AMD's Athlon 3000G Processor Begins Shipping At $49 USD

[elatllat]

There's plenty of SBC's that fulfill those requirements. Why not an RPi4 or something even more powerful?

A rk3399 or Odroid N2 has fast crypto, the Odroid H2 has 32GB ram.
I don't know why AMD is making 14nm in 2020 when 7nm is already in hand.

[sverris]

Yes, that would be a fine NAS system. Michael could you please test stuff like:
- Idle power consumption
- Load power consumption
- Encryption performance (file system encryption)
- Compression performance (file system compression)
- Comparison with e.g. Pentium G4400 (My current NAS CPU ) or similar low end Intel CPUs.

++
And also in comparison to the older low end AMD CPUs/APUs... - would be great.

[torsionbar28]

Yes, that would be a fine NAS system.

Without ECC memory support, no, not so much. Personally I'm using an Opteron 4365 for this role. The 4365 has low 40w TDP, ECC memory support to 128GB, and can be had for ~$15 used.

[wizard69]

How does 2 core 4 threads compare to 4 cores 4 threads? I have a Skylake i5-6500 which is 4/4 cores/threads at 3.2GHz turbo to 3.6GHz, probably paid ~4x the price for it back in 2016 than this $49 AMD part. I assume the additional cores make a difference? Or is the architecture/age difference between the two going to narrow that a fair bit?

The granny panthers answer is the only right one here - it depends! That being said Zen is very competitive.

[phoenix_rizzen]

If you do that, please test it on a cheap and low end motherboard. These day I say a YT channel testing those cheap AMD APUs on some expensive, full ATX mobo (because it was what they had on hand), which is ridiculous. Not only is not something most people will do, but will also give power consumption above of what you expect from it.

Although, it could be a decent way to build a custom system without blowing the budget all at once.

Get an expensive motherboard, RAM, power supply. Use whatever old case you have lying around. Stick an Athlon 3000G into it. That gets you a working system with graphics.

6 months down the road, pick up a GPU on sale.

6 months later, pick up a Ryzen 7 CPU on sale, as the 4000-series come out.

I mean, it's not something most people would do, but I could see doing it that way to get a system running now, while you save for a better CPU.

[wizard69]

A rk3399 or Odroid N2 has fast crypto, the Odroid H2 has 32GB ram.

there are many ARM boards out there but most of them come up short with respect to standard I/O.

I don't know why AMD is making 14nm in 2020 when 7nm is already in hand.

Cheap!!! The processor probably costs $10 to AMD thus a big profit for AMD and the retailers. AMD could easily sell the processor to Newegg for 25 while Newegg will sell it for $50. The manufacture probably is making the processors for $5 before selling to AMD at $10.


Beyond that you don’t know what variant of 14nm they are using or even where the processor is being manufactured. These processes undergo refinement. TSMC for example already has 3, 7nm variants if I remember correctly.

interestingly this processor seems to be very competitive with respect to performance and power usage. Hopefully Micheal can test the chip against current Intel offerings in this performance range.

[wizard69]

Although, it could be a decent way to build a custom system without blowing the budget all at once.

Get an expensive motherboard, RAM, power supply. Use whatever old case you have lying around. Stick an Athlon 3000G into it. That gets you a working system with graphics.

6 months down the road, pick up a GPU on sale.

6 months later, pick up a Ryzen 7 CPU on sale, as the 4000-series come out.

I mean, it's not something most people would do, but I could see doing it that way to get a system running now, while you save for a better CPU.

I’m not sure that is the modern way to a much better machine. Mainly because of AM4. At some point AMD will need to drop AM4 to move the platform forward. This especially if a high core count machine is in your future.

[Veto]

Without ECC memory support, no, not so much.

Is that really necessary or just an extra precaution? How often do you experience bit error corrections in your RAM?

AFAIK most smaller commercial NAS's do not use ECC RAM either, and if you are not running RAID anyway I guess the value of ECC is marginal.

[torsionbar28]

Is that really necessary or just an extra precaution? How often do you experience bit error corrections in your RAM?

If you don't have ECC memory, you'll never know. I can tell you that my system with 32 GB has recorded roughly one memory error every ~9 months in /var/log/messages. ECC was able to detect and correct the error each time. It's actually kind of cool seeing it in the logs.

AFAIK most smaller commercial NAS's do not use ECC RAM either, and if you are not running RAID anyway I guess the value of ECC is marginal.

Yes of course, RAID is a given, even for a small home NAS. Hard disk space is so cheap these days, it would be foolish not to buy two and use mdadm to mirror them.

FWIW I've never seen a commercial NAS without ECC memory.

[polarathene]

There's plenty of SBC's that fulfill those requirements. Why not an RPi4 or something even more powerful?

A rk3399 or Odroid N2 has fast crypto, the Odroid H2 has 32GB ram.

If you take the time to look into the majority of the ARM SBCs, you'll find plenty of problems. ODROID-N2 is a recent SBC, but the issues it has especially with USB chipset(proprietary driver) have caused lots of frustration for users. I believe they've reduced the issues with some tweaks/workarounds to the kernel config(something you might not get by default or be aware of if you use mainline kernel), and quite a few boards have poor mainline kernel support depending on what you need, which can be a bit limiting on what you can do(custom distros, newer kernels, driver support, bugfixes, especially with filesystems). SoC vendors are steadily getting their proprietary drivers open-sourced and upstreamed into mainline afaik, but it's taking years.

Usually support for SATA is limited too, it may be offered over PCIE 2.0 or m.2, some offer this but you lose I/O elsewhere like a USB-C/3.x port/controller(Khadas VIM3 iirc). You have to ensure adequate power is supplied too, under certain loads the hardware can act up, which is another common issue that can be experienced with USB(along with USB-SATA bridges/chipsets for external disks). Since they're usually powered by a power brick DC or recently USB-C, you'll need to power those internal HDDs/SSDs without enclosures separately if you want to use SATA directly.

Basically, it can complicate things. Sounds like a good idea on the surface, but then you run into the joys of stuff mentioned here and more. Can be less hassle to stick with x86(especially with non-SBC grade hardware)