Ryzen/Threadripper Prices Have Been Dropping Ahead Of The Holidays

[Spooktra]

Is your argument really that a single feature in favor of the Intel offerings means that Intel's offerings are better across the board?

You do realize that most people don't sit around doing video encodes all day, right?

If you read up on AVX-512, you will realize that this "single feature" has wide ranging applications across numerous types of workloads. It's the same situation as when Intel had SSE but AMD didn't, when Intel had SSE2/3/4 but AMD didn't, when Intel had AVX/2 but AMD didn't and now where back to Intel having AVX-512 but AMD doesn't.

Do a google search of everything AVX-512 brings to the table, AMD is an also-ran, there's a reason that AMD executives have been dumping AMD stock for over a year now, there's a reason that AMD stock is down to $11.34 a share, where Intel stock is over $44 a share; there's a reason that this is the first quarter where AMD was in the black across the board and it took one time cash infusions from licensing deals with Intel and selling property in order to do so.

Only a sucker buys an AMD processor or someone on a very tight budget but if one can wait they are much better off saving their money for a quality processor from Intel.

[Spooktra]

Except that with the TRs you'll have the option of ECC which you *still* don't get even with an 18-core i9. In other words, your only choice is AMD if you're going sub-Xeon. In fact I'll go as far as to say an 18-core chip with AVX512, but without ECC, is the most stupid thing I have ever seen in marketing segmentation foot-blown-off strategy. Oh and... 128GB memory limit versus a terabyte for the TR1950.

Funny stuff, you made me laugh, bravo.

If you'll bare with me for a minute:

Why do you believe that ECC memory is a must when using AVX-512? Is it a must when using AVX2? How about when using SSE? Along the same lines, why do you believe that an 18 core processor necessitates ECC? At what core count do you feel ECC support becomes a must?

This sentence right here "128GB memory limit versus a terabyte for the TR1950" tells me you have no idea what you are talking about. How much does a 1950X cost? About $800 to $1000 depending on who you buy from. Any idea how much a terabyte of ram costs? I've heard of 1 Terabyte DDR4 ECC going for close to 100 grand, a bit of back of the envelope math tells us that if 32Gb non-ECC (2x16Gb sticks) costs between $300 and $400 then 320Gb would cost between $3000 and $4000 and 960Gb would cost between $9000 and $12000. So do you really think anyone is going to pair an $800 cpu with 12 grand worth of ram?

But, because I'm a nice guy, I'll let you in on a little secret, it's called Intel's Scalable Processors, of which the Xeon Silver is a member. The cheapest Xeon Silver costs just over $400 and supports, wait for it, AVX-512, ECC and 768Gb of ram per processor and is a 2P part. If only someone, somewhere had done a review of a dual Xeon Silver, where, oh where will I ever find such a review? Oh, I know:

https://www.servethehome.com/dual-processor-intel-xeon-silver-4108-linux-benchmarks-and-review/

Now I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, tell me again what a great value Threadrippers are.

[rrohbeck]

Dropping prices ... if anyone is aware of any good deals on memory, I'm all ears. If you need 256GB in your workstation, then cpu price is not a factor

Directron often has good memory prices.

[R41N3R]

I switched to DC and linux-git 2 days ago. Just during typing this short sentence I got a random freeze. I'm not aware that the issue of not waking up after the display turned off is resolved either. Ok, I will try to compile linux-git again.

Sadly, my system with linux-git doesn't wake up after the display turned off. Tested with Plasma-Wayland.

[Niarbeht]

If you read up on AVX-512, you will realize that this "single feature" has wide ranging applications across numerous types of workloads. It's the same situation as when Intel had SSE but AMD didn't, when Intel had SSE2/3/4 but AMD didn't, when Intel had AVX/2 but AMD didn't and now where back to Intel having AVX-512 but AMD doesn't.

Do a google search of everything AVX-512 brings to the table, AMD is an also-ran, there's a reason that AMD executives have been dumping AMD stock for over a year now, there's a reason that AMD stock is down to $11.34 a share, where Intel stock is over $44 a share; there's a reason that this is the first quarter where AMD was in the black across the board and it took one time cash infusions from licensing deals with Intel and selling property in order to do so.

Only a sucker buys an AMD processor or someone on a very tight budget but if one can wait they are much better off saving their money for a quality processor from Intel.

AMD's stock is "down" to $11 a share from, what, under $2 a couple years ago? That's a long fall. Do stock prices wrap positive at zero?

AVX-512 might have wide-ranging applications, but so does fertilizer. That doesn't mean that it's useful for MY applications. Does AVX-512 mean I get ECC support? No? Does it make me play my games faster? Not really, not if we look at the utterly punishing effect it has on clock speeds. Does it allow me to do PCI passthrough without paying Xeon prices? No.

Does it get some rando on an internet forum so worked up his arguments don't take into account that different users have different use-cases? Yes.

Does that make the rando correct?

No.

AVX-512 does nothing useful for me, personally. And arguing, "But company X has a better stock price!" is a non-starter. The company I work for produces analyzers that are miles ahead of our primary competition. Our primary competition is valued over a billion dollars. We're only a few million. But slowly and steadily, big customer after big customer are switching all their new deployments to us.

Today's high stock price is tomorrow's sell order.

EDIT:
Oh, and a quick riposte for your STH benches:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11891/best-cpus-for-workstations-2017

Huh. Look at that. A respected outlet giving their opinions on good values for different categories finds use-cases that suit both AMD and Intel.

EDIT2:
It gets even more laughable. Dual EPYC 7251s can beat dual Xeon 4108s in one of your own source's AVX-512 benchmarks. Hell, dual 7251s beat dual 4108s in nearly every test, and that gets repeated even in the single-CPU scenarios. Do you even check your own sources?

[grok]

If you're doing graphics, video, animation, 3D, perhaps you won't care that one pixel will be slightly wrong after 50 trillions were just right. So 18 cores of AVX512 might work for something here. Otherwise 128 gigs and no ECC is getting embarassing. Heck even if you don't care that much about accuracy or stability the ECC might tell you when a stick is borked and needs be removed.

[numacross]

If you're doing graphics, video, animation, 3D, perhaps you won't care that one pixel will be slightly wrong after 50 trillions were just right. So 18 cores of AVX512 might work for something here. Otherwise 128 gigs and no ECC is getting embarassing. Heck even if you don't care that much about accuracy or stability the ECC might tell you when a stick is borked and needs be removed.

Or your 8-hour encode job fails after 15 minutes because that "one pixel" worth of memory corruption was actually in the area where the program code is stored?

[vegabook]

Funny stuff, you made me laugh, bravo.

If you'll bare with me for a minute:

Why do you believe that ECC memory is a must when using AVX-512? Is it a must when using AVX2? How about when using SSE? Along the same lines, why do you believe that an 18 core processor necessitates ECC? At what core count do you feel ECC support becomes a must?

This sentence right here "128GB memory limit versus a terabyte for the TR1950" tells me you have no idea what you are talking about. How much does a 1950X cost? About $800 to $1000 depending on who you buy from. Any idea how much a terabyte of ram costs? I've heard of 1 Terabyte DDR4 ECC going for close to 100 grand, a bit of back of the envelope math tells us that if 32Gb non-ECC (2x16Gb sticks) costs between $300 and $400 then 320Gb would cost between $3000 and $4000 and 960Gb would cost between $9000 and $12000. So do you really think anyone is going to pair an $800 cpu with 12 grand worth of ram?

But, because I'm a nice guy, I'll let you in on a little secret, it's called Intel's Scalable Processors, of which the Xeon Silver is a member. The cheapest Xeon Silver costs just over $400 and supports, wait for it, AVX-512, ECC and 768Gb of ram per processor and is a 2P part. If only someone, somewhere had done a review of a dual Xeon Silver, where, oh where will I ever find such a review? Oh, I know:

https://www.servethehome.com/dual-pr...ks-and-review/

Now I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, tell me again what a great value Threadrippers are.

128 gigabytes of RAM is about 1000 dollars. So there's an extra 128 gig right there for _no extra outlay_ since the 1950 is (less than) half the i9. Xeon silver. Don't make me laugh. So I must now buy a dual socket motherboard? I do data science every single day using all the AVXs, and I can guarantee you that I need ECC. Actually, please explain to me the scenario where you need an 18-core i9, with AVX, but where ECC is not needed. Multiple Twitch streaming, I get it. For any serious use case anywhere ever, ECC is needed once you get past 64 gig of RAM. The 18-core i9 is a stupid product. Period.

More broadly, AVX512 is a white elephant anyway. If you're needing the step up from AVX2 to AVX3, you're probably needing a GPU. 512 only exists because Intel has no GPU solution and is panicking as Nvida approaches 100billion valuation and has the capital power to take Intel head on. So there goes your argument about floating point. Poof it's gone.

So now that we've ascertained that AVX512 is a moot point, we get to the crux of the matter, which is core-bound and throughput-bound workloads. *Please* don't try to hawk the idea that Intel is better value on those measures 'cos you'll have most of the internet calling bull.

[pegasus]

AVX512 does look nice on paper, but please do check how turbo frequencies go down with avx512 use. It's heavy on power use and cpus need to downclock significantly if there's a significant number of avx512 instructions in use, slowing down everything else that runs on them. There's just one example of this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-d...uency-scaling/

Other part of this story is the wider vector units you have, the more memory bandwidth you need to feed them. Very rarely does your data fit in the cpu cache, usually you have to fetch it from main memory. And this is why epyc is wiping the floor with xeons on these larger datasets. It can feed its execution units faster since it has more memory channels.

And thirdly, it will take something like three years until mainstream software starts taking advantage of avx512 in any meaningful way.

[bridgman]

But, because I'm a nice guy, I'll let you in on a little secret, it's called Intel's Scalable Processors, of which the Xeon Silver is a member. The cheapest Xeon Silver costs just over $400 and supports, wait for it, AVX-512, ECC and 768Gb of ram per processor and is a 2P part. If only someone, somewhere had done a review of a dual Xeon Silver, where, oh where will I ever find such a review? Oh, I know:

https://www.servethehome.com/dual-pr...ks-and-review/

You may be conflating "AVX-512 support" with "more FMA units for higher performance" - they are not the same. The thing that affects floating point performance is the number and type of floating point units in the CPU, and that is exactly where the scaling happens in Scalable Processors. Silver parts have one AVX-512 FMA while Gold and Platinum have two.

I'm not saying this is bad, just that you are glossing over an important point by focusing on "AVX-512" rather than performance:

Although the Intel Xeon Silver 4116 has the ability to execute AVX-512, the performance is not great. Unlike the Intel Xeon Gold 6100 and Platinum, the AVX-512 on the Intel Xeon Silver series is a single FMA unit. That, combined with low AVX-512 clocks, means that the Intel Xeon Gold 6100 series that looks great with AVX-512 here, is significantly faster. If you want AVX-512 performance, just go Gold 6100 or higher in the Intel stack.

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-x...ks-and-review/

It is worth noting the 7351P ($750 IIRC, 16 core, no AVX-512) outperforms dual 4108's in the only benchmark using AVX-512.