Hacker News Reader

Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this how it's always been? New tech shows up in enthusiast/consumer segment first, bugs are ironed out, manufacturing ramps up & yields go up, then new server parts are announced?

Besides, isn't EPYC2 the best server CPU already? There's no time pressure on AMD, they're comfortably in the lead.

View on HN

Regular EPYC CPUs have too high a TDP for smaller server installations, such as so-called edge servers. EPYC Embedded is still stuck on Zen 1. Intel hasn't upgraded their comparable line of mid-range server CPUs (e.g. Xeon D line), either, but AMD won't win on performance alone. Intel has a huge SKU lineup, much more volume, and a much richer vendor and platform ecosystem. If the vendor demand isn't there to push AMD on EPYC Embedded, Ryzen Emedded, and other market segments, AMD should build demand, otherwise they'll just recapitulate their rise & fall during the 2000s.

Cloudflare recently announced that they would be building out some data centers with EPYC CPUs. Do you believe that the situation has changed since February? They did a pretty exhaustive analysis [0] of price, performance, and power where they saw an advantage in switching away from Intel for that generation at least.

If the existing server hardware is already in a decent spot, then maybe they need to spend more resources on sales rather than making changes to keep it cutting edge.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/an-epyc-trip-to-rome-amd-is-clou...

I think Cloudflare is a different kind of "edge" service than what EPYC Embedded targets, and I would think Cloudflare uses regular EPYC chips. The "edge" that EPYC Embedded, Xeon D, etc target is, I think, more about the hardware configurations (smaller enclosures, minimal number of drives and other devices) and the type of facility (usually not a colocation facility, so power and heat are of significantly more concern). But the workloads are still very much server-class.

EPYC Embedded chips are competitive with Intel's offerings (Xeon D, etc), but as I said Intel's ecosystem is richer--for example, more, better motherboards. It's not enough that AMD's chips are competitive with Intel's. AMD has a huge ecosystem handicap, and so either they need to improve the ecosystem or sell chips that are dramatically better than Intel's, and for EPYC Embedded neither is the case. Long term a better ecosystem is necessary for AMD to survive because a broader product and customer base brings consistent income and mindshare--staying power. I would hope and assume AMD is working closely with cloud vendors on their proprietary hardware, but the results are opaque; judging by traditional channels (Supermicro, etc), AMD hasn't even begun to close the gap.

I don’t think survival is at stake. AMD powers both XBox and PlayStation for the second generation in a row and that ought to help keeping them alive. It’s more a matter of whether they can capture enough of the market so they’re not merely “surviving”.

Fair enough. Survive was a poor choice. What I had in mind was surviving as a contender at the high-end, so we can continue to benefit from competition for server-class chips. Alpha, SPARC, and POWER all lost the high-end market (their only market) to Intel at a time when Intel was inferior. AMD previously failed because Intel surpassed them, but that's because AMD couldn't leverage their initial advantage to secure their markets and thus their ability to keep investing. Without volume and mindshare failure is inevitable. Providing the best high-end chips is insufficient to remain competitive long-term. The reasons for previous failures were complex (ISA, operating system, sales channels, etc), but ultimately it comes down to something like diversity--customer and product diversity provide buffers in terms of sales as well as changes in market direction. AMD's chips are indisputably better than Intel's right now, but even with Intel's mindboggingly massive fumbles they're barely sweating in terms of current and prospective revenue.

> Alpha, SPARC, and POWER all lost the high-end market (their only market) to Intel at a time when Intel was inferior

What's interesting is that the industry was so sure that Itanium / Windows NT was going to crush everything that many of them just gave up. Compaq and Silicon Graphics specifically tired to switch to Itainium, which was years late and never a huge success. They probably could have gotten another generation or two in. Might have saved SGI.

> Providing the best high-end chips is insufficient to remain competitive long-term

Reason Alpha SPARC and POWER failed was they did not support the de facto standard X86 instruction-set, I believe. So the fastest most power efficient chip is not enough unless it can also run the most common software

In this case "most common software" meant proprietary and nonportable operating systems and applications. Would you buy a server that will run the software you want to use either never (Windows and Windows applications developed on Windows) or maybe, eventually, as long as the new platform is a success (only slightly more portable proprietary Unix variants)?

> most common software

Maybe it is different this time because well for one Intel and AMD are on the same architecture

but more importantly for arm or other platform, maybe this time is different because the servers mostly run on open source software. Given the potential revenue, I'd imagine it should be pretty straightforward to port common server software to any architecture if it isn't already?

With the kind of marketshare ryzen has gotten on custom builds plus several % increase in server( which has large margins) I don't think amd has financial issues right now. They'll probably target gpus next, go for the low hanging fruit and then slowly iterate on the rest of their products.

And before that Cloudfare announced that they are migrating to Arm servers.

Turns out it just wasn't performant enough for their applications, per this follow up post:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/technical-details-of-why-cloudfl...

ARM just needs to be a little bit more competitive on performance per watt and a few other metrics...I think when Apple inevitably either proves ARM can be a very powerful platform via their migration to complete ARM based computing, we'll see a lot more movement and investment here, I'd say ~5 years is a good timeframe to start seeing serious long term shifts to ARM. If Apple fails to do this within that time frame, I think that may push it out longer. They're already pushing the limits of ARM as a platform with their custom chipsets

I think nvidia's long term strategy is going to be built around this, among other things, otherwise I believe they overpaid for ARM holdings. They'll need to make sure they can expand the market for ARM CPUs to drive ever more GPU sales in the future. They haven't been as successful getting their embedded GPUs into the ARM market if I recall correctly

> but AMD won't win on performance alone.

Yup. Let's talk about price and TDP...

> Intel has a huge SKU lineup,

Why is that supposed to be an advantage?

> much more volume,

> and a much richer vendor and platform ecosystem

This is just marketing-speak.

richer vendor...ecosystem = more resellers

richer...platform ecosystem - what does that even mean?

> AMD should build demand

How?

And have you noticed how many people here saying they want to buy intel?

> otherwise they'll just recapitulate their rise & fall during the 2000s.

Who's in the stronger position now in terms of price and performance?

A huge sku lineup according to every marketing book every made is a terrible idea here. I hope they don't view it as a strength. I'd be slashing like hell.

AMD and Hector Ruiz sat on their temporary advantage and were in denial of Intel's investment in the Core architecture.

AMD is keeping the throttle down this time.

It's not a given at all, even if that's common. As a fresh counter-example, Nvidia released Ampere on TSMC 7nm for the enterprise many months before they released chips of the same architecture for consumer devices on Samsung's cheaper and significantly less dense 8nm node.

> There's no time pressure on AMD, they're comfortably in the lead.

Intel thought this way, and that's why AMD are where they are now.

And Microsoft to a lesser extent.

Sitting on huge piles of cash helps though.

AMD lacks AVX512 instruction set, which is a show stopper for many applications.

AVX512 is garbage. It incurs a massive performance hit from both frequency and mode-switching penalties. Apart from a few niche HPC and ML applications which you'll never encounter, AVX512's most compelling use cases are to drive Intel's shady market fragmentation, and to create more bullshit FP benchmarks that Intel can claim to win.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312673-linus-torvalds-...

Now that we've covered both ends of hyperbole, it's maybe worth noting that a lot of CPU parallel tasks can be well accelerated by ISPC, which can make reasonably effective use of AVX512 (with the aforementioned clock speed caveat): https://www.mail-archive.com/ispc-users@googlegroups.com/msg...

Also, AVX512 is a much nicer (orthogonal) ISA than SSE or AVX2.

While there are some niche applications that need larger amounts of memory than GPUs can offer, it's worth noting that this speedup comes from making the CPU act more like a GPU, and they aren't as fast as GPUs acting like GPUs (which are essentially many 32-wide vector units, rather than AVX512's 16-wide).

Nah, to be fair, the most compelling application is: https://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/10/14/vectorized_e...

This is not true anymore: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/08/19/icl-avx512-fre...

That's an i5. When Cloudflare talked about the issue, they were using high performance Xeons.

I'm aware, but the ice lake xeons are starting to ship.

Which applications, and why? Some computational ones will go significantly slower on the same number of cores if they could have kept avx512 fed (perhaps small data in cache), but most don't spend all their time in something like GEMM. The new UK "tier 1" HPC system is all EPYC.

1. not many 2. avx2 with twice the cores is about as good as avx512 a lot of the time

Automatic vectorization for AVX512 would work on the simplest of cases and using intrinsics or writing inline assembly is beyond the scope of 99% of software projects.

> a show stopper for many applications

It's really not.

There's a very small set of applications where the precision of AVX512, but more cores also speeds them up.

A much more important set of applications is those sped up with GPUs or other ML accelerators. Notably the high performance of these CPUs is useful with those too, because they are great at data pipeline crunching prior to the GPU part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com