Sure, it has half as many cores as the 3960X Threadripper listed, but 12C/24T is still a lot.
Also, it's much easier to cool -- 105W TDP vs 280W on the Threadrippers.
I ssh in from my XPS 13 running Fedora and use X forwarding to do work on it. It's so much faster than trying to do everything on an ultrabook. Not to mention quite a bit cheaper than a high-end laptop.
The VSCode remote extension installs extensions onto a VSCode remote client installed on the remote machine. So the C++ extensions spawns rg processes on the remote which is a lot faster.
I was under the impression that sshfs is based on FUSE, which works in userspace.
It sounds like an amazing build, but definitely not needed for most tasks. The XPS 13 seems a little wasteful in the setup. You could practically do it with a chromebook.
-U series (somehow, magically the same designation between AMD and Intel) will typically run ~15W, though this is configurable by the OEM (sometimes in BIOS?).
-H series (also, magically the same designation) will typically run ~45W, and this is also configurable by the OEM.
The increased power envelope of -H series typically allows higher base clocks. Turbo can sometimes be close between a 15W and a 45W chip, but a -H series will be able to maintain higher frequencies for longer, thanks to a superior thermal solution.
I think some may discount Ryzen 9 because it's technically not "HEDT", but the market boundaries have changed over time.
HEDT used to include all CPUs more $400 dollars, all of which shared the same socket (for a given generation). Mainstream was on a separate socket and all below $400.
However, Broadwell-E and Skylake-X moved the top end of the HEDT from $1K to $2K, which meant that HEDT spanned a huge segment.
What AMD did with Ryzen 9 and X570 was to take the middle segment of that HEDT market and make it it's own segment.
It did carve out a pricing segment there, but the really cool thing is that it's so compatible, backward and forward with other CPUs in the Ryzen family. There is huge upgrade potential.
It would be entirely reasonable to build a system around an R7, with the expectation that its workload will grow, and throw in a discounted 3950X in a year when Zen3 hits.
If you've gotten locked into needing that, you have no other options aside from not using hardware that you can currently slot.
AMD entirely eliminated the lower end HEDT parts and raised prices for TR3.
Intel has a nasty shortage, too.
Compare that to x99, which had an entry level msrp of just $350, but often went for exact same price as 7700k, significantly under $300.
HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.
That's exactly the area where I argue there is some fuzziness.
For PCIE lanes, it's true that AMD only has 24 lanes (4 of which dedicated for the chipset) but it has the equivalent of 48 PCIE gen3 lanes in terms of raw bandwidth. Now, it's still not as flexible as having that many actual PCIE gen3 lanes, but high-end x570 motherboards do support some level of bifurcation. You also need compatible devices, but we already compatible storage. There are a couple GPUs out now, but given the upcoming launches of RDNA2 and Ampere GPUs, I expect there will be plenty more compatible GPUs. X570 is somewhat limited now, but as more gen4 devices are released that chipset will only become more versatile.
For RAM, there you have another fuzzy spot. I mean sure, HEDT usually has 4 channels, but what does that mean in terms of memory capacity and bandwidth? Only within the last year or so have 32GB UDIMMs been available (iirc) so HEDT was limited to 128GB until very recently. And if you really need more, you can use an Optane storage device as a swap partition (It's been done before, it's fine). As for bandwidth, 2 channels is a bit of a limitation, but Ryzen does support faster memory, which can help bridge the gap a little bit to quad channel Intel parts running at lower RAM speeds.
I'm not saying that Ryzen + X570 is HEDT, but it's so darn close that I can understand why AMD chose not to produce low-end TR 3000 parts. Between Ryzen 9, TR 2000, Epyc 7002P, and limited use of TSMCs fabs, I think the move they made was smart.
> HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.
I don't think it's a bad value prop overall. We have a $4000 CPU that's beating out two $10,000 CPUs (dual Xeon Platinums), which is a phenomenal improvement in value. I think we are in this weird space where, when trying to buy the system capabilities you need (in terms of cores, clock speeds, memory capacity, and expansion slots) you sometimes have to pay a bit extra for capabilities that you don't need. That's unfortunate and I hope next gen fixes that. However, it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel will have new HEDT parts for at least a year.
I built one, a Noctua NH-D15 can cool it at 16*4ghz at 700RPM, so basically almost inaudible even at full load.
No ECC, though.
Is ECC useful for a workstation? I thought it was useful for shared servers (VM hosts) to protect against rowhammer & co, but does is have other uses?
Without ECC, modern systems (>= a few GB RAM) will have bits flipping pretty much daily.
Ultimately these flips are caused by charged particles hitting the memory module (a so called 'single event upset' or SEU), and the number of charged particles hitting the modules has not increased with density (although the modules are more sensitive to SEU, it's a smaller effect).
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I think the environment in racks for nodes in whichever formfactor in racks is toxic. Be it EMF interference, power distribution issues, vibrations, and/or temperature. You don't have that in a single system at home, when it is built in a good way, and has stable power. Or at least to a lesser degree.
Until they happen more often that expected. It's something that varies based on building, temperature, etc. environmental factors. And of course on your luck with memory module lottery.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I assume the 3950X is the same way. The hardware is there, the official blessing is not.
edit: I mean near the DIMMs. Don't try this if you are afraid, or need your hardware. This is a test i'm doing with every build, or any system i have to fix. And it crashes every system, though not at the same places and in the same ways. So far it didn't damage anything permanently, but no guaranties it won't.
edit: By searching for networks i mean for the telcos, not wifi. Then it uses all bands it is capable of.
But I'm of course not suggesting to run it in this state whil doing anything important.
Ryzen has always been very "sensitive" to low-clocked RAM and shows some pretty good scaling as you increase frequency and tighten timings and the ECC UDIMMs on the market are just not binned to do that.
Or convince AMD to stop artificially not supporting registered memory on Ryzen/Threadripper -- the early Athlons supported both.
I wonder if those would run on my Haswell-E xeons. They support RDIMMs, and they are unlocked so nominally they should support higher RAM clocks too (although I've never tried it with RDIMMs, only UDIMMs).
More recently, the W-3175X (Threadripper's real competitor) supports RDIMM as well. So Threadripper actually offers less features than the competition here.
I really would like to see the Threadripper series merged with the 7002P series though. Right now there is no option that gives you both Threadripper-level clocks and large quantities of RAM, the frequency-optimized parts are still a large compromise in performance and aren't widely supported. There is no part that gets you to 4 GHZ on 64 cores with 512+ GB of RAM, despite all of these capabilities existing in their respective segments.
When you are shipping a 64C HEDT processor there is really no longer any meaningful distinction between that and a server processor. And 256GB simply is not enough RAM for a 64C processor. AMD could still upcharge on the multi-socket models, but they are drawing lines between product segments that no longer make sense now that they have pushed core counts so high.
Basically, give us a modern successor to the Intel X5670 series. It's the top of the line, you're paying $4000 for a workstation processor, you should get the whole processor and not have a bunch of disabled features.
The really funny thing is, it's not even a money thing, Epyc isn't even priced significantly higher. 7702P is $4150 at Provantage (HPE p/n P16660-B21) vs $3990 for the 3990X. The 7402P (HPE p/n P16664-B21) is actually $250 cheaper than the 3960X. AMD is no longer using the "traditional" model where workstation is cheaper than server. Workstation is now just as expensive as server. So it's not like giving you Epyc capabilities would mean AMD foregoing any money.
AMD is just drawing arbitrary lines between these product segments because they can.
They should've done that when they changed the socket for the latest generation. Just admit that the existence of Socket TR4 was a mistake and release the new Threadrippers on Socket SP3.
I suspect there are even some people interested in dual socket workstations with 2TB of memory that nonetheless have a 4.5GHz boost clock, because workstations often have mixed workloads. And there is no point in doing market segmentation when all the prices are the same anyway, it's just incompatibility for no reason.
Cooling would become a big issue, though. Air cooling a 280W 3970X in a big tower with sufficient airflow to maintain ambient temperature internally is difficult. I cannot maintain max turbo on all cores.
Putting this in 1 or 2 Us in a server would likely be impossible without water cooling (requiring piping to external liquid coolers (whether radiators or chillers)). There's only so much that increasing air velocity can do in cooling.
I don't know if this is the primary thing holding back Epyc specs, but I know it will be an issue.
huh, where ? from what I see here the 3900X is listed at 450€ and the 3950X at 900€ on average in the mainstream websites...
[1] Well, has them for a reasonable price. Newegg as third-party sellers offering a few of them for 60%+ markups, but I feel better paying $500 for a $500 board than I do paying $275 for a $160 board.
If only 12-16 cores with 64GB of RAM are enough to be useful, then the Ryzen 9 gets A LOT of work done for an unprecedented low price. But if the work being done can make use of 128GB quad-channel RAM and 24-32-64 cores, then the $350 extra for a Threadripper motherboard is nothing. Doesn't take many billable hours to pay for it :)