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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Don't get married to Intel, if you need big beefy xen or kvm hypervisor machines, there's lots of good EPYC based motherboards.

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I am planning on making a home-server. Any suggestions for EPYC boards?

I just built my first AMD machine since the Athlon days with an ASRock Rack EPYCD8-2T [0] motherboard and an AMD EPYC 7281 CPU [1].

I upgraded a VMWare ESXi server hosting FreeNAS from a consumer motherboard with an Intel Core i7 3930K and it was completely painless.

[0]: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E...

[1]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-7281

I've used a lot of ASUS desktop boards and never have been disappointed. However I have heard that they stop pushing BIOS updates for older boards. Have you faces such an issue?

My current HP home-server has been with me for ~10years

If you are running only open source software, you may want to consider this:

https://www.raptorcs.com/

Starting at $5800? For 5800 I can build one hell of a threadripper or epyc system with nvme storage.

I've been seeing people try to make power architecture (ibm) servers a thing for 12+ years now, it never happens, because ordinary developers can't afford them. Compared to what you can put under your desk for a thousand bucks based on any Intel or amd, amd64 architecture system .

Or this? https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2B01/intro.html

$2700 and probably is outperformed by a $150 ryzen cpu on a $110 motherboard.

"Starting at $5800? For 5800 I can build one hell of a threadripper or epyc system with nvme storage."

Except that it won't have open firmware on a CPU hardly anyone targets. Whatever you build will probably be vulnerable. Unless you're running OpenBSD or something.

I guess something being such terrible value nobody uses it is a sort of advantage...

Less used != terrible value.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t...

In case you are curious to see benchmarks.

Depending on what you're using it for, I would take a look at Threadripper too. There are some crazy deals right now. If you don't IPMI and registered ECC, it's a great option for a ton of cores and PCIe lanes.

Threadripper and Ryzen both have ECC support.

'Registered ECC' is just slightly different than ECC memory, but it's definitely a feature of EPYC, and unsupported on Threadripper and Ryzen.

I cannot find anything at all that supports such a claim. Do you have any links or supporting spec sheets? All I can find are the same "Supports ECC: Yes" listing for Epyc, Threadripper, and Ryzen. The only spec differences I can find for Epyc vs. Threadripper on the memory side of things is 8-channel vs. 4-channel.

Look at specs for any X399 board and they will say something like "Supports Quad Channel DDR4 3600+(OC) & ECC UDIMM Memory" or "8 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR4 3600(O.C.)... MHz ECC and non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory". Both omit buffered/registered DIMMs.

AM4 boards have similar verbiage.

Here's a document from AMD about EPYC: https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/56301_1.0.pdf

They do not mention unregistered DIMMs being supported.

I'm setting up a home server and decided to just go with Ryzen. You get a bunch of server features (ECC RAM, lots of PCIE lanes, and lots of cores) for a lot less cash than the equivalent EPYC build.

Obviously EPYC has a place but for the home usecase you could use a Ryzen as a substitution for Intel Xeons because of the baseline features of Ryzen.

Ryzen only has 20 PCIE lanes, it's not that much. Basically the same as Intel since Intel uses DMI 3.0 (basically pcie x4) for communication to the chipset. So on Ryzen you get 16x lanes directly to CPU + 4 to chipset where it multoplexes, and on Intel you get 16x lanes directly to CPU + dmi3 to chipset which multoplexes to pcie.

Threadripper has 64 lanes, though, which is definitely a lot.

Ryzen has 24 PCIe lanes: 16 for graphics (can be split to 8/8), 4 for NVMe storage, and 4 for the chipset. So you get 4 more lanes compared to Intel's consumer platforms.

Be aware of the fun with numa nodes and AMD. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9ngwzf/amd_epyc_on_esx...

These will be made irrelevant in the immediate future due to Zen2's dedicated I/O chiplet.

Do you need Ryzen Pro for ECC?

You only need your motherboard to support ECC (not sure if they all do), that's the only prerequisite.

They don't all support ECC. ASRock seems to be the most-supported in this category.

Nope. Regular Ryzen supports unbuffered ECC modules.

What about registered (buffered) ECC modules?

Nope, Ryzen and TR don't. Epyc does.

Thanks!

Unbuffered ECC modules can be hard to find, though.

Intel has been proven unreliable and untrustorthy time and time again, people have been complaining about how awful and unscalable x86 is since the 90s.

The future is more likely ARM- I know a few companies are experimenting with moving their internal servers to ARM, and AWS started offering that platform a few months ago.

But I'm not sure how long this takes, people have also been wrongly predicting the death of x86 since the 90s.

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