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Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

Given that amd has the lead in power consumption per performance, is it now the cpu of choice in the datacenter?

Some engineering software I use, uses Intel MPI libraries, and I suspect the math kernel also. The software runs 30% faster on an i7 versus a Ryzen 7, both with equivalent clock rate and number of cores.

Given the forthcoming i9 will hit 5.3 GHz, I’m choosing Intel for my next build. Until AMD comes out with libraries and compilers targeting scientific computing, Intel may still have the lead.

Do Intel consumer chips support ECC memory now? Without ECC, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable doing any scientific computing or production serving. (I would consider using them for things like CI, though, because the price sure is good.)

No, and only 64 GB max of non-ECC at that. I typically don’t run simulation of more than 1 hour though, and I’ll know when the results are wrong. My use case is CAD/real-time design for RF and EM; multiple smaller simulations of parametric sweeps, Monte Carlo, and optimization.

Ryzen does support ECC, and > 64 GB, so that is a plus.

I don't care too much about the results of my own programs, but I do worry very much about OS-level data structures. If some bit gets flipped in memory while you're extracting an update, that program will just randomly be weird forever. If some bit gets flipped in your filesystem, your data randomly disappears. Given how frequent both auto-updates and bit flips are in practice, no doubt something on my computer is corrupted somewhere. Or maybe only my backup is corrupted. Maybe it will never cause a problem, or maybe my computer will just one day become unusable. I have spent so much time debugging random failures that I see ECC memory as at least avoiding one set of possibilities, reducing the inevitable system integration time that building your own computer requires.

The unfortunate truth about the Intel-compiled/supplied libraries is that they deliberately only use the SIMD codepaths on Intel chips. AMD chips are forced to fall back to SSE1.

It certainly is in terms of power, performance, and cost, but Intel's reputation for rock-solid reliability and a decade of optimization for its architectures, not to mention the established software/support ecosystem, means AMD has a very long haul ahead of it.

Sorry, but especially on servers amd has a better track record with reliability. You are right with missing optimizations on some software stacks but that’s not a long haul it’s just that nobody saw the need to do it until now. Don’t forget all the loss of performance from spectre mitigation a lot of datacenters lost up too 25% performance overnight. Everyone is going amd. Google/Facebook/Disney/Pixar...

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Thanks for the info!

AWS and GCP, at least, have started offering them, and at a discount, so I'd say yes.

https://www.amd.com/en/processors/amd-epyc-aws https://www.amd.com/en/processors/epyc-google-cloud

and

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/amd-epyc-proc...

Depending on the use case. Some hyper scalers won't buy hardware just because of the CPU has the lower power consumption. It would be also not very wise to bet only on one vendor.

The fact that the Super 7 don't want to rely upon one vendor actually gives AMD a better shot - all other serious contenders use different instruction sets, so AMD's x86 procs are compatible with existing software ecosystems, thus reducing qualification and validation results. A viable x86 alternative to Intel has been sorely needed, and AMD fills that role quite nicely.

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