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Comment by elcct | Hacker News Reader

But is it going to support ECC memory?

Also with Intel you can upgrade to more performant Xeons. What can you upgrade AMD to?

AMD typically includes ECC support in "consumer" chips. Not all boards, do. I'm worried too, though, that this still hasn't been confirmed yet. An 8-core at 3.4+ GHz sounds perfect for a workstation.

A lot of motherboard manufacturers have stopped supporting ECC on their boards with recent AMD sockets but I think Asus is the last holdout.

ASUS is one of the few that lists it on their spec sheets. But I believe Gigabyte also supports it on a number of current boards, along with some other manufacturers.

ECC support is the norm with AMD CPUs. Even my cheap GA-970A-UD3 motherboard supports it.

I don't think any of the desktop APUs support ECC though (e.g. FM2, FM2+) (information on this is terribly hard to find).

The AMD server line has usually been named Opteron.

And by the way, Xeon CPUs aren't usually faster than regular Intel chips. They may have more cache or more cores, which might speed up some programs. But otherwise, they're the same. Or even slower since their motherboards don't overclock well, overclocking not being a big selling point for servers.

One of my machines has a low-end Xeon because at the time it was basically 1:1 performance comparable to an i7, but cost ~$40 less because it had no integrated graphics.

Now you can score E5 pretty cheap on eBay even powerful dual cpu servers for a price of i7

The other day I thought to look into refurbished server and workstation boxes. Lots of last-gen Xeon machines to be had for 25% of their original retail, often likewise outfitted with a workstation-spec NV Quadro GPU - maybe a good choice if you've been working on laptops for years like me and could make use of more cores.

http://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/xeon-vs-i7i5-whats-differe...

Biggest difference with i7 vs xeon, xeon can handle sometimes upwares of 1tb of ram now. i7 maxes out at 64gb. You be the judge. i7 were usually 32gb, especially the LGA1100 series. The LGA2011 were @ i7 handled 64gb. LGA 2011 Xeon's are all 64GB+. Also support for ECC ram. So basically if you are not pressed for raw CPU, and you need just a lot of cpu for simulations, VM's etc, xeon is your go to CPU. Xeon LGA2011 series has some crazy CPU Socket configurations, you can get a lot depending on the motherboard vendor. I think some as many as 4+ CPU Sockets. i7 cannot run in parallel with another socket I believe. Just like with the LGA2011 1600 vs 2600 series xeons.

LGA-2011 i7s can handle 128GB of RAM now. 6800k for example: https://ark.intel.com/products/94189/Intel-Core-i7-6800K-Pro...

The previous generation (5820k, etc) were only officially rated for 64GB, but they too worked fine with 128GB in practice. Intel just never updated the spec sheets once 16GB DIMMs became available.

8Gbit DDR4, really. In fact, I think the first 128GB (8x16GB) kits that used it were targeted at Haswell-E.

Single cores might be slower but with more of them you can run much more processes at the same time.

They have more PCI-E lanes which could matter for SLI setups, though those are falling out of favor as support has waned.

Not just SLI, but also non-SLI multi-GPU clusters which are common in machine learning, e.g.: http://timdettmers.com/2014/11/09/model-parallelism-deep-lea...

And even if you don't use GPUs, now there are M.2 SSDs which commonly use 4X PCIe lanes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2

> They may have more cache or more cores, which might speed up some programs. But otherwise, they're the same.

It's like saying that mercedes with 2.0 engine is the same as 65 AMG. So writing that they are the same is like writing that every car is the same because they all drive.

You do not overclock in 99.99% cases Xeon server cpus. You do not buy 12 core xeon to use one core, don't you? of course Xeon is faster for the use case you are buying it. A LOT faster in many cases than what you called "regular" chips. You are writing about home use cases from what I see and Xeon series is mainly for server use.

The E3 xeons use the same silicon as the desktop ships, but they do enable ECC. Amusingly the cheaper E3s are often cheaper than desktop equivalents, but have hyper threading enabled. A few times I've managed an E3 based system (4-5 generations out so far) CPU cheaper than the similar I7. Often something like $270 vs $340.

ECC isn't just for servers. Why do we assume that it's okay for Grandma's laptop to randomly flip bits and crash?

For the same reason she doesn't run a redundant disk array in there

Well, since you ask, and speaking as someone who purposely bought AMD with ECC RAM in the past - because she'd want it that way.

It's a bit cheaper, and the downside is an occasional bad cat pic, or maybe an extra browser crash per month to add to the 399 one already gets from poor code ...

> Also with Intel you can upgrade to more performant Xeons

Xeons are not necessarily more performant, in fact, often they are less performant than their desktop brethren...

They're server CPU's, designed for long uptime, typically underclocked compared to the same silicon in an i7/i5 package (they focus on stability, not sheer performance), support ECC memory (again, not performance related, rather stability), support more memory, etc.

Yes I am also worried about this, desktop are getting scary amounts of memory. And this will only get worse in the future.

There will most certainly be a server variant. Currently on schedule for Q2 (this article is about the desktop variant, which is scheduled for Q1. Maybe at CES?)

For both companies, you typically need a different socket/chipset/mainboard for the server chips.

Speculations AFAIK are that it will be presented at CES and go on sale by end of January... but don't quote me on that.

Personally, I will be buying a new PC with Ryzen as soon as they get out.

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