AMD EPYC 7000 Series CPUs Launched

[edwaleni]

I agree on the Supermicro boards, they are underspec'ed relative to the capability. I reckon being first was more important than being comprehensive in this case.

I would expect a dual Epyc workstation board to have USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt, more PCIe 16x and M.2 slots.

The fact they are stacking 14 SATA ports seems to be a waste. I would rather have a multi port U.2 riser card instead of SATA. Or a multi M.2 riser.

Me thinks this is just the beginning.

[GI_Jack]

>only a 180 Watt TDP

More than every light bulb in my apartment combined with all my monitors, combined with the fridge.

[NateHubbard]

>only a 180 Watt TDP

More than every light bulb in my apartment combined with all my monitors, combined with the fridge.

Even the fridge? Because mine says 7.0 amps 115 volts right on the sticker and it isn't a big (or admittedly new) fridge, but that's like 800 watts.

[thelongdivider]

>only a 180 Watt TDP

More than every light bulb in my apartment combined with all my monitors, combined with the fridge.

I mean, given that that the hedt parts from Intel are 140W TDP at 10 cores, I would say this is a huge win.

Otherwise, this processor is a phenomenal leap forward for AMD in the server market. I really hope that people invest in this technology.

I couldn't be happier with my 1700 @ 3.8 ghz.

[starshipeleven]

>only a 180 Watt TDP

More than every light bulb in my apartment combined with all my monitors, combined with the fridge.

Ummmmmmmm.... you have a very small fridge right there.

[torsionbar28]

Weird... I wonder why it uses any PCIe slots that aren't 16x, and I find it weird that it only has gigabit ethernet. Epyc has enough PCIe lanes for 4 high-end PCs.

Simple; Board real estate. It's standard desktop peecee ATX size, not E-ATX. The SP3 socket is physically large. And it has *eight* DIMM slots. Plus M.2. And on-board SAS controller. And onboard BMC controller. And 16 SATA connectors. All that stuff takes up space. There isn't physically room for an all 16x slot arrangement on a regular ATX board like this. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen an ATX sized board full of 16x slots from *any* vendor. All of the full-16x arrangements I've seen have been larger E-ATX sized.

Plus the fact that most enterprisey I/O cards use x8 as a standard. 10 Gb/e cards, Fibre Channel cards, SAS RAID cards, all typically use x8. So it makes sense that this board has a mix of x8 and x16.

Edit: what you even do with an all 16x slot arrangement? What kind of single-width card with x16 connector did you have in mind? Sounds like you have a very niche use case.

[schmidtbag]

Simple; Board real estate. It's standard ATX size, not E-ATX. And it has 8 DIMM slots and a boat load of SATA connections. Plus M.2 SSD. And on-board SAS controller. And onboard BMC controller. All that stuff takes up space. There isn't physically room for an all 16x slot arrangement on a regular ATX board like this. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen an ATX sized board full of 16x slots from *any* vendor. All of the full-16x arrangements I've seen have been larger E-ATX sized.

Plus the fact that most enterprisey I/O cards use x8 as a standard. 10 Gb/e cards, Fibre Channel cards, SAS RAID cards, all typically use x8. So it makes sense that this board has a mix of x8 and x16.

I disagree:

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P9X79E_WS/

That board has 8 DIMM slots, 7 PCIe x16 slots (whether or not they're electrically x16 is a different story), 10 total SATA ports, a beefy VRM heatsink, chipsets for things servers don't have such as audio, and many pin headers not found on servers.

Again, it's not a matter of what currently can utilize the lanes. My point is the lanes exist, so in the event you can saturate them, I think it makes sense to have the opportunity to do so. Nothing is preventing the manufacturers from soldering components to the back. This is how mITX boards can fit so much on so little.

[starshipeleven]

Simple; Board real estate.

Let me introduce the concept of board layers.
Electronic boards are made by copper layers and insulating fiberglass/resin layers, they can have multiple copper layers so they can route more stuff as each copper layer gives you well, a full layer worth of space for copper connections.

The more layers your board has, the higher is the cost and the more complex the design phase is as you need to make sure that signals don't interfere with each other on othe rlayers, but it is definitely possible to have ridiculous amounts of stuff on the same board. It just costs more and takes much more time to reach the market.

While simpler designs with less layers hit the market much sooner.

Edit: what you even do with an all 16x slot arrangement? What kind of single-width card with x16 connector did you have in mind? Sounds like you have a very niche use case.

Like workstation cards. Yeah totally niche. http://www.liveatpc.com/amd-announce...raphics-cards/


Also computing stuff meant to be cooled by the rack's own fans, again very niche, especially for server-grade mobo running a server-grade processor. Sure there are two-slotted cards of this kind too.

[torsionbar28]

I disagree:

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P9X79E_WS/

That board has 8 DIMM slots, 7 PCIe x16 slots (whether or not they're electrically x16 is a different story), 10 total SATA ports, a beefy VRM heatsink, chipsets for things servers don't have such as audio, and many pin headers not found on servers.

Again, it's not a matter of what currently can utilize the lanes. My point is the lanes exist, so in the event you can saturate them, I think it makes sense to have the opportunity to do so. Nothing is preventing the manufacturers from soldering components to the back. This is how mITX boards can fit so much on so little.

1. That asus board is not ATX size. It's larger CEB size.
2. It has no M.2 slot
3. It has no SAS controller
4. It has no BMC controller

Call me when you find an *ATX* sized board with all of these. And no, you can't put components that require active cooling like SAS controller on the back side, nor M.2 slots that require physical access.

My challenge still stands - find me an *ATX* sized board with eight DIMMS, SAS, M.2, BMC, and seven x16 slots - I've never seen one and I don't think it's physically possible.

[torsionbar28]

Let me introduce the concept of board layers.

Familiar with layers, it does not solve the problem of top side real estate however. See above.

Like workstation cards. Yeah totally niche.

The fact is, installing seven single-slot workstation (or compute) cards onto a desktop ATX mobo does not happen in the real world. This is a task typically handled by a rack-mount compute server. Almost nobody is doing 7x single-slot GPUs on the desktop period, and the very few niche folks who do it, use a dual-socket E-ATX board, not a smaller ATX. In an ATX desktop, you're more likely to see multiple double-width GPU's, which the alternating 16x slots of this board are designed for.