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Comment by jmt_ | Hacker News Reader

Historically I've always gone with Intel, but I've been wondering if new AMD CPUs would work well hypervisor hosts. A Ryzen Threadripper 3990x for example has 64 cores, 128 threads, and supports ECC RAM. Intel by comparison doesn't offer anything close to those numbers on a single CPU. So, does anyone have any thoughts as to why using the 3990x or some other similar AMD product wouldn't be a great idea compared to using some Intel solution? Is the, say, dual Xeon approach better in some way I don't know? I can't tell if Intel is actually better these days or if they just benefit from all the contracts they've been able to get with major manufacturers over time.

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Something to keep in mind if you use it, VMware just changed their licensing for CPUs over 32 cores require an additional ESXi license. So that 64 core processor now requires 2 licenses instead of one!

Wow, I had no idea. Super useful to know. Just seems like a money grab from VMware.

MS has done the same thing, they all saw the writing on the wall a few years ago.

MS licensing is complicated, but you must buy a minimum of 16 cores, then you get license packs for additional cores.

My grey market Windows Server 2019 Standard (with Hyper-V) key happily activated on my 48-core system. What's the proper way to buy a license?

I can tell you why I just choose a dual Xeon workstation over a thread ripper, despite it being considerably more expensive for lower performance: memory. The threadripper motherboards apparently max out at 256 GB of ram. I put 1 TB on the Xeon machine and could have gone higher if I needed it.

It is really too bad, but 64 cores with a max of 256 GB is super unbalanced.

Step up to Epyc processors if you need memory, which is the competitor to the Xeon. Threadripper is for enthusiasts, not specifically for servers.

Thanks, I'm much less familiar with AMD product lines and didn't know about EPYC.

EPYC supports up to 4TB of RAM. Here's Linus having fun with one back in September. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLsrr79-Pw

I clicked that link expecting Linus Torvalds and was very confused. The mononym "Linus" is already taken :-) It would be very exciting to see Linus Torvalds playing with giant amounts of RAM but sadly he doesn't seem to make a lot of videos like that.

If you're talking operating systems, it's Linus Torvalds. If you're talking tech videos, it's Linus Sebastian. Linus Media Group gets a lot of the cool hardware first and often makes a point of getting some unofficially to mess with it in ways they're not supposed to.

Ryzen 3rd gen max memory is 128GB, which matches a realistic requirement for doing a cookie cutter cloud hosting.

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)

Threadrippers are not really 'workstation' CPUs, they are HEDT CPUs. More Apples-to-Apples would be to compare to EPYC CPUs.

Definitely an important factor, didn't check the max RAM. Kind of surprises me that AMD would put all this work into building a many core/thread CPU only to have a 256 GB RAM limit but if it's intended for gamers/workstations and not servers then I guess 256 GB would be plenty for that. But I agree it's unbalanced regardless.

Threadripper is the prosumer chip, Epyc is the server chip. The current Epyc based on the 7nm Zen2 architecture can handle 4TB of ram.

That's the market -- EPYC is the server oriented product, and it supports a lot more RAM, though I think still less than Intel (I hand-wavily remember 4TB for EPYC, 6TB for Xeon, but with a huge price difference between them).

Given the design of threadripper, it's not really "all this work" to make a 64 core model, given the 32 core model. Just pile more of the things you can scale on the chip without worrying too much about the parts that don't scale. And the same happened with previous generation. 16 core 2950X turned into 2990WX, but with a weird crippled memory interface. At least 3990X is more balanced than that.

I am looking into a Threadripper 3990x (64 cores) with Proxmox, which is free, rather than dealing with licensing with ESXi and all that.

Threadripper is limited to quad channel ram, so you might want EPYC or Xeon instead if that is an issue.

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