Can Ryzen dominate server CPUs?

[mikegg]

Ryzen is power efficient and very good at everything except for gaming. For servers, gaming doesn't matter and multi-core optimization is a given.

Can AMD dominate the server CPU market?

 

[strategyfreak]

I can't speak much to its use for web server purposes. However, it looks quite promising for calculations and HPC purposes, so I definitely think it will have a place in computational clusters and workstations. It's multithreaded performance and power efficiency look very good, and if AMD prices their Naples cores well, there is a good chance they could grab a good amount of market share from Intel (which is just as dominant in the server/workstation market as it is in desktops, and is charging even more). Some might bring up AVX support but imo that's not a big factor since most programs still don't take advantage of AVX and those that do often don't realize much of a speedup. It will take time before programmers can figure out how to use it effectively real applications.

We will have to see how their CPUs hold up in a multisocket system (memory bandwidth, etc), but things look good for AMD if they do a good job of translating Ryzen. They will also be facing competition from the Skylake-EP (or whatever it's called now) processors.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Dominate? Hard to say. Xeons are still pretty tough, and Intel has some major platform advantages. Anyone looking to get away from Intel will be able to use it as a viable alternative, which was generally not true of CON-based Opterons.

 

[dark zero]

In big servers? No.

But if Napples cost way less than expecting... I'd say that it easily will get some Web Servers on their side. They won't be on the 25% of the market as before, but they could easily recover at least to 10% for now, sending them enough money to pay debts and to prepare the next step along Zen+: ARM K12.

 

[Shivansps]

No one ever got fired for buying Intel

 

[nk215]

If the price it right, I think quite a few small business servers may switch.

I know that when I look to update my 2 servers (currently dual E5-2670v1 and an E3-1270v2) in a year or 2, I'll look closely at AMD vs Intel.

For a business, saving of around $500-$1000 means little reason to switch from a known working solution. The saving must be more than that.

 

[DaveSimmons]

My wild guess is that it's a few years too late -- more and more server applications are moving to data centers and the cloud, where CPU density and IPC per watt rules. That $9,000 24-core Xeon sounds like it's an insane price until you think about a data center fitting thousands of cores into one rack.

I'd say it won't dominate, but will find a market in small business servers, department-level LAN servers, company in-house data closets.

 

[cbn]

Besides servers, there are also workstations to consider.

Does Ryzen and AM4 chipset Support ECC RDIMMs? 1P Workstations HP Z440, Lenovo P500, Dell 5810 have this capability.http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-t5810-workstation/pd?ref=PD_OC

 

[happyflow]

There seems to be a first HPC test out, can anyone with experience (and ideally Japanese skills ) comment on this?

https://translate.google.ch/transla...n_orca/items/2d30323a7c96db929ecf&prev=search

 

[Red Squirrel]

Do they have server versions out yet, or do the existing ones support ECC ram and VT-D? At 16 threads they definitely look very attractive for server usage. Especially if you use a dual or quad cpu board now you're looking at like 32 or even 64 threads on a single system. *moist*

I just hope that this chip means AMD is back in the game, as there needs to be some healthy competition, no matter which side you're on. If I was in the market to build a new system I'd definitly be looking at Ryzen.

 

[MongGrel]

Do they have server versions out yet, or do the existing ones support ECC ram and VT-D? At 16 threads they definitely look very attractive for server usage. Especially if you use a dual or quad cpu board now you're looking at like 32 or even 64 threads on a single system. *moist*

I just hope that this chip means AMD is back in the game, as there needs to be some healthy competition, no matter which side you're on. If I was in the market to build a new system I'd definitly be looking at Ryzen.

I still think they are playing ketchup myself to be honest.

Most thing compared the even an older X58 Xeon rig do not look mind blowing to me with the hype.

I imagine there will be many Ryzens sold, for a new rig it looks very viable and solid as a build.

It still kinda looks like what you could have been doing with a Xeon and a X58 for years now, with some newer futures added.

I do not have ECC Ram on the main rig, but it does support it.

I'm not sure why that would be a selling point to begin with.

 

[teejee]

No one ever got fired for buying Intel

In my business (automotive OEM's) people get fired for single sourcing of a supplier though.
In a mature competitive market it is very important to keep costs at a minimum by negotiating with all possible suppliers and buy the cheapest part that is good enough.

 

[Atari2600]

Can AMD dominate the server CPU market?

Not if their platform isn't rock steady.

The Ryzen launch balls up simply cannot be repeated.


If the platform is good, based on the P/W we are seeing so far (cinebench at ~1300 @ ~40W), Naples has the potential to utterly demolish the top line Xeons in performance, performance/watt and performance/$ across most workloads.

But if the platform is rubbish, it'll be a failure.

 

[Atari2600]

My wild guess is that it's a few years too late -- more and more server applications are moving to data centers and the cloud, where CPU density and IPC per watt rules.

This is where Naples (Zen) would be even better than the Xeon alternative.

Bigger purchasers will evaluate both (the potential savings are too great to ignore) and the adage "no-one got fired for buying Intel" simply doesn't apply. If the technical purchaser fails to evaluate Zen and it becomes known that Zen is a better alternative, they'll likely be out the door.

 

[Glo.]

Professional markets, HPC and Server are the ones that offer highest resistance to change.

When I look at professional forums, and discuss with people about the hardware, the biggest problem is the mindshare, and beliefs about... software.

Believe it or not, but People in professional market are able to equate software performance with Hardware performance. For example, CUDA gives zero abstraction level from hardware, and the application is running as close to hardware as possible - the software is extremely optimized for Nvidia, and therefore - it gives huge boost to performance. But its all due to software optimization. But Pros believe its because of Nvidia amazing hardware.

On the other hand we have had OpenCL applications, and two GPUs from two manufacturers, AMD R9 390X and GTX 980 Ti. Both GPU with similar efficiency, but AMD GPU was slightly faster. The pros were adamant that it was due to software optimized for AMD, not Nvidia. You get the picture of beliefs in this market?

It will be EXTREMELY hard for AMD to get traction in any professional market. Their brand is not considered as performance oriented, their software is not considered "quality" enough, and their marketing is absolutely atrocious. Hardware alone will not sell any even with best potential.

Steve Jobs have said many years ago, that People in enterprise markets are confused. And that lately became extremely apparent.

 

[dealcorn]

Can AMD dominate the server CPU market?

I am uncomfortable with the way the question is phrased. I would express it as: "Is AMD a bunch of idiots because they focused the pre release hype train on gaming when the real opportunity was is servers?" With that phasing, you start with AMD's assessment of where the opportunity lies. Your assessment may differ. However, if your assessment is more accurate than AMD's, that also says something important.

 

[guachi]

The only reason I'd say "no" to the question is I'm not sure if AMD has the production capacity to make that many chips.

 

[Atari2600]

I would express it as: "Is AMD a bunch of idiots because they focused the pre release hype train on gaming when the real opportunity was is servers?"

?

Ryzen is a consumer production, not professional. They demo'd productivity and games. Hardly focussing the hype train solely on gaming.

 

[Dribble]

You need multi-chip motherboards, quad channel memory per cpu, whatever the latest server storage connection is, very fast networking, all ultra reliable. You need companies to design and sell you these systems. Power efficiency is more important then upfront cost. You also need to give people a reason to change. AMD can't be "almost as good as Intel", it has to be clearly better or you'd just stick with what you know and what works.

I think servers will be a really hard sell. There best bet is workstations - there's quite a few software engineers out there. They do want cheaper pc's as their company normally spends as little as possible. They don't care about power usage or absolute rock solid reliability as much. If it compiles faster and is cheaper it's gonna make some sales.

 

[NTMBK]

My wild guess is that it's a few years too late -- more and more server applications are moving to data centers and the cloud, where CPU density and IPC per watt rules. That $9,000 24-core Xeon sounds like it's an insane price until you think about a data center fitting thousands of cores into one rack.

I'd say it won't dominate, but will find a market in small business servers, department-level LAN servers, company in-house data closets.

How does 32 cores in a socket sound for density?

 

[Atari2600]

How does 32 cores in a socket sound for density?

32 cores* at a likely base frequency of 2.8-3.0 GHz vs. 22 cores* at a base frequency of 2.4 GHz!

*with each core roughly comparable in IPC.

 

[mxnerd]

Do they have server versions out yet, or do the existing ones support ECC ram and VT-D? At 16 threads they definitely look very attractive for server usage. Especially if you use a dual or quad cpu board now you're looking at like 32 or even 64 threads on a single system. *moist*

I just hope that this chip means AMD is back in the game, as there needs to be some healthy competition, no matter which side you're on. If I was in the market to build a new system I'd definitly be looking at Ryzen.

Ryzen does support ECC & AMD version of VT-D


AMD version of VT-D is AMD-Vi (I/O MMU virtualization)
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_7/1700
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_7/1800x
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x92s9/psa_iommugpu_passthrough_possible_on_ryzen/
but not completely functional according to reddit user?

Need more users to confirm whether it really works.


AMD confirms that Ryzen support ECC memory
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_confirms_that_ryzen_supports_ecc_memory/1

 

[mxnerd]

Bad news.

Ryzen does not work with ESXi 6.5 yet.

Pink screen of death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd-yQH3-vxw

 

[PingSpike]

Bad news.

Ryzen does not work with ESXi 6.5 yet.

Pink screen of death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd-yQH3-vxw

Yeah, not great news. Not that surprising either since you need a pretty new linux kernel to avoid crashes.

I think they'll probably get the broken IOMMU groups in KVM fixed eventually though, probably just with bios updates. I seem to recall some people having that kind of issue with earlier phenom II boards but I know people got those working eventually.

 

[cbn]

AMD confirms that Ryzen support ECC memory
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_confirms_that_ryzen_supports_ecc_memory/1

ECC is not disabled. It works, but not validated for our consumer client platform.

Validated means run it through server/workstation grade testing. For the first Ryzen processors, focused on the prosumer/gaming market, this feature is enabled and working but not validated by AMD. You should not have issues creating a whitebox homelab or NAS with ECC memory enabled.

yes, if you enable ECC support in the BIOS so check with the MB feature list before you buy.

That is good to hear.

For the hardware that is validated.....I wonder what that will be comprised of? Will there be different chipsets? Or will we see regular consumer chipsets being used with some 1P Opterons? (1P LGA 1366 Workstations used Xeon with the consumer X58 chipset, but 1P LGA 2011 Workstations used E5 Xeon with a server chipset (C602)).