AMD Showed Off New Threadrippers, 7nm Vega At Computex 2018

[Tomin]

Aside from that, I wonder if it's possible to configure a 32-core EPYC chip in such a way as to "simulate" a 32-core Threadripper chip by selectively not using certain memory channels or whatever.

That could be easily done by not putting memories to those channels. AMD might have done something to improve the behaviour of Infinity Fabric in this configuration, so it could be a little slower when emulated with EPYCs.

[Niarbeht]

That could be easily done by not putting memories to those channels. AMD might have done something to improve the behaviour of Infinity Fabric in this configuration, so it could be a little slower when emulated with EPYCs.

Might be interesting to see Michael Larabel give it a spin, then. Maybe he'll be able to cook up some tests for us.

[chithanh]

Apart from being about twice the price of the Asus X399 Prime used in the workstation offered by my current employer there's also the fact that the CPU and RAM take up so much space those boards can't fit full size PCIe cards, which make them a complete non-starter for our use cases (as we also do some heavy GPU compute).

Huh? To my knowledge only the Gigabyte MZ30/MZ31 mobo has this problem. Plus the price difference between the X399-Prime and the cheapest socket SP3 mobo is only 10%.

ASUS X399-Prime (300€ here) has four x16 slots (two in x8 configuration), but can fit only 3 dual-slot cards.
Supermicro H11SSL (330€ here) has 3 PCIe x16 slots that are not blocked by anything behind it
ASRock EPYCD8 (price not disclosed yet, but I expect same ballpark) has 4 PCIe x16 slots, and additionally the 3 PCIe x8 slots are open ended.

So if you use dual-slot graphics cards, then you can install the same number in X399-Prime like in the H11SSL today, and one more even when EPYCD8 is released.

[L_A_G]

...

Maybe prices are different where you live, but the only place that sells the H11SSL where I live charges €500 each and only sells them in packs of 10. I've also not had particularly good experiences with them (or any other white box maker when dealing with them directly) so I didn't even think it was worth being brought up.

[chithanh]

L_A_G
Interesting. Maybe Supermicro does hot have an official distributor in your country, that would explain it.

Do note that there are several variants of the H11SSL, and only the cheapest (H11SSL-i) is 330€.
For 500€ there is already the dual-socket H11DSi available.

https://geizhals.de/?cat=mb940&xf=644_Sockel+SP3

[L_A_G]

Interesting. Maybe Supermicro does hot have an official distributor in your country, that would explain it.

Considering Supermicro is a white box manufacturer, any "distributor" of their hardware is less of an actual distributor and more of a company that just buys their volume business-to-business products (rather than business-to-end-user) and sells them to end users. The whole idea with white box manufacturers is that they sell directly to companies who in turn make the actual end product and take care of support, certification, sales and other very region-specific functions.

[oleyska]

That could be easily done by not putting memories to those channels. AMD might have done something to improve the behaviour of Infinity Fabric in this configuration, so it could be a little slower when emulated with EPYCs.

L2 cache is 17 cycles on Epyc TR2 will have 12cycle, + other cache improvements makes it a bad comparison.