10-20% faster. For well-threaded applications it's >60% faster.
Keep in mind that the 2700X still has a resale value of over $200, so if you're selling one and buying the other it's not a very expensive upgrade. But the value proposition is a lot better if you can use the extra cores. (Of course, if you can't and you just want the single-thread performance improvement, there's always the 3700X.)
It's a presentation issue. The benchmark data agrees with you, the transformation from "lower is better" to "higher is better" makes the result misleading. That needs a better solution, showing that the difference is actually quite high.
It's not a presentation issue, the pc-kombo.com site is just a garbage. In one of the Blender graphs it has the 3900X as "10839" and the 2700X as "10732" (very close together), but it links to the Anandtech results where the actual numbers are 161 and 268, not close together at all and completely different numbers. In another graph it links to a "source" where the 2700X isn't even on the page.
Their graphs are completely fictional, probably as a result of bad data scraping code since it looks like they're just pulling results (inaccurately) from other sites.
Look at the worst result in the anandtech benchmark. Remember what I said about converting from "lower is better" to "higher is better". It is a presentation issue.
If the 2700X is not on the source page that page either got changed or it's a combined benchmark that was presented in multiple articles. In which benchmark do you see that?
The numbers on that page for the 3900X and 2700X bear no resemblance to the ones in the graph that links to it.
Compare to their first 7zip graph which links here and contains the actual numbers for the 3900X and 2700X, because they evidently scraped that one correctly:
Computerbase hides some benchmark results by default. Click at the top right "+29 Einträge" to see 29 processors more, including the 2700X.
I understand that the number in that specific benchmarks is confusing right now. Again, that's from the conversion done for the "lower is better" benchmarks. That's why it's not the same number, just the same distance. I hope a better solution can be used soon.
It's not the same distance though. The way to convert "lower is better" to "higher is better" is to invert the results, e.g. convert seconds per render to renders per second. You take 1/X where the original number was X. Or do renders per day if you don't want results as small fractions, which just means multiplying the inverted results by a constant, e.g. the number of seconds per day.
For both the Anandtech and Computerbase Blender results, the 2700X takes ~60% longer in reality, which is ~66% more renders per second (which is the same percentage more per day), but the difference in the length of the bars on pc-kombo.com is <10% for Computerbase and ~1% for Anandtech. Something has gone wrong there.
It's the same numerical distance. Look how small the bars are at the anandtech page, https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2247 also does not show you the one is 66% faster - same problem, just inverted. But the original is easier to get, and 1/X style comparisons could work - or in general just "how much faster" bars. Thanks :)
Actually the bar for the 2700X on the Anandtech page is 66% longer than the bar for the 3900X, though it's admittedly harder to eyeball when they're both that short because of the much slower processors at the bottom of the page. You can imagine how much easier that page would be to see if they didn't include those two Celerons at the bottom. (You can also imagine how that would affect the results using the math you were using; if adding or removing a CPU changes not just the length of the bar but the actual numbers for an entirely different CPU, something's fishy.)
Doing 1/X for timed benchmarks helps that for the modern processors though, because it makes it so the bars that are short and hard to eyeball are the slowest processors rather than the fastest ones.
Id wait for the next set of chips. There is IPC and clock gains to be had, but unless you are often cpu-bound, I think your money would be better spent or saved
I wasted 6h of research trying to find a small machine with R1606G (or any of the V1000's) with dual 10GbE NICs, and failed. :(
Even Sapphire who promised such a machine retracted their pages and now only their dual 1GbE NIC offering are being sold[0]. The dual 10GbE NIC variants only exist in two PDFs[1][2] now.
I went through AMD's official list[3] of embedded offerings based on the latest R1000/V1000 platforms but exactly zero of the options have the promised dual 10GbE NICs.
Can somebody point me in the right direction? I need a strong and power-efficient embedded NAS with 1 or 2 10GbE NICs that covers several other homelab/server needs and I feel the R1606G is the best compromise in terms of money, power, wattage expense, form factor and required cooling (ideally I'd keep that thing in my bedroom or living room and want to never hear its fans but hey, it can sit in a closet as well).
I am willing to look elsewhere, it's just that the latest R1000/V1000 offerings seem to be so good!
Depending on how many hdd's you're trying to use, it might be the go. Low power (energy use wise), but decent cpu, already assembled, etc.
It's not as small as a NUC, but the older generation one I have here is about 1ft x 1ft x 1ft (easily fits on a shelf, under desk, etc), and is pretty much silent.
That is actually an amazing recommendation. I don't mind it being small or large that much to be honest -- I would prioritise it being [almost] silent. And I don't think I'd need more than 4x 12TB disks for a few years.
Do you use yours as a NAS + media server? That's what I plan to use mine for.
Mine is only really used as a NAS (file serving of smb/cifs mostly), not as a media server.
It runs FreeNAS (works "out of the box"), which does have media server capabilities and many people apparently use them. I just have no real need for media server stuff personally. :)
The Asrock Rack X470D4U is pretty nice, and there is a variant with onboard dual 10GbE (X470D4U2-2T) albeit only 6 onboard SATA ports and loses the middle x4 slot. The base X470D4U also has the middle slot attached to the "NVMe lanes" (rather than fed from the chipset like normal) so it actually has 20 CPU-direct lanes.
If you put a Noctua L9a on it, anything will be silent (although you may need to set fans manually on a server board, or use the included "low noise adapter" to drop the fan speed). That plus a 3600 (or maybe a 3100/3300X if you can source one yet) would be a good little NAS build. Has IPMI, which is nice if you will be running headless.
Or if you don't care about IPMI (if it's not going to be running headless) then you can use pretty much whatever mITX/mATX board you want.
This is also a very solid tech, just looked it up.
Trouble is, I can't find it anywhere except in the US Amazon, which will set me back like 30-40% premium on top of the $450 that the motherboard costs. :(
If I am going for that kind of money then I'll probably just shell out $1000 for some of the extremely good Xeon D mobos.
That sounded great. Quick search, and there it is for $109 on the HPE website. NICE! Couple hours later, I got an email saying they were cancelling all orders for May 5th, as they had a bad price, and that if I wanted to still buy it I should go to Tiger Direct.
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 currently rocks 103 CPU-Mark/$ whereas Threadripper 3960X has 40 CPU-Mark/$. You get a lot of power out of Threadrippers but you loose a lot of value.
A major drawback of CPU benchmark is that it doesn't include second-hand CPU prices. Actually many older series of Xeon CPUs can have better score/$ ratio. For example: E5 2695V4 is sold at $199 on AliExpress with ~20000 benchmark score on cpubenchmark (excluding the last anomaly data point), which suggests ~100 CPU-Mark/$
You can and should. It's crazy to try to integrate your own workstation, for the reasons the article states but then ignores: ECC doesn't actually work on any of the random Ryzen motherboards, and Intel is sending all of their parts to OEMs instead of retailers. An HP Z4 workstation comes with ECC memory, actually boots, and all the other stuff you want from a _work_station.
I have a HP Z440 at home - E5-1680v3 (8 cores, 16 hyperthreaded), reasonably fast for everything I do. I replaced the GPU (some random Quadro) with a RTX-2070. Now, 6 months later, I get random beeps on boot (6 beeps = GPU error). I wish I stayed with the workstation as it was. The faster GPU was not worth the trouble.
Overall, I am a convert to workstations with ECC. Worth it the peace of mind that I won't corrupt my files and that it won't randomly crash. Had my share of those over years.
Just bought a pair of used Intel E5-2673v4 (20C/40T) for $450 each, an E-ATX ASUS motherboard for 99EUR, and 256GB DDR4 for $700.
A little older (~2017), but the whole system at a lower price than a 3970X, for similar performance on my embarrassingly parallel workloads, at similar TDP.
There is no way those even come close to a single 3970x or even the 3960x. This latest generation of AMD processors made all the old “good deals” pretty much crap.
Not saying your machine isn’t nice, but the CPUs were probably not worth it. Each of the 30000 series Threadrippers will be about 50% faster in single core benchmarks than the 2673v4 and have better multi-core results.
Updated to 3970x a few days ago. The performance has been good (llvm compiles around 5 minutes!) and it is stable (previous 2920x has soft lockups and have to workaround with idle=halt: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683). Ubuntu 20.04 installed without much issue (other than NVIDIA driver, that's a different story).
Every linux distro I have tried works fine with my Ryzen 3900X. Ubuntu 18/19/20. Maybe threadripper had some extra issues early but its likely fine now.
The only Ryzen/Linux issue I've heard of is on launch week of Zen2 some distros of Linux were broken by an AMD bug which was fixed pretty quick.
In fact performance is better for many cored Ryzens than windows usually.
If you stick with 1 or 2 GPUs and common mainstream motherboards, more recent Linux distro (Ubuntu 20.04). You will be fine. The most problem I had is due to the "high-end" motherboard.
Few months back I put together Ryzen 3950x with an ASUS X570-ACE motherboard. Has been completely painless running Fedora. With a Gen3 Ryzen and a mainstream linux distro you probably can't go wrong.
If you want something that just works, buy something with Linux preinstalled and supported. If no vendor offers the distro you want, buy from a Linux vendor anyway and install what you want. When people buy Windows hardware then complain that Linux doesn't work it sends the wrong message to the market.
They are buying Clevo gear and slapping their logo on it. A sticker with a 40% markup does not change hardware support. In fact, if you take the time to read the links I've presented you'll eventually stumble on comments stating that they even fail to support basic hardware shipped by Clevo such as fingerprint readers.
I have a home server with 32GB of RAM that's been up 24/7. I've been running Debian testing on it. I started with Ryzen 1700, then upgraded to Ryzen 2700. It's been running a dozen of VMs with Windows and Linux. Linux VMs run services like Samba, Kubernetes, Postgres and photo sharing albums inside. Windows VMs are used to run photo editing software, so it's not idle at all. I also compile Golang projects on that box frequently. The current uptime of the entire thing is 92 days since last reboot, which was intentional (new kernel). So... quite stable.
But when I bought it a couple of years ago, I experienced some lock-ups, about once a month, especially when the CPU was idle. I replaced the "gamer" motherboard with [1] and the problems disappeared. I think a lot, but possibly not all, of problems you see online are caused by gaming community itself. For whatever reason, that culture/market is plagued by premature/buggy product launches (motherboard+UEFI) and oftentimes CPU has nothing to do with user issues.
TBH I don't use sound, and the GPU there is very basic ASpeed chip, the primary "UI" is IPMI, it's a server motherboard after all.
But when you connect to a Windows VM via RDP, there's an option to pipe sound back to the client via a virtual sound card. On a gigabit ethernet, you can watch Youtube videos this way. :)
I've had a first gen Threadripper and ASrock X399 board from right around launch and they've just worked the entire time (ECC RAM). The first gen Ryzen (desktop) parts had some issues that required RMAs for some end-users, but that was 2-3 generations ago.
I've been really happy with my Ryzen 9 3900X on a ASUS X570-PLUS AM4 TUF motherboard [0], with 64GB of RAM and a reused GeForce GTW 970 (built this Feb).
No-drama install on Ubuntu 19.10 (18.04 didn't boot due to drivers?). No kernel panics or even X lockups. It's wonderful to have such a fast development box.
If the stock cooler is too loud, the Noctua NH-D15 is silent until full load when it just audibly whispers.
(I'd been developing PhotoStructure on older hardware to make inefficient code paths more immediately painful, but I needed a beefer box to replicate parallelism issues that some of my beta users were seeing. Thankfully, those issues were immediately apparent, and library syncs are dramatically faster now).
My suggestion is to get a tower server from a good brand that fits your needs. My workhorse box is an aging Xeon E3 "server" that has been running Linux flawlessly from day one. It's replacement will probably be a similar box. You can go all the way from low-end server to MacPro-killer monster (dual socket Xeon Platinum, multiple GPU boards, insane disk IO and a couple terabytes of RAM) directly from Dell's website.
I bought a 3700X in September, two months after they were released. (took a while for prices/supply to stabilize) I have never had any problems with it.
Linux problems only crop up with heavily integrated custom systems. Typically laptops that cram a ton of shit into the smallest possible space, and then try to work around incompatibilities with extensive driver customization. Typically, if you can wipe a system's hard disk, install Windows on it, and only install drivers from the chipset manufacturer rather than from the brand of the laptop, and everything works, you'll be fine. But if your Lenovo laptop has a Realtek wireless chip in it, and the driver downloaded directly from Realtek is flaky, but the driver downloaded from Lenovo works, it will be flaky in Linux too. The laptop brand isn't going to spend the money to monkey with some weird driver because they like spending money - they're spending that money because they're doing something the chipset maker doesn't support.
These problems almost never happen on desktops with full sized ATX motherboards. First of all, the expectation is that you'll buy a copy of Windows and the motherboard manufacturer doesn't have the opportunity to slip in their pile of custom drivers and other assorted crapware into a custom Windows install. Second, with plenty of space on the motherboard there's no need for fancy tricks that fall down when you look at them funny.
I have a first-gen Ryzen system (the one that people have had issues with on linux) with an NVIDIA graphics card.
PopOS has been rock solid on it. I have 19.10 but will be upgrading to 20.04 this weekend. As someone who doesn't want to spend all day futzing around with my system and just get work done, I'm very happy with this distro.
I did the consumer 3700X. The Asrock micro ATX x570 board worked w/o problems. Well, except for the fact I bought "registered memory" instead of ECC....wooops. But once corrected I haven't had any problems. Had to throw in a GeForce 1030 card for monitor support but has been running Ubuntu for admitted basic fileserver needs w/o a hitch.
I assume the more common consumer processors have been tested more than the thread ripper ones, being they are more common and out longer.
I think Gigabyte Aorus line is just entirely screwed up.
Never had any issues with any of my desktop hardware before. Did a 3900X+Gigabyte Aorus Elite X570 build in december. Aside from overheating and throttling issues (which I mostly sorted out), everything was fine for a while, but then my mobo straight up died in February. I tried everything possible with no success, it wouldn't even get to the BIOS screen, not even talking about the OS load screen. The error code on the mobo was pointing at the GPU, but that definitely wasn't it (that GPU worked fine for years before, and currently works fine in my build after I got rid of that Gigabyte mobo).
Then I saw a friend doing a build in March with the same components. I didn't think much of my mobo dying, since random accidents happen, so I didn't really discourage him from getting the same mobo. His mobo died on day 2 after the build.
I got a X570 asus mobo instead as a replacement, and had zero issues since. Neither with stability/perf nor with overheating. Aside from swapping the mobo and adding an extra SSD, I had made zero changes to my build, so I blame solely the mobo.
I have a Gigabyte B450 I AORUS PRO (Mini ITX) for my 3900X. Didn't had any issues so far, apart from the initial Windows installation being a bit tricky because it bluescreen due to a missing Intel Wifi driver.
Things are running stable, and I didn't had any overheating issue (even though people told me that board would never work due to too week VRMs on B450 series).
My bad, I should've specified that I was talking about their X570 AORUS lineup, not all AORUS mobos in general, that one is on me. Since yours is B450, I wouldn't expect the same issues to surface as in the X570 mobos, makes sense.
I run Ubuntu 20.04 on 3700x/Gigabyte Aorus Ultra/2080ti/32gb ram/970 evo plus and so far everything is OK, although I can't seem to pair my headphones via bluetooth. Had some lock ups with vscode but that seems to have been fixed.
Knock on wood, I've had good luck with the Aorus Master from Gigabyte. The only thing I'm missing support for (and not a dealbreaker) is S/PDIF for digital audio out on Linux.
I had no install issues. It ran rock solid under several days of memtest86 and prime95, the latter on both Windows and Linux.
My only "complaint" is that it cannot maintain full turbo indefinitely on even a beefy air cooling setup in a big case with massive airflow. I have 7x140mm fans in the case and on the cooler. The case maintains ambient temperature, except for the (short) stream of air from the CPU cooler to the rear exhaust. Under sustained synthetic load, the CPU will run at >4.4GHz all-core until the heat sink is saturated (usually ~10 minutes), and then slowly stabilize down to a 3.9GHz-4.1GHz range for all cores and stay there. An eventual project will be a water cooling loop with much radiator surface area.
Need a Zfs with 8 disk nas and on searching for a ECC based Server. Got It reverse as got the disk, the 10g Ethernet card and Sata card. 1900 seems too old. Is 3900 good for this?
The 3900 seems like massive overkill for that. You might want to look at something like the 3400G or 3200G, since who wants to buy a separate GPU for a NAS anyway.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadI'd not ignore Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9. If you can work with 128GB ram (and especially if you just want a regular strong system with the usual 16GB) 3700X, 3900X and 3950X are really strong processor and apart from the last one a lot cheaper. Most developers don't even need to go that high, not even on a workstation, one based on the Ryzen 5 3600 would not be weak.
Sure, it has half as many cores as the 3960X Threadripper listed, but 12C/24T is still a lot.
Also, it's much easier to cool -- 105W TDP vs 280W on the Threadrippers.
I built one, a Noctua NH-D15 can cool it at 16*4ghz at 700RPM, so basically almost inaudible even at full load.
No ECC, though.
Is ECC useful for a workstation? I thought it was useful for shared servers (VM hosts) to protect against rowhammer & co, but does is have other uses?
Without ECC, modern systems (>= a few GB RAM) will have bits flipping pretty much daily.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401
Ultimately these flips are caused by charged particles hitting the memory module (a so called 'single event upset' or SEU), and the number of charged particles hitting the modules has not increased with density (although the modules are more sensitive to SEU, it's a smaller effect).
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I think the environment in racks for nodes in whichever formfactor in racks is toxic. Be it EMF interference, power distribution issues, vibrations, and/or temperature. You don't have that in a single system at home, when it is built in a good way, and has stable power. Or at least to a lesser degree.
Until they happen more often that expected. It's something that varies based on building, temperature, etc. environmental factors. And of course on your luck with memory module lottery.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I assume the 3950X is the same way. The hardware is there, the official blessing is not.
edit: I mean near the DIMMs. Don't try this if you are afraid, or need your hardware. This is a test i'm doing with every build, or any system i have to fix. And it crashes every system, though not at the same places and in the same ways. So far it didn't damage anything permanently, but no guaranties it won't.
edit: By searching for networks i mean for the telcos, not wifi. Then it uses all bands it is capable of.
But I'm of course not suggesting to run it in this state whil doing anything important.
[1]: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Pro-WS-X570-ACE/
Ryzen has always been very "sensitive" to low-clocked RAM and shows some pretty good scaling as you increase frequency and tighten timings and the ECC UDIMMs on the market are just not binned to do that.
Or convince AMD to stop artificially not supporting registered memory on Ryzen/Threadripper -- the early Athlons supported both.
I wonder if those would run on my Haswell-E xeons. They support RDIMMs, and they are unlocked so nominally they should support higher RAM clocks too (although I've never tried it with RDIMMs, only UDIMMs).
More recently, the W-3175X (Threadripper's real competitor) supports RDIMM as well. So Threadripper actually offers less features than the competition here.
I really would like to see the Threadripper series merged with the 7002P series though. Right now there is no option that gives you both Threadripper-level clocks and large quantities of RAM, the frequency-optimized parts are still a large compromise in performance and aren't widely supported. There is no part that gets you to 4 GHZ on 64 cores with 512+ GB of RAM, despite all of these capabilities existing in their respective segments.
When you are shipping a 64C HEDT processor there is really no longer any meaningful distinction between that and a server processor. And 256GB simply is not enough RAM for a 64C processor. AMD could still upcharge on the multi-socket models, but they are drawing lines between product segments that no longer make sense now that they have pushed core counts so high.
Basically, give us a modern successor to the Intel X5670 series. It's the top of the line, you're paying $4000 for a workstation processor, you should get the whole processor and not have a bunch of disabled features.
The really funny thing is, it's not even a money thing, Epyc isn't even priced significantly higher. 7702P is $4150 at Provantage (HPE p/n P16660-B21) vs $3990 for the 3990X. The 7402P (HPE p/n P16664-B21) is actually $250 cheaper than the 3960X. AMD is no longer using the "traditional" model where workstation is cheaper than server. Workstation is now just as expensive as server. So it's not like giving you Epyc capabilities would mean AMD foregoing any money.
AMD is just drawing arbitrary lines between these product segments because they can.
They should've done that when they changed the socket for the latest generation. Just admit that the existence of Socket TR4 was a mistake and release the new Threadrippers on Socket SP3.
I suspect there are even some people interested in dual socket workstations with 2TB of memory that nonetheless have a 4.5GHz boost clock, because workstations often have mixed workloads. And there is no point in doing market segmentation when all the prices are the same anyway, it's just incompatibility for no reason.
Cooling would become a big issue, though. Air cooling a 280W 3970X in a big tower with sufficient airflow to maintain ambient temperature internally is difficult. I cannot maintain max turbo on all cores.
Putting this in 1 or 2 Us in a server would likely be impossible without water cooling (requiring piping to external liquid coolers (whether radiators or chillers)). There's only so much that increasing air velocity can do in cooling.
I don't know if this is the primary thing holding back Epyc specs, but I know it will be an issue.
huh, where ? from what I see here the 3900X is listed at 450€ and the 3950X at 900€ on average in the mainstream websites...
If you've gotten locked into needing that, you have no other options aside from not using hardware that you can currently slot.
AMD entirely eliminated the lower end HEDT parts and raised prices for TR3.
Intel has a nasty shortage, too.
Compare that to x99, which had an entry level msrp of just $350, but often went for exact same price as 7700k, significantly under $300.
HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.
That's exactly the area where I argue there is some fuzziness.
For PCIE lanes, it's true that AMD only has 24 lanes (4 of which dedicated for the chipset) but it has the equivalent of 48 PCIE gen3 lanes in terms of raw bandwidth. Now, it's still not as flexible as having that many actual PCIE gen3 lanes, but high-end x570 motherboards do support some level of bifurcation. You also need compatible devices, but we already compatible storage. There are a couple GPUs out now, but given the upcoming launches of RDNA2 and Ampere GPUs, I expect there will be plenty more compatible GPUs. X570 is somewhat limited now, but as more gen4 devices are released that chipset will only become more versatile.
For RAM, there you have another fuzzy spot. I mean sure, HEDT usually has 4 channels, but what does that mean in terms of memory capacity and bandwidth? Only within the last year or so have 32GB UDIMMs been available (iirc) so HEDT was limited to 128GB until very recently. And if you really need more, you can use an Optane storage device as a swap partition (It's been done before, it's fine). As for bandwidth, 2 channels is a bit of a limitation, but Ryzen does support faster memory, which can help bridge the gap a little bit to quad channel Intel parts running at lower RAM speeds.
I'm not saying that Ryzen + X570 is HEDT, but it's so darn close that I can understand why AMD chose not to produce low-end TR 3000 parts. Between Ryzen 9, TR 2000, Epyc 7002P, and limited use of TSMCs fabs, I think the move they made was smart.
> HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.
I don't think it's a bad value prop overall. We have a $4000 CPU that's beating out two $10,000 CPUs (dual Xeon Platinums), which is a phenomenal improvement in value. I think we are in this weird space where, when trying to buy the system capabilities you need (in terms of cores, clock speeds, memory capacity, and expansion slots) you sometimes have to pay a bit extra for capabilities that you don't need. That's unfortunate and I hope next gen fixes that. However, it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel will have new HEDT parts for at least a year.
I ssh in from my XPS 13 running Fedora and use X forwarding to do work on it. It's so much faster than trying to do everything on an ultrabook. Not to mention quite a bit cheaper than a high-end laptop.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
The VSCode remote extension installs extensions onto a VSCode remote client installed on the remote machine. So the C++ extensions spawns rg processes on the remote which is a lot faster.
I was under the impression that sshfs is based on FUSE, which works in userspace.
It sounds like an amazing build, but definitely not needed for most tasks. The XPS 13 seems a little wasteful in the setup. You could practically do it with a chromebook.
-U series (somehow, magically the same designation between AMD and Intel) will typically run ~15W, though this is configurable by the OEM (sometimes in BIOS?).
-H series (also, magically the same designation) will typically run ~45W, and this is also configurable by the OEM.
The increased power envelope of -H series typically allows higher base clocks. Turbo can sometimes be close between a 15W and a 45W chip, but a -H series will be able to maintain higher frequencies for longer, thanks to a superior thermal solution.
I think some may discount Ryzen 9 because it's technically not "HEDT", but the market boundaries have changed over time.
HEDT used to include all CPUs more $400 dollars, all of which shared the same socket (for a given generation). Mainstream was on a separate socket and all below $400.
However, Broadwell-E and Skylake-X moved the top end of the HEDT from $1K to $2K, which meant that HEDT spanned a huge segment.
What AMD did with Ryzen 9 and X570 was to take the middle segment of that HEDT market and make it it's own segment.
It did carve out a pricing segment there, but the really cool thing is that it's so compatible, backward and forward with other CPUs in the Ryzen family. There is huge upgrade potential.
It would be entirely reasonable to build a system around an R7, with the expectation that its workload will grow, and throw in a discounted 3950X in a year when Zen3 hits.
[1] Well, has them for a reasonable price. Newegg as third-party sellers offering a few of them for 60%+ markups, but I feel better paying $500 for a $500 board than I do paying $275 for a $160 board.
If only 12-16 cores with 64GB of RAM are enough to be useful, then the Ryzen 9 gets A LOT of work done for an unprecedented low price. But if the work being done can make use of 128GB quad-channel RAM and 24-32-64 cores, then the $350 extra for a Threadripper motherboard is nothing. Doesn't take many billable hours to pay for it :)
Yeah. Downvote as much as you like fanboys. Can't dilute the truth.
> The downside to going Intel here is finding a CPU for sale.
Haha what?
People dealing with professional softwares also have problems that are magically solved when they use Intel. Have no statistics on that tho.
Just to be clear, I am not defending defective and/or unreliable products, just want to make sure the fingers are pointed into the right direction.
When those things happen they just send them back to the distributor without testing further because they're not sure. They tell them that a)it's not their fault and returns the cpu or say b)it's their fault and sends a replacement.
Could be that AMD is blindly replacing CPUs rather than test them like Intel does.
In my new job, I have a co-worker who is an AMD fan boy. He also had a first gen Razen CPU on his workstation. He got an Intel CPU after one crash and everything is fine since. He is still upset about it. Though he got a new Ryzen CPU at home and he says it's stable.
IIRC, there was a brief 2nd gen Ryzen glitch for crashing, which was resolved with some BIOS updates.
After a BIOS update, an option for power supply idle control appeared, and selecting the "typical" over "low" option resolved the hangups. No C-state or C'n'Q changes required.
I did have to RMA the CPU initially when it wouldn't post with DIMMs in 2/4 slots, but later revisions seem to have quickly overcome the memory controller issues.
Could you please elaborate? I have 3 amd systems at home gen2 - gen3 and they are performing well under windows and linux. I use the win machine for gaming on tv while I work on linux with gen3. I have yet to experience any problem which caused by the cpu. And I did not encounter big issues other than the first generation ryzens in gaming.
No mention of POWER9, for example (my own personal favourite), which I’m running on my workstation (https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/)
There’s several other ISAs out there (ARM, obviously, but desktop-, let alone workstation-class chips are hard at least for now a dicy proposition).
EDIT: Surprised by all the downvotes. Is mentioning anything outside the domain of x86 considered controversial nowadays?!
Well yes, it probably is. That's another reason why everyone is ignoring it.
What I was referring to as possibly dying was POWER on the desktop generally, and Raptor/Talos specifically.
I also don't like that some languages have become a niche within a niche with similar consequences.
https://ubuntu.com/download/server/power
I like the idea of a POWER9 desktop machine, but I don't see the pricepoint ever getting to the point where I'd seriously consider one.
Nobody will consider an alternative platform until it becomes affordable.
Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)
Well, now this is the case, yes. Wasn't when I bought the iMac Pro. It's a very respectable machine and it has the same drawbacks as the Threadripper -- only 4 channels of memory (with 10c/20t CPU).
> Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)
Heard about that, it's quite embarrassing for Intel. As for SIMD itself, it's a sad story. Most, if not 99%, of the compilers out there don't utilise it. Makes me want to contribute to a compiler but I can't seem to find such a job, especially having never done it before.
I had high hopes for RISC-V but I already heard the usual BS about "extensions that vendors may choose to implement or not" and I kind of lost hope. :(
POWER9 is very interesting, especially with it's open licensing. It's even in the relative price and performance category as Intel Xeons, and I'm hopeful that POWER10 on Samsung 7nm will also be competitive.
But POWER9 doesn't have the software compatibility that x86 does, nor is it remotely close in price or performance to AMD. At best, POWER9 might receive a special mention as a niche product (along with the Arm Ampere workstation[0]).
Also, RaptorCS has had problems with their support process. I know they've been working on it, but that doesn't mean they've worked through all of the teething issues.
[0]https://www.anandtech.com/show/15737/arm-development-for-the...
I am thinking about going for the Epyc 7502p with 32 cores but having a hard time knowing if the Threadripper counterpart with 32 cores would be better given its higher frequency.
Guess it is very hard to answer but which one would you go for? Will the threadripper perform much better?
On HN I still don't know if it's an easy way to get upvotes, or the best way to get down-voted hell.
(I haven't checked if they've different cache sizes ;>)
The 7502p is better in situations where you need more memory (either bandwidth or capacity) or you need to to consume less power (such as in a server deployment or a fanless case).
There are almost no cooling solutions that can passively dissipate the heat from a 180W TDP CPU. I am not aware of any commercially available at present. Fanless is not really in the cards for any of these CPUs.
Thanks for sharing!
Ninja edit: Ooof $700-$1400 for the chassis and custom fab for the CPU block. If I'm going for silence, I'd probably just spring for the radiator case instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfbcD248n4Y&t=361s
Ninja edit 2: Looks like there's a retailer (rather than going through the manufacturer to Taobao) in the US selling it for $1090. Unsure where to price out a custom CPU heat spreader to integrate with this (per the Anandtech article, that was a custom component Turemetal made for one customer). Either way this is awesome to see available.
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2125?vs=2519
The 3900X has 50% more cores and Blender is embarrassingly parallel, so it's more than 50% faster, as expected.
That's the real question for whether it's worth it. For single threads the 3900X will be 10-20% faster. For well-threaded applications it's >60% faster.
Keep in mind that the 2700X still has a resale value of over $200, so if you're selling one and buying the other it's not a very expensive upgrade. But the value proposition is a lot better if you can use the extra cores. (Of course, if you can't and you just want the single-thread performance improvement, there's always the 3700X.)
Their graphs are completely fictional, probably as a result of bad data scraping code since it looks like they're just pulling results (inaccurately) from other sites.
If the 2700X is not on the source page that page either got changed or it's a combined benchmark that was presented in multiple articles. In which benchmark do you see that?
https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/apps/cpu/compare?ids%5...
This is the Anandtech benchmark that it links to from the first Blender graph (you can click on the graph):
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2247
The numbers on that page for the 3900X and 2700X bear no resemblance to the ones in the graph that links to it.
Compare to their first 7zip graph which links here and contains the actual numbers for the 3900X and 2700X, because they evidently scraped that one correctly:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2240
This is the page they link for the second Blender graph:
https://www.computerbase.de/2019-11/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...
The numbers in their graph don't match what that page has for the 3900X and the 2700X doesn't appear on that page at all.
I understand that the number in that specific benchmarks is confusing right now. Again, that's from the conversion done for the "lower is better" benchmarks. That's why it's not the same number, just the same distance. I hope a better solution can be used soon.
For both the Anandtech and Computerbase Blender results, the 2700X takes ~60% longer in reality, which is ~66% more renders per second (which is the same percentage more per day), but the difference in the length of the bars on pc-kombo.com is <10% for Computerbase and ~1% for Anandtech. Something has gone wrong there.
...
What people are going to care about is the difference as a percentage. :)
> Look how small the bars are at the anandtech page, https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2247 also does not show you the one is 66% faster - same problem, just inverted.
Actually the bar for the 2700X on the Anandtech page is 66% longer than the bar for the 3900X, though it's admittedly harder to eyeball when they're both that short because of the much slower processors at the bottom of the page. You can imagine how much easier that page would be to see if they didn't include those two Celerons at the bottom. (You can also imagine how that would affect the results using the math you were using; if adding or removing a CPU changes not just the length of the bar but the actual numbers for an entirely different CPU, something's fishy.)
Doing 1/X for timed benchmarks helps that for the modern processors though, because it makes it so the bars that are short and hard to eyeball are the slowest processors rather than the fastest ones.
I wasted 6h of research trying to find a small machine with R1606G (or any of the V1000's) with dual 10GbE NICs, and failed. :(
Even Sapphire who promised such a machine retracted their pages and now only their dual 1GbE NIC offering are being sold[0]. The dual 10GbE NIC variants only exist in two PDFs[1][2] now.
I went through AMD's official list[3] of embedded offerings based on the latest R1000/V1000 platforms but exactly zero of the options have the promised dual 10GbE NICs.
Can somebody point me in the right direction? I need a strong and power-efficient embedded NAS with 1 or 2 10GbE NICs that covers several other homelab/server needs and I feel the R1606G is the best compromise in terms of money, power, wattage expense, form factor and required cooling (ideally I'd keep that thing in my bedroom or living room and want to never hear its fans but hey, it can sit in a closet as well).
I am willing to look elsewhere, it's just that the latest R1000/V1000 offerings seem to be so good!
[0] https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/ipc-fp5v-1ge
[1] https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/...
[2] https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/...
[3] https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions
[0] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mellanox-ConnectX-3-QDR-QSFP-Infini...
https://www.servethehome.com/hpe-proliant-microserver-gen10-...
Depending on how many hdd's you're trying to use, it might be the go. Low power (energy use wise), but decent cpu, already assembled, etc.
It's not as small as a NUC, but the older generation one I have here is about 1ft x 1ft x 1ft (easily fits on a shelf, under desk, etc), and is pretty much silent.
Do you use yours as a NAS + media server? That's what I plan to use mine for.
It runs FreeNAS (works "out of the box"), which does have media server capabilities and many people apparently use them. I just have no real need for media server stuff personally. :)
https://www.freenas.org/download-freenas-release/
If you put a Noctua L9a on it, anything will be silent (although you may need to set fans manually on a server board, or use the included "low noise adapter" to drop the fan speed). That plus a 3600 (or maybe a 3100/3300X if you can source one yet) would be a good little NAS build. Has IPMI, which is nice if you will be running headless.
Or if you don't care about IPMI (if it's not going to be running headless) then you can use pretty much whatever mITX/mATX board you want.
Trouble is, I can't find it anywhere except in the US Amazon, which will set me back like 30-40% premium on top of the $450 that the motherboard costs. :(
If I am going for that kind of money then I'll probably just shell out $1000 for some of the extremely good Xeon D mobos.
Wow
Still sitting there at that price.
https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/servers/proliant-microserver/proli...
> From $109.99
Sounds like the opportunity there, is in finding a place that does price matching. :)
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 currently rocks 103 CPU-Mark/$ whereas Threadripper 3960X has 40 CPU-Mark/$. You get a lot of power out of Threadrippers but you loose a lot of value.
Overall, I am a convert to workstations with ECC. Worth it the peace of mind that I won't corrupt my files and that it won't randomly crash. Had my share of those over years.
A little older (~2017), but the whole system at a lower price than a 3970X, for similar performance on my embarrassingly parallel workloads, at similar TDP.
Not saying your machine isn’t nice, but the CPUs were probably not worth it. Each of the 30000 series Threadrippers will be about 50% faster in single core benchmarks than the 2673v4 and have better multi-core results.
It is still rough though, mostly around the mobo. The Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme mobo doesn't work out of the gate: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/enatk1/gigabyte_t..., https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/ankjfx/inte...
Ubuntu 18.04 also has an issue with the dated kernel on 3970x: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Bo... that can be workaround by mce=off. Due to combination of that and NVIDIA driver, I did 20.04, and it has been stable so far.
The only Ryzen/Linux issue I've heard of is on launch week of Zen2 some distros of Linux were broken by an AMD bug which was fixed pretty quick.
In fact performance is better for many cored Ryzens than windows usually.
If you want something that just works, buy something with Linux preinstalled and supported. If no vendor offers the distro you want, buy from a Linux vendor anyway and install what you want. When people buy Windows hardware then complain that Linux doesn't work it sends the wrong message to the market.
System76 is known for simply rebranding cheap Clevo/Sager laptops.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17039414
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17049463
Figuring out which Clevo laptops can run Linux and which ones can't is work that is worth money.
But when I bought it a couple of years ago, I experienced some lock-ups, about once a month, especially when the CPU was idle. I replaced the "gamer" motherboard with [1] and the problems disappeared. I think a lot, but possibly not all, of problems you see online are caused by gaming community itself. For whatever reason, that culture/market is plagued by premature/buggy product launches (motherboard+UEFI) and oftentimes CPU has nothing to do with user issues.
[1] https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X...
But when you connect to a Windows VM via RDP, there's an option to pipe sound back to the client via a virtual sound card. On a gigabit ethernet, you can watch Youtube videos this way. :)
No-drama install on Ubuntu 19.10 (18.04 didn't boot due to drivers?). No kernel panics or even X lockups. It's wonderful to have such a fast development box.
If the stock cooler is too loud, the Noctua NH-D15 is silent until full load when it just audibly whispers.
(I'd been developing PhotoStructure on older hardware to make inefficient code paths more immediately painful, but I needed a beefer box to replicate parallelism issues that some of my beta users were seeing. Thankfully, those issues were immediately apparent, and library syncs are dramatically faster now).
[0] https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/TUF-GAMING-X570-PLUS/
Linux problems only crop up with heavily integrated custom systems. Typically laptops that cram a ton of shit into the smallest possible space, and then try to work around incompatibilities with extensive driver customization. Typically, if you can wipe a system's hard disk, install Windows on it, and only install drivers from the chipset manufacturer rather than from the brand of the laptop, and everything works, you'll be fine. But if your Lenovo laptop has a Realtek wireless chip in it, and the driver downloaded directly from Realtek is flaky, but the driver downloaded from Lenovo works, it will be flaky in Linux too. The laptop brand isn't going to spend the money to monkey with some weird driver because they like spending money - they're spending that money because they're doing something the chipset maker doesn't support.
These problems almost never happen on desktops with full sized ATX motherboards. First of all, the expectation is that you'll buy a copy of Windows and the motherboard manufacturer doesn't have the opportunity to slip in their pile of custom drivers and other assorted crapware into a custom Windows install. Second, with plenty of space on the motherboard there's no need for fancy tricks that fall down when you look at them funny.
PopOS has been rock solid on it. I have 19.10 but will be upgrading to 20.04 this weekend. As someone who doesn't want to spend all day futzing around with my system and just get work done, I'm very happy with this distro.
I assume the more common consumer processors have been tested more than the thread ripper ones, being they are more common and out longer.
Registered ECC memory is for larger amounts, mostly used in servers or extreme workstations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_memory
In reality, registered non-ECC is uncommon because the situations that create the need for RDIMMs typically coincide with the need for ECC.
For TR and Ryzen you have to buy unregistered DIMMs, aka UDIMMs. This is documented on the data sheets for the CPUs as well as the motherboards.
Never had any issues with any of my desktop hardware before. Did a 3900X+Gigabyte Aorus Elite X570 build in december. Aside from overheating and throttling issues (which I mostly sorted out), everything was fine for a while, but then my mobo straight up died in February. I tried everything possible with no success, it wouldn't even get to the BIOS screen, not even talking about the OS load screen. The error code on the mobo was pointing at the GPU, but that definitely wasn't it (that GPU worked fine for years before, and currently works fine in my build after I got rid of that Gigabyte mobo).
Then I saw a friend doing a build in March with the same components. I didn't think much of my mobo dying, since random accidents happen, so I didn't really discourage him from getting the same mobo. His mobo died on day 2 after the build.
I got a X570 asus mobo instead as a replacement, and had zero issues since. Neither with stability/perf nor with overheating. Aside from swapping the mobo and adding an extra SSD, I had made zero changes to my build, so I blame solely the mobo.
Things are running stable, and I didn't had any overheating issue (even though people told me that board would never work due to too week VRMs on B450 series).
My bad, I should've specified that I was talking about their X570 AORUS lineup, not all AORUS mobos in general, that one is on me. Since yours is B450, I wouldn't expect the same issues to surface as in the X570 mobos, makes sense.
I had no install issues. It ran rock solid under several days of memtest86 and prime95, the latter on both Windows and Linux.
My only "complaint" is that it cannot maintain full turbo indefinitely on even a beefy air cooling setup in a big case with massive airflow. I have 7x140mm fans in the case and on the cooler. The case maintains ambient temperature, except for the (short) stream of air from the CPU cooler to the rear exhaust. Under sustained synthetic load, the CPU will run at >4.4GHz all-core until the heat sink is saturated (usually ~10 minutes), and then slowly stabilize down to a 3.9GHz-4.1GHz range for all cores and stay there. An eventual project will be a water cooling loop with much radiator surface area.