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Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

I'm sort of confused on this one, is this essentially the "home version" of an Epyc? Who is the intended purchaser here? As previously if I wanted to build an AMD workstation at home I would have opted for an Epyc setup.

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I mean, usually the intended audience is Us - people who benefit from lots of cores for things like compilation, but still want to have a Regular Computer rather than something in a rackmount form-factor that sounds like an aircraft taking off

There's no particular reason Epyc couldn't be in a tower, and these are 300+ W CPUs, so aircraftiness is still on the table.

This generation of ThreadRipper has higher TDP than last generation of EPYC. There is very little difference between EPYC and ThreadRipper of the same generation. There are plenty of workstation style motherboards for EPYC as well (see asrock offerings).

Are there not beefy cloud compilers services available?

I’d imagine most people use the horsepower for only a fraction of the day

Some other comments mentioned lower frequency of EPYC, but I'll add another point, the motherboards on EPYC are built for a datacenter environment where you run very loud fans and shove a crap ton of air through the system. Threadripper has larger heatsinks on VRM and chipsets and whatnot on the motherboard so that you can use quieter fans, like on Ryzen.

Relevant to that, a lot of EPYC (and server boards in general) also have the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees compared to non-server boards to support that "Back to Front high airflow" scenario. (That said, a Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 still fits perfectly fine on a ROMED8-2T, but in a regular ATX case, the fan will blow towards the top of the case, not the back - so you need to have an exhaust at the top.)

Professional workstations. Think video editing, creative types, engineering, CAD, EDA, and I'm sure a whole bunch I don't know about.

>a whole bunch I don't know about

...Linus might consider an upgrade (he got a Threadripper some time ago) to compile the kernel.

HEDT, high end desktops. Epyc computers aren't that good at multi-core performance, and also, their frequency is lower.

With Threadripper, I can compile as well as play games, all on one machine.

How long does that compilation take?

People who like lots of USB ports and onboard audio.

EPYC has much lower freq than Threadripper.

Yep, this is also true, EPYC has tons of low-powered cores intended to service lots of incoming requests

> I would have opted for an Epyc setup.

I do more or less the same - I look for tower servers. The hardware is good, the maintenance is easy, plenty of space for storage and memory, and so on.

From memory, they're supposed to be cheaper than EPYC. So, probably some kind of middle ground between Ryzen and EPYC pricing.

Indeed. Who needs all these price points? Why would anyone buy anything but the most expensive product? Companies are weird.

> Why would anyone buy anything but the most expensive product?

If I were to build a workstation on it right now, I wouldn't buy the most expensive one. My relatively modest compute needs don't come even close to what that monster is able to do.

If you are IO-bound, why spend $3000 more on a CPU if you can spend that in memory, more/faster NVMe or HDDs?

>NVMe

You'd be limited by PCIe lanes (and memory bandwidth, 8 channel DDR5) The CPUs feature 128 PCIe lanes, compared to 7950x's 28.

If you need more than 28 PCIe lanes, then you need the big one. In any case, 28 is still a lot of IO. It makes little sense to pay for what you won't need.

workstation - that would require some external GPU, so 8 or 16 lanes. 4 for chipset/USB. That leaves 8 or 16 pcie lanes for SSD, decent NVMe SSDs are 4 lanes, which means up to 4 fully enabled SSD, it's not much, esp. running RAID.

Not all work for workstations require a 16-lane GPU or four NVMe SSDs. Sometimes all you need is a lot of CPU cores and lots of memory at a reasonable, albeit not ludicrous, bandwidth.

Although I work with 2-3 monitors all the time, I'm happy with low-end GPUs - I don't do much data visualization or 3D rendering. I mostly develop software, so I stand-up relatively thin ephemeral VMs and containers all the time. For me the core count and amount of memory is the limiting factor. To completely avoid any swapping, 64GB of RAM is needed, and more would allow me to keep a CI pipeline running all the time. If I need more space, I can spare one or two SSDs as bcache for a larger SATA array.

As much as I'd love the biggest Xeon X, EPYC, AmpereOne, MI-300, or Grace Hopper under my desk, I have no need for that much power.

My initial response was to: "If you are IO-bound, why spend $3000 more on a CPU...", the desktop ones just dont have the PCIe lanes to prevent the I/O bound case. You can run 3 monitors off a iGPU (if you dont care about 3D), overall your setup is a classic desktop, running lots of VM just requires memory as the processes don't do much but exist peacefully. 128GB on a desktop CPU is totally fine with 4 DIMM slots, there won't be ECC - which DDR5 doesn't fully cover, though.

If you pay for it yourself, you can upgrade to more cores later and save a lot of money buying a used CPU.

This is nothing compared to the range of price points offered for server CPUs. I remember one Intel launch must've included like 50 different SKUs. It's clear that companies do not just buy the most expensive one.

I guess everyone missed the sarcasm

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