Just by looking at revision numbers at their boards, it seems clear that they already went through quite a number of iterations, just as usually happens with more proper server mobos.
There must be a demand for them.
MS licensing is complicated, but you must buy a minimum of 16 cores, then you get license packs for additional cores.
It is really too bad, but 64 cores with a max of 256 GB is super unbalanced.
A wicked fast quad core instance with 32 gigs of mem is a top tier offering as far as cloud hosting goes.
And as for cost/perf goes, Ryzen U1s can easily yield more money than a mid-tier Xeon offering, especially if you are buying twins or quad systems (2 or 4 independent systems in a single U1 enclosure)
Our new HPC system will mostly consist of Epyc 7742, but having one node with super high single-thread performance would be nice for less well parallelized applications.
I can’t see enterprise vendors selling them and I doubt the support is great.
Hosting companies don't end with enterprise cloud stuff. The availability of consumer grade hardware chips has always been much better than server ones for anybody, but tier 1 vendors.
Just before there was little incentive to chase that market for anything as even the best consumer grade CPUs still were not contenders on core count, ECC, IPMI support, and cache size to compete with Xeons.
But now, even very cheap 3rd gen Ryzens can easily beat mid-tier Xeons: more cores, more cache, ECC support, support for Aspeed remote management. And they are way more power efficient, so making a twin or even a quad system in U1 is possible.
That's already overkill. It's nice having the spare capacity, but it would be absolutely foolish to lease a full-blown EPYC trio.
They have quite a few:
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/products.asp#AMD
MSI guy was particularly secretive. MSI appears to actually have a separate sub-brand they don't market around to do server OEM AMD products without loosing Intel partner status.
The current max capacity for Threadripper ECC RAM is 128GB. The largest unbuffered ECC DIMM is 16GB. With an Epyc (or a Xeon) you could used registered memory which is available in higher capacities.
If you went 3990X, you'd be limited to 1GB per thread or 2GB per core. This isn't a showstopper, but could be a bottleneck depending on how RAM-intensive your workload is.
Let me be clear, I'm still quite happy with my recent purchase and build. Threadripper has enabled unprecedented core counts at very low prices.
I've only heard about these from buildzoid's overclocking video. https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/exnrcz/buildz...
CAS latency isn't the best, and tweaking this has resulted in a quite unstable system.
I'm currently running 128GB of this:
https://www.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/ct16g4wfd8266/ct16439854
It's a 3970X with 128GB (link to RAM in sibling thread) of 3000MHz RAM on a GIGABYTE Aorus Master. No processor overclock. Running Noctua's NH-U14S with one of their high-RPM fans. GPU is nothing special - the cheapest card I could find with DisplayPort 1.4+ and HDMI 2.0+ (for potential dual 4k@60Hz - currently dual 2560x1440@60Hz) - it's a Radeon 550. Boots from NVME and has 40TB raw (20TB usable) spinning disk.
It's a virtualization host and prototyping workstation. I work primarily in data analytics, and it's not uncommon to have prod servers larger than this. I've got enough headroom to realistically test things at scale.