AMD adds server horsepower with 16-core chip

[blckgrffn]

Except the price delta between comparable servers is typically around 5%, and the Intel one typically performs 20-40% better.

On the cheap side AMD's ~2.2 Ghz 8/16T compares up to a ~ 2.3 ghz 6C/12T Xeon right now. I am hoping that PD changes that up a bit. More clock speed, lower TDP, more IPC and ISA completeness are all coming - I want it to be enough to make PD competitive. It probably won't be.

Especially given that Intel has that awesome E5-2620 @ ~$400 per CPU. That makes up for somewhat higher motherboard cost, IMHO, and makes BD a non-starter even for white box servers.

On the low end, from Dell and the like, a comparable AMD server can be ~$1k cheaper, which as you move up the spectrum becomes meaningless (ie, your 5%). At $3k vs $4k it is more compelling, especially for those in the "OMG look at the core count!" crew. Somewhat agonizingly, folks with this mindset came to control my BU's purse strings when we were recently acquired. Sigh.

In the past when I did volume server purchases, Dell was able to completely negate the platform savings AMD offered through discounts (better pricing on volume Intel purchases, where as AMD pricing stayed relatively flat regardless of volume), but that was a different time and different employer. I miss having the server acquisition budget being my budget.

The folks who care enough to know about CPU architecture and IPC aren't always the ones making the purchase decisions is my long winded point.

 

[Ferzerp]

On the cheap side AMD's ~2.2 Ghz 8/16T compares up to a ~ 2.3 ghz 6C/12T Xeon right now. I am hoping that PD changes that up a bit. More clock speed, lower TDP, more IPC and ISA completeness are all coming - I want it to be enough to make PD competitive. It probably won't be.

Especially given that Intel has that awesome E5-2620 @ ~$400 per CPU. That makes up for somewhat higher motherboard cost, IMHO, and makes BD a non-starter even for white box servers.

On the low end, from Dell and the like, a comparable AMD server can be ~$1k cheaper, which as you move up the spectrum becomes meaningless (ie, your 5%). At $3k vs $4k it is more compelling, especially for those in the "OMG look at the core count!" crew. Somewhat agonizingly, folks with this mindset came to control my BU's purse strings when we were recently acquired. Sigh.

In the past when I did volume server purchases, Dell was able to completely negate the platform savings AMD offered through discounts (better pricing on volume Intel purchases, where as AMD pricing stayed relatively flat regardless of volume), but that was a different time and different employer. I miss having the server acquisition budget being my budget.

The folks who care enough to know about CPU architecture and IPC aren't always the ones making the purchase decisions is my long winded point.

Good points. In most applications, since the world loves virtualization now, DIMM slots are far more important to me than core counts. With general workloads, I've seen a total of 8 nehalem cores be able to handle far more than 144GB worth of of VMS with no sort of issues at all. Moar Cores is such a waste at that point. I have a few systems where scaling up within one box makes sense, but it's extremely rare, especially since our heavy, heavy lifting is done on Power and not x86.

 

[Genx87]

I cant stop laughing at that picture.

 

[piesquared]

http://www.marketwire.com/press-rel...cro-server-citrix-readyr-nyse-amd-1666525.htm

The SeaMicro SM10000-XE server is the highest-density, most energy-efficient system available, using half the power, one-third the space and delivering up to 12 times the bandwidth of today's best-in-class server(1). The system delivers 10 gigabits of network bandwidth to each socket for an industry-leading 2.5 gigabits per core. Moreover, the SeaMicro SM10000-XE eliminates the need for expensive switches and load balancers and is plug-and-play, all in a single 10-RU system. The SeaMicro SM10000-XE enables accelerated deployments while providing outstanding performance for security and cloud environments.

The SM10000-XE is built around SeaMicro's Freedom™ Fabric ASIC -- the industry's first second-generation fabric chip. The Freedom Fabric ASIC contains three key patented technologies:
•SeaMicro's Input/Output (I/O) Virtualization Technology, which eliminates all but three components from SeaMicro's motherboard -- CPU, DRAM, and the ASIC itself -- thereby shrinking the motherboard, helping to reduce power, cost and space.
•SeaMicro's TIO™ ("Turn It Off") technology, which enables SeaMicro to further power-optimize the motherboard by consolidating functionality and turning off unneeded CPU and chipset functions. Together, SeaMicro's I/O Virtualization Technology and TIO technology produce small and power-efficient motherboards.
•The Freedom Supercompute Fabric, which ties these small, power-efficient motherboards together with an industry leading 1.28 terabits-per-second of bandwidth. The Freedom Supercompute Fabric is built of multiple Freedom ASICs working together to create a multi-dimensional torus -- delivering a low latency, massive bandwidth fabric with exceptionally low power draw.

 

[Wriptire]

The SeaMicro SM10000-XE server is the highest-density, most energy-efficient system available,

This is not surprising. It uses Xeons. Acquiring SeaMicro was really a smart move; now AMD gets to sell decent server hardware again, after all this time.

 

[Ferzerp]

This is not surprising. It uses Xeons. Acquiring SeaMicro was really a smart move; now AMD gets to sell decent server hardware again, after all this time.

Something tells me that the guy you were replying to didn't quite realize that

Honestly, those setups have very little interest to me at all. They aren't dense enough. I can get around 1800 cores (moar cores!) and the necessary data connections in two racks. (9 blade chassis, some Cisco 5548s, and FC run back to some Brocade directors, which can service 30 or so of these chassis per pair) and get best in breed product. On the VDI/App presentation side of things, we do go with an a single-brand solution (HP, 16 servers + storage in 15U)

Now granted this setup can use up to 60 kW in 2 racks (reasonable max is much less), but it also capable of doing something like 10x the work of 2 racks of this system.

 

[ShintaiDK]

AMD, OEM for Intel Xeons. If you cant beat the, join them

 

[piesquared]

This is not surprising. It uses Xeons. Acquiring SeaMicro was really a smart move; now AMD gets to sell decent server hardware again, after all this time.

Short term. And agreed, aquiring SeaMicro was a very smart move..

 

[Don Karnage]

I cant stop laughing at that picture.

In case you've never seen it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SArxcnpXStE

 

[ShintaiDK]

Short term. And agreed, aquiring SeaMicro was a very smart move..

You sure are optimistic. If AMD forces in Opteron CPUs in, the customers will flee the company just as fast.

 

[piesquared]

You sure are optimistic. If AMD forces in Opteron CPUs in, the customers will flee the company just as fast.

There will be no fleeing going on. Unless of course intel uses it's monopoly to force customers out...

 

[ShintaiDK]

There will be no fleeing going on. Unless of course intel uses it's monopoly to force customers out...

So you say that customers are totally blank about knowing the massive performance and performance/watt differences there is?

I am sure they know better.

 

[BenchPress]

Hey, why don't you just back off. 16 cores is awesome for servers.

Please stop calling it 16 cores. It's 8 cores or better yet "modules" with two independent narrow integer execution clusters each. The decoders and many other things are shared so you'll never ever achieve the performance of 16 full cores.

It's really an extension of Hyper-Threading (which duplicates the architectural state resources for running two threads), with a few more things duplicated and then narrowed. But you don't hear Intel claiming the E7-8870 to be a 20-core CPU just because they duplicated the threads!

Also, having many cores in and of itself is not awesome for servers. In fact having many cores in and of itself is not awesome for anything. The ideal CPU has one core, but an insanely fast one. It's only because of practical limitations that multi-core is a necessity. It's a last resort. In other words, a CPU with more cores is only preferable over a CPU with fewer cores, if each of those cores do all that is reasonably possible to maximize their individual performance and balance power consumption.

This is simply not the case for Bulldozer. It sacrifices per-thread performance for the sake of running more threads, and tries (and fails) to compensate with clock speed. Their quest for more cores did not result in a good product overall. Not even for servers.

 

[piesquared]

So you say that customers are totally blank about knowing the massive performance and performance/watt differences there is?

I am sure they know better.

I'm saying server admins know enough to not buy into the propaganda or swallow the pills like enthusiast tech forums like this one try to marketize. If their is demand for AMD based SeaMicro servers, then there will be AMD based SeaMicro servers. I suppose there was a reason AMD invested $380 Million to aquire them.

 

[Ferzerp]

I know of no "server admins" actively buying servers with AMD processors in them. They exist, I know, AMD has something like 13% of the marketshare, so someone is buying them. I just don't know who those people are.

edit: looks like 5.5% now, not 13%

 

[Phynaz]

I know of no "server admins" actively buying servers with AMD processors in them. They exist, I know, AMD has something like 13% of the marketshare, so someone is buying them. I just don't know who those people are.

It's more like 6% or 7%.

 

[Ferzerp]

Woops. I guess I gave them too much credit. Maybe my number is "deployed 'core' count"? Actually, I shouldn't poke fun. The older opterons actually had the core count that they advertise.

 

[Black96ws6]

I know of no "server admins" actively buying servers with AMD processors in them. They exist, I know, AMD has something like 13% of the marketshare, so someone is buying them. I just don't know who those people are.

Here's one of them now:

 

[mikeymikec]

in case you've never seen it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sarxcnpxste

rofl

 

[ShintaiDK]

I know of no "server admins" actively buying servers with AMD processors in them. They exist, I know, AMD has something like 13% of the marketshare, so someone is buying them. I just don't know who those people are.

Latest one showed 5.5% or about 1 in 20.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatsp...ere-light-but-2012-can-still-be-a-great-year/

AMD which has seen its server market share erode from 15% in 2007 to the current level of 5.5%

Fully fledged disaster.

 

[blckgrffn]

My company buys them in some number, far removed from me.

This is one of those awkward times when you have wonder how good the company you work for is at a scraping the Internet for your expressed opinions.

So, I'll stop there. And say that I hope that they -EX based Intel servers we have now last forever, because evidently we purchased the last of them for the foreseeable future.

Good thing the 8 Core 2P SB based servers are so crushingly fast.

I ordered a number of Shanghai based AMD servers when they were the "best" 2P VT servers we could get for the money I had to spend, ie prior to Nehalem launching, twilight of the Penryn based Xeon, memory density was cheaper, everything had to be expensed (whole server under $5k, excluding support.) That was in Q4 2008, I think?

Context is key to understanding these decisions. No one wakes up today and says "I am going to build a sh!tty architecture!" or "I am going to blow money by buying cheap hardware today that I will have to replace soon!" but holy crap things go that way because of compromise and external requirements and past decisions crapping up the environment.

 

[Meghan54]

I though the Opterons always had a specific application advantage in one of Anand's server benchmarks, but i can't remember what it would have been at this point.

Turning off?

 

[Ferzerp]

There were advantages in the past, now, other than the "marketed core count per processor", I'm not sure that there is a single metric that they are better in.

 

[theevilsharpie]

I know of no "server admins" actively buying servers with AMD processors in them. They exist, I know, AMD has something like 13% of the marketshare, so someone is buying them. I just don't know who those people are.

I bought an AMD-powered ProLiant Microserver a few months ago, and it works extremely well as a low-powered server.

That's probably not what you had in mind, though

 

[Ferzerp]

New slogan?

Opteron: When your reqirements are so low, any old CPU will do?